Why I think Blockchain.info is in a good position despite the rising fees

[Wind_FURY]

Since the fees keep rising and the mempool is always flooded because the 1mb blocks are overflowed beyond its confines, I could foresee wallet services making arrangments with Bitcoin merchants, gambling sites and others to make transactions with them through an internal ledger. Settlement will come later on the blockchain.

Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.

I want to hear your opinions please.

[jonald_fyookball]

Sounds like that would be going in the direction of trusted third parties and away from the original 'distributed consensus' Bitcoin was supposed to be promising.

[AgentofCoin]

...
Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.
I want to hear your opinions please.

Yes, very likely and probably more appropriate for certain situations.

As for blockchain.info itself, this may interest you:
https://blog.blockchain.com/2016/05/16/announcing-the-thunder-network-alpha-release/

Sounds like that would be going in the direction of trusted third parties and away from the original 'distributed consensus' Bitcoin was supposed to be promising.

Most online wallets are already "third parties".
This solution would be for people who wish to transact faster and
"aren't concerned" with Bitcoin's real designed intention and purposes.

[freebutcaged]

All of this to reduce the fees correct? if so then I doubt it if they can sustain in long term. but if they are willing to do this for free why not.

[The_Dark_Knight]

All of this to reduce the fees correct? if so then I doubt it if they can sustain in long term. but if they are willing to do this for free why not.

I think what he is proposing is just to keep most transactions out of the blockchain and then settle them after a period of time, as an example lets suppose I send 1 BTC to address A and the owner of address A sends 0.4BTC to address B that I own, what the OP seems to be proposing is that instead of two transactions, we settle the difference and I make a transaction of only 0.6BTC this way there is only one transaction instead of two, do this for many transactions and it could be possible to diminish the number of unconfirmed transactions.

[n0ne]

Sounds like that would be going in the direction of trusted third parties and away from the original 'distributed consensus' Bitcoin was supposed to be promising.

It looks like an dependence over a third party to overcome the correlation. As they don't support bitcoin unlimited, the prevailing mining difficulty could have forced to come up with such a plan. Even when the fee is high people understand the truth behind I, now for someone it's hard to trust a third party supporting blockchain.info

[Hydrogen]

Last I heard this is walmart's pricing for wire transfers.



Walmart is MUCH cheaper than their competition, btw.

It makes me wonder if the fuss over "expensive bitcoin transaction fees" is exaggerated and blown out of proportion.

[U2]

Better yet what we could do is just vote for certain people that would make these decisions for us. They could decide to make more bitcoins, increase the block size, you know, do whatever they want to pretty much. Once that's achieved we're good to go. Wait...  this sounds familiar. Oh! Because it's fiat!

[RoommateAgreement]

when i started using bitcoin i did it because it was a stand alone decentralized currency that i didn't need anyone to use. this means i build the wallet myself, make the transactions myself and broadcast them myself, and i could even mine them myself long time ago.
apart from mining if we want to start using third parties i think i am just going to use my bank instead. it doesn't have fees in my country. and just keep bitcoin as investment.

[Dudeperfect]

I am using blockchain.info since 2014 and I haven't faced any problem yet with them. They provide good service, good infrastructure to transact bitcoins but again, the core essence of bitcoin is that keeping third parties away from the transaction and as even though Blockchain says, "Be your own bank", one has to keep his funds with blockchain.info in order to transact. It's less about blockchain's trust and more about involvement of a third party in the transaction.

[pooya87]

Since the fees keep rising and the mempool is always flooded because the 1mb blocks are overflowed beyond its confines, I could foresee wallet services making arrangments with Bitcoin merchants, gambling sites and others to make transactions with them through an internal ledger. Settlement will come later on the blockchain.

Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.

I want to hear your opinions please.

that is a big ass NO for me. because nothing about this sounds like "bitcoin" to me. blockchain.info is a bad service with bugs and it is unsafe as a web wallet to begin with and adding something like this, although may interest some people i never like it.

if Coinbase or a web wallet like that which is working off-chain and similar to banks offer something like that and it helps adoption (although i don't like that either) i can see it as helpful since it can bring more average Joe and help adoption with merchants also.

[Kakmakr]

Since the fees keep rising and the mempool is always flooded because the 1mb blocks are overflowed beyond its confines, I could foresee wallet services making arrangments with Bitcoin merchants, gambling sites and others to make transactions with them through an internal ledger. Settlement will come later on the blockchain.

Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.

I want to hear your opinions please.

Blockchain.info is all about security and for that reason they do not store any private keys on their side. Why would they implement a closed ledger that would attract a lot of negative attention from hackers? There are already third parties doing this with off-chain transactions, like Xapo and people would rather use them.

I would rather want to see Blockchain.info beefing up the security and closing all the holes. ^smile^

[Killerpotleaf]

Since the fees keep rising and the mempool is always flooded because the 1mb blocks are overflowed beyond its confines, I could foresee wallet services making arrangments with Bitcoin merchants, gambling sites and others to make transactions with them through an internal ledger. Settlement will come later on the blockchain.

Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.

I want to hear your opinions please.

Blockchain.info is all about security and for that reason they do not store any private keys on their side. Why would they implement a closed ledger that would attract a lot of negative attention from hackers? There are already third parties doing this with off-chain transactions, like Xapo and people would rather use them.

I would rather want to see Blockchain.info beefing up the security and closing all the holes. ^smile^

Right. well then maybe bitpay is in a better position to hold user funds that will eventually be used to pay merchants.
Bitpay bypassing the blockchain in favor a closed loop centralized system might be the slap in the face poeple need to understand just how bad the situation has gotten.

But i think if blockchain.info was to leverage LN payment channels they could pull off a system in which they dont actually control anyones private key but they can facilitate "BTC payments" to merchants.

blockchain.info holds "channels"  to all the merchants, and users hold a channel to blockchain, or somthing...

problem is, payment channels are not available, and they are theoretical a headache to manage, not sure the sunk cost to blockchain.info and the users sunk cost of learning how to use / manage a "channel" is going to be worth it, if you can pay a few dollars to avoid a headache you'll pay for the no-problem-easy-way every time.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but somthing tells me LN V1.0 is going to have problems, some technical, and some really bad user-friendliness types of problems that leads to poeple losing money cuz "not watching their channel properly" or something...

we need to experiment in that direction, but we also need to realize its not a viable solution untill its proven itself. and maybe we can all also recognize that even LN will require FAR larger then 1MB blocks to actually work( unless, you subscribe to the idea that a TX's signature is weightless... )

rising the blocklimit isn't a band-aid solution its a requirement in all scenarios.

how we go about doing it...

through centralized means with an authority setting arbitrary subsidies on certain types of TX?
or
through decentralized consensus mechanism relying on economic incentives to keep block's sized based on supply/demand?

its our choice. sorta.

[amacar2]

If blockchain.info starts to have this types of internal ledger just like coinbase and xapo than they will loss their charm of being a true bitcoin web wallet. They will be same as centralized payment processors and talking about internal transactions between merchants there may be fee in % which will cost you more if you are sending more than 1BTC compared to what you have to pay to send that 1BTC in normal bitcoin transaction.

[Amph]

Sounds like that would be going in the direction of trusted third parties and away from the original 'distributed consensus' Bitcoin was supposed to be promising.

there is no fully decentralization anyway, people are still using exchange which are centralized service, to spend their bitcoin, if bitcoin was serious about decentralization we would have a buil-in wallet exchange

it seems that people after all don't really care about this kind of decentralization, they just want security at all cost...as for blockchain info i hope they fixed all their security hole that were there in the past

[Opsamk]

If blockchain.info starts to have this types of internal ledger just like coinbase and xapo than they will loss their charm of being a true bitcoin web wallet. They will be same as centralized payment processors and talking about internal transactions between merchants there may be fee in % which will cost you more if you are sending more than 1BTC compared to what you have to pay to send that 1BTC in normal bitcoin transaction.

We will see what happens with this blockchain.info outage that's happening at this very moment.

[BitcoinHodler]

nah, it is going to suck as a service then.
so far they have added the option to buy bitcoin through their website and i haven't been seeing good reviews so far.
and for this option, unless they offer big discounts and no addition fee then i can see it take of but that is impossible to do, because such services will require some additional fees and the merchants aren't just going to offer discounts.

[DomainMagnate]

Since the fees keep rising and the mempool is always flooded because the 1mb blocks are overflowed beyond its confines, I could foresee wallet services making arrangments with Bitcoin merchants, gambling sites and others to make transactions with them through an internal ledger. Settlement will come later on the blockchain.

Blockchain.info is in an excellent position to start this. Soon we'll see recommended merchants inside their wallet.

I want to hear your opinions please.

It is good if they do this and given their market share,they are in a position to convince the merchants.
I am sure other wallet will also follow the suit taking leaf from blockchain.info book.

[Wind_FURY]

Sounds like that would be going in the direction of trusted third parties and away from the original 'distributed consensus' Bitcoin was supposed to be promising.

Like it or not that is the current situation. By now the mining pools may have already chosen which implementation they want. And the majority are still running Core. It will be in the hands of the wallet services and the merchants now to be creative in making transactions cheaper for Bitcoiners. It might be a good way to market their services to the users too.

[eternalgloom]

Last I heard this is walmart's pricing for wire transfers.



Walmart is MUCH cheaper than their competition, btw.

It makes me wonder if the fuss over "expensive bitcoin transaction fees" is exaggerated and blown out of proportion.

The problem with the current fees for Bitcoin transactions is that they do not really scale.
Micropayments are practically impossible right now, adding around 0.0015 BTC in fees for a transaction worth 0.003 BTC is pretty expensive.