[Jun 2024] Fees are high, wait for opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs

[cryptosize]

Here, banks charge up to 0.5% or more to deposit cash (coins), and €0.50 per roll of coins if you need them.

Which country is that?

I know it's not free to deposit coins in many countries, but banknotes are still accepted for free via ATMs.

Could it be the €2 is off the books and won't get taxed, while the €1.99 is handled officially?

It's not possible to avoid issuing a receipt with a POS, because they're interconnected with the tax registry.

With cash payments it's always possible to not issue a receipt and thus not pay VAT (13-24%).

It's kinda risky if they catch you though, because it's compulsory to issue receipts for every type of payment (including BTC).

[LoyceV]

Here, banks charge up to 0.5% or more to deposit cash (coins), and €0.50 per roll of coins if you need them.

Which country is that?

Netherlands.

I know it's not free to deposit coins in many countries, but banknotes are still accepted for free via ATMs.

Lol. That's cute
The first bank I checked with rates for merchants: €7.96 + 0.26%. They made cash very expensive, so they can claim card payments are cheaper. Card payment rates go from €0.05 to €0.40 per transaction. To get back on-topic again: I'd argue Bitcoin fees should be lower than card fees to be competitive for adoption. LN should be able to do that, on-chain it's not going to happen anymore.

[bitmover]

The first bank I checked with rates for merchants: €7.96 + 0.26%. They made cash very expensive, so they can claim card payments are cheaper. Card payment rates go from €0.05 to €0.40 per transaction. To get back on-topic again: I'd argue Bitcoin fees should be lower than card fees to be competitive for adoption. LN should be able to do that, on-chain it's not going to happen anymore.

Is it just me that thinks 1-3 usd is extremely cheap for an international transfer, pseudo anonymous,  confirmed within 30 minutes.

You can transfer 100 or 10,000 usd, same fee.

Not all daily transactions are 50 cents coffees.

I love getting paid in bitcoin here!

[cryptosize]

Lol. That's cute

You mean they also charge you for depositing banknotes in Netherlands?

Charging ATM withdrawals would make far more sense... banks want the cash back into the system, not the other way around.

LN should be able to do that, on-chain it's not going to happen anymore.

It's never going to happen, only L2 solutions are going to save the day.

Just like IPv4 (2 ^ 32 addresses) was never designed to serve 8 billion people with multiple devices (PCs, mobile, consoles etc.)

Nobody has tried to abandon the tried and trusted IPv4, they just created a new fork with zero backwards compatibility (IPv6) that will never reach 100% adoption for obvious reasons.

Is it just me that thinks 1-3 usd is extremely cheap for an international transfer, pseudo anonymous,  confirmed within 30 minutes.

You can transfer 100 or 10,000 usd, same fee.

Not all daily transactions are 50 cents coffees.

I love getting paid in bitcoin here!

It depends on where exactly you're located and how much banks charge you there.

Compared to SWIFT, it's cheap and fast, yeah, but some people want to use BTC for daily payments.

IMHO, BTC follows the exact same trajectory as gold... people used to use gold coins for daily payments hundreds of years ago, but not anymore.

Yes, Satoshi wanted to create p2p cash, but at the same time, he also said that BTC is a "boring grey metal" (yes, Satoshi started the "digital gold narrative", not BTC maxis as BSV folks would like you to believe ).

Chances are he knew that BTC cannot fulfill both objectives simultaneously, at least not in L1.

If he wanted BTC to be more attractive as p2p cash, he would have made it inflationary (no halvings), not deflationary. More like DOGE, more like iron than gold.

Asking to keep halvings and low mainnet fees at the same time is like asking to keep your cake and eat it too. Would be nice if possible, but the math just doesn't add up.

[BlackHatCoiner]

There is a legislation that says card payments up to €10 should only charge 0,5% fees. Some banks have already implemented it.

I was having this impression that in 2009, banks did charge a lot more than today, and the whitepaper made a lot more sense back then. You'll remember better. Did they?

The reason Greek merchants don't want to accept debit cards is to evade taxes, not transaction fees. Truth be told.

With the minimum of 1 sat/byte, storing movies would still cost $650,000 per GB at current Bitcoin price.

The minimum fee is not 1 sat/vb. It is 0 sat/vb. And the minimum after that is 1 sat per transaction. Then 2 sats per transaction, and it goes on and on.

Is it just me that thinks 1-3 usd is extremely cheap for an international transfer, pseudo anonymous,  confirmed within 30 minutes.

Property sent through cyberspace within minutes. Overseas. Pseudonymously. Unstoppably. It was, still is and will always be magic Internet money. 

[bitmover]

Yes, Satoshi wanted to create p2p cash, but at the same time, he also said that BTC is a "boring grey metal" (yes, Satoshi started the "digital gold narrative", not BTC maxis as BSV folks would like you to believe ).

Interesting.  Do you have references for this? Never saw this post of him

[cryptosize]

Yes, Satoshi wanted to create p2p cash, but at the same time, he also said that BTC is a "boring grey metal" (yes, Satoshi started the "digital gold narrative", not BTC maxis as BSV folks would like you to believe ).

Interesting.  Do you have references for this? Never saw this post of him

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=583.msg11405#msg11405

I was having this impression that in 2009, banks did charge a lot more than today, and the whitepaper made a lot more sense back then. You'll remember better. Did they?

Things were very different back in 2009:

1) Revolut/FinTech didn't exist.

You got charged for exchange rate fees.

2) SEPA cost €1 and took 2-3 days.

These days SEPA instant costs €0 and offers instant settlement.

The reason Greek merchants don't want to accept debit cards is to evade taxes, not transaction fees. Truth be told

Fees are not an issue, not only because they're low enough, but also CBDC will offer zero fees via ECB, so that excuse won't hold any water.

Hell, if you visit some FB groups you'll see an image of a €50 banknote where it tells you that it "vanishes" after a few transactions due to card fees.

Nobody will mention the fact that the exact same €50 banknote buys less and less stuff over time (covert robbery by ECB's inflation). €100 today has the same purchasing power of €50 back in 2020.

People are OK with inflation stealing their purchasing power (they cry all day about it, but they do nothing to save themselves) and very few of them are aware of CBDC's real dangers (carbon credits, social credit score).

Bitcoin (and physical gold for less tech-savvy people) is the only way they have to preserve their wealth.

[Synchronice]

You must have noticed as well that some merchants will hesitate to accept card payments for a soda drink or cigarettes. The cost of the transaction fees may significantly cut into or even exceed the profit margin on such low-cost items.

Yes, I experienced that moment years ago when I was travelling but I don't remember the country. By the way, I don't understand what's an issue for them. Don't they get charged the same percentage for $1 and $10?

And Ordinals send dust from one address to another, which is perfectly legal from the protocol's perspective. They don't abuse anything.

Ordinal transactions aren't normal transactions. Money and Bitcoin too, are fungible. Ordinals try to make each Satoshi non-fungible and on top of that, they also try to value blocks (halving block) and the place of ordinals transaction in each block (someone paid 6.73 Bitcoin on transaction to make his/her transaction appear number one in particular, 840000th block).

Sending dust from one address to another will be perfectly legal if JPEGs aren't embedded. If someone is willing to create dust transactions and pay for it from their own pocket, then they can do it, no one can stop but I'm glad you mentioned this. This only proves that Bitcoin is far from perfect payment method. Today, it's very easy to abuse Bitcoin. Miners, if they collab, can easily increase transaction fees cause every money they spend on fees, will end up in their pocket but it will make transaction expensive for everyone else and that's where they steal money from other people. Like I said above, I also think that there might be some deal between ordinals and mining pools.

Netherlands.

Netherlands is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. By the way, check Call Of Duty - Modern Warfare 2 Amsterdam Mission. You'll feel at home

The reason Greek merchants don't want to accept debit cards is to evade taxes, not transaction fees. Truth be told.

So, when you buy something and pay with cash, Greek merchants hide the fact that they sold something and evade taxes this way?

The minimum fee is not 1 sat/vb. It is 0 sat/vb. And the minimum after that is 1 sat per transaction. Then 2 sats per transaction, and it goes on and on.

1 sat/vByte is the minimum relay fee setting that nodes use, oeleo told me if I am not wrong, when I asked a question about fees and empty mempool.

[BlackHatCoiner]

By the way, I don't understand what's an issue for them. Don't they get charged the same percentage for $1 and $10?

Back in 2009, certain banks were charging fixed transaction fees. It was a common practice for ATM withdrawals, wire transfers, and foreign transactions. This is probably what Satoshi was talking about. I can't tell the same is true today. I can neither tell that Bitcoin is in the exact same form as it was in 2009.

Ordinal transactions aren't normal transactions.

Here we go again.

Ordinals try to make each Satoshi non-fungible

Just because a fool thinks his satoshi is more valuable, it doesn't make the currency non-fungible.

they also try to value blocks (halving block) and the place of ordinals transaction in each block (someone paid 6.73 Bitcoin on transaction to make his/her transaction appear number one in particular, 840000th block).

Bitcoin block space is auctioned every 10 minutes, based on the law of demand and supply. And Ordinal users are very demanding. I see no problem with that.

This only proves that Bitcoin is far from perfect payment method.

Bitcoin Layer 1 is far from a perfect payment method, regardless of the presence of Ordinals. Transactions can take hours to settle and incur variable fees depending on the current demand and supply for block space. These factors alone make it an unattractive medium of exchange for point-of-sale transactions.

This is why I prefer calling it an asset layer. You don't move assets every day.

So, when you buy something and pay with cash, Greek merchants hide the fact that they sold something and evade taxes this way?

Pretty much.

1 sat/vByte is the minimum relay fee setting that nodes use, oeleo told me if I am not wrong, when I asked a question about fees and empty mempool.

Exactly. Minimum relay fee. That's the default local policy. You can change it to 0.5, or 0.001, or even 0. This is done for DDoS protection I think, but it's totally possible to adjust it if there's demand for it. In the worst case, they can send their movies directly to the mining pools.

(I missed him too  )

[Synchronice]

This only proves that Bitcoin is far from perfect payment method.

Bitcoin Layer 1 is far from a perfect payment method, regardless of the presence of Ordinals. Transactions can take hours to settle and incur variable fees depending on the current demand and supply for block space. These factors alone make it an unattractive medium of exchange for point-of-sale transactions.

I completely agree with you, you are right! With or without the presence of Ordinals, Bitcoin isn't practical for those who want to use it regularly.

Bitcoin block space is auctioned every 10 minutes, based on the law of demand and supply. And Ordinal users are very demanding. I see no problem with that.

I have a problem with the fact that they found a loophole in code and use it to embed the data, create the false sense of non-fungibility and scam thousands or probably millions of people. I do not wish to censor transactions, I wish to censor abuse.

By the way, there is an evil part of me in my mind that thinks that Ordinals are a mechanism of evolution in crypto space. I hope you understand what I mean

1 sat/vByte is the minimum relay fee setting that nodes use, oeleo told me if I am not wrong, when I asked a question about fees and empty mempool.

Exactly. Minimum relay fee. That's the default local policy. You can change it to 0.5, or 0.001, or even 0. This is done for DDoS protection I think, but it's totally possible to adjust it if there's demand for it. In the worst case, they can send their movies directly to the mining pools.

(I missed him too  )

He was the guy that, you know, would have the correct answer to any question. I sometimes check his profile and read his posts because the knowledge that he had was very valuable.

What I wrote below, is completely my honest opinion.

Bitcoin was created for pure p2p transactions without the involvement of 3rd party, Satoshi's vision was great! But the problem is that Satoshi's Bitcoin become popular and everything that he ever wanted for Bitcoin, went wrong. People with lots of money decided to buy Bitcoins and created Centralized Exchanges. CEXs hold a significant amount of Bitcoins. Besides CEXs, there are crypto wallet providers like Blockchain.com and Nexo (that lets you have a visa card and buy things with automatically converting Bitcoins into USD). On top of that, two countries, The USA and China are the biggest miners and pool owners. 56.1% of hashrate goes to Chinese pools, 33.6% to the United States and the rest of them - other countries.
Bitcoin failed in decentralization and in the avoidance of 3rd party financial systems. Pseudo-anonymity? It's only getting easier and easier to deanonymize Bitcoin users. On top of that, Bitcoin ETFs got approved, which basically means if you can't beat them, join them strategy and financial institutes got closer again. Mark my words, soon miners will be forced to filter transactions, i.e. disapprove transactions that government doesn't want to be approved.

Satoshi's vision was great but I think that conservative politics of developers killed this project. Bitcoin needs many updates, to fill loopholes and fix what's wrong. 2024 and 1 MB (4 MB) block size? At least if we don't change much of the code, okay, but 1 MB block size really sucks. But I think it's politics too. There are part of influential people who make money from current mess because they make tons of money. Bitcoin lost it's function as a P2P currency and instead become a store of a value.
But there is a hope, always!

[cryptosize]

Bitcoin was created for pure p2p transactions without the involvement of 3rd party, Satoshi's vision was great! But the problem is that Satoshi's Bitcoin become popular and everything that he ever wanted for Bitcoin, went wrong. People with lots of money decided to buy Bitcoins and created Centralized Exchanges. CEXs hold a significant amount of Bitcoins. Besides CEXs, there are crypto wallet providers like Blockchain.com and Nexo (that lets you have a visa card and buy things with automatically converting Bitcoins into USD). On top of that, two countries, The USA and China are the biggest miners and pool owners. 56.1% of hashrate goes to Chinese pools, 33.6% to the United States and the rest of them - other countries.
Bitcoin failed in decentralization and in the avoidance of 3rd party financial systems. Pseudo-anonymity? It's only getting easier and easier to deanonymize Bitcoin users. On top of that, Bitcoin ETFs got approved, which basically means if you can't beat them, join them strategy and financial institutes got closer again. Mark my words, soon miners will be forced to filter transactions, i.e. disapprove transactions that government doesn't want to be approved.

Satoshi's vision was great but I think that conservative politics of developers killed this project. Bitcoin needs many updates, to fill loopholes and fix what's wrong. 2024 and 1 MB (4 MB) block size? At least if we don't change much of the code, okay, but 1 MB block size really sucks. But I think it's politics too. There are part of influential people who make money from current mess because they make tons of money. Bitcoin lost it's function as a P2P currency and instead become a store of a value.
But there is a hope, always!

Mining pools reduce decentralization, but think of them as the equivalent of states/armies in the BTC ecosystem.

When did states/armies appear and why?

They started with the dawn of civilization 10000 years ago when small tribes/bands of people started forming bigger groups to defend themselves better and to even attack other, weaker tribes.

Mining pools have the exact same philosophy: small miners banded together to form bigger entities to make solving blocks easier and far more predictable than solo mining.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a natural occurring pattern. Everything starts decentralized and slowly leans into centralization. Same thing happened to food production with agriculture (hunter gatherers got their food in a decentralized manner, unlike farmers).

It is what it is. I'm not saying it's pleasant.

[LoyceV]

Is it just me that thinks 1-3 usd is extremely cheap for an international transfer, pseudo anonymous,  confirmed within 30 minutes.

It depends: with Monero, you could do this 200 times cheaper, and more anonymous.
By bank, I can do it without cost, as long as it's SEPA and in euro. It'll be more anonymous to random people, but not anonymous to my bank and government.

Not all daily transactions are 50 cents coffees.

When I started with Bitcoin, I could make small transactions. I prefer to test something with many small transactions, to feel how it works in different wallets, before making large transactions. That's costly now.
Where do you get coffee for 50 cents?

I love getting paid in bitcoin here!

Me too

You mean they also charge you for depositing banknotes in Netherlands?

Of course! They can get away with it, so why wouldn't they? Consumers can still deposit a few times per year without fees, but businesses can't.

Just like IPv4 (2 ^ 32 addresses) was never designed to serve 8 billion people with multiple devices (PCs, mobile, consoles etc.)

Bitcoin addresses on the other hand (2^160 times 4 for the different address formats) are more than enough to serve all of humanity

IMHO, BTC follows the exact same trajectory as gold... people used to use gold coins for daily payments hundreds of years ago, but not anymore.

That would be bad. I want money without someone with a printer that goes brrr. Gold was replaced by gold certificates, which turned into banknotes, which were eventually decoupled from gold. I don't want fractional reserve Bitcoin.

If he wanted BTC to be more attractive as p2p cash, he would have made it inflationary (no halvings)

I disagree. I love deflationary money. I don't need my money to lose value if I keep it for later.

With the minimum of 1 sat/byte, storing movies would still cost $650,000 per GB at current Bitcoin price.

The minimum fee is not 1 sat/vb. It is 0 sat/vb. And the minimum after that is 1 sat per transaction. Then 2 sats per transaction, and it goes on and on.

Good point. Miners could indeed add full movies to blocks. But that can be fixed in a consensus rule: the moment we increase the block size, we set a minimum fee of 1 sat/byte for all transactions. If it's less, other miners will reject the block.

As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold

Gold isn't scarce, it's just hard to get. There's enough gold in the earth's core to cover the entire planet with half a meter of gold. That's about the total amount of gold ever mined per person.

Nobody will mention the fact that the exact same €50 banknote buys less and less stuff over time (covert robbery by ECB's inflation).

Actually.... Everyone mentions that. What truely amazes me is that people just accept it. Barely anyone points at central banks for causing infinite inflation. This quote comes to mind:

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Henry Ford

[BlackHatCoiner]

I have a problem with the fact that they found a loophole in code and use it to embed the data, create the false sense of non-fungibility and scam thousands or probably millions of people.

I don't have a problem with the "loophole", because I know they can re-create another protocol after the loophole is fixed. For example, store their Ordinals in the UTXO set, which would be even worse for us then. It's like beating the air. As for the scam part, I am not the sole arbitrator of truth. If some people find it funny, entertaining etc., I have no right to trespass their freedom. I can warn them, but that's the most I can do, and so should everyone else.

If you don't have the freedom to make mistakes, then what kind of freedom do you have?

I do not wish to censor transactions, I wish to censor abuse.

I mean, let's leave asides principles for a moment. How are you thinking of doing this? Suppose that I'm a miner. Please convince me that I should censor Ordinals.

What I wrote below, is completely my honest opinion.

Here's mine.

Bitcoin is a hell of a lot things. It's peer-to-peer cash, it's a decentralized computer network, it's a living organism, it's sound money, it's digital scarcity, it's an idea, but more importantly: it's money separated from the state. It's not prone to human corruption. Please take a moment to comprehend the significance of this property.

Trade is what keeps us civilized. Because I can trade with you for what you have, I don't have to kill you for what you have. To facilitate trade, we need money. Therefore, money is extremely important for the human species. However, all the money we've had so far has been prone to corruption, often controlled by an entity, a government, or the elite. This control allows them to manipulate money for their own benefit, which takes us back to primitive times. When money is corrupted, the free market becomes corrupted as well. Trade is then based on false positives, and the signal of prices becomes distorted.

You might have heard of Bitcoin being peaceful revolution, or freedom money. That is what it fixes. And it'd be unforgivable if we started experimenting recklessly with that invaluable property. If you simply want to experiment with a new payment system, there are altcoins for that.

Good point. Miners could indeed add full movies to blocks. But that can be fixed in a consensus rule: the moment we increase the block size, we set a minimum fee of 1 sat/byte for all transactions. If it's less, other miners will reject the block.

I now see that you don't just want to increase the block size. You want to change more than that.  

That doesn't change the situation. We could argue that it'd discourage ordinary users, but it doesn't discourage miners since that 1 sat/vb goes back to them. Ordinary users could still come to an agreement with the mining pool and get their money back. (Or just pay them off-chain to include it with a 1 sat/vb)

[cryptosize]

You mean they also charge you for depositing banknotes in Netherlands?

Of course! They can get away with it, so why wouldn't they? Consumers can still deposit a few times per year without fees, but businesses can't.

You're talking about ATM usage, right? That's really shitty.

Just like IPv4 (2 ^ 32 addresses) was never designed to serve 8 billion people with multiple devices (PCs, mobile, consoles etc.)

Bitcoin addresses on the other hand (2^160 times 4 for the different address formats) are more than enough to serve all of humanity

But you know very well that my analogy was referring to BTC's fixed block size, don't you?

Just like IPv4 cannot be extended to more than 32 bits, BTC block size cannot be extended to over 4MB.

Engineers try to find smart solutions (like NAT/RFC 1918, SegWit).

It's perfectly acceptable to use NAT and share the same public IP address among different devices, despite the fact it violates the end-to-end principle (sounds like the BTC whitepaper maximalism in a way).

So if BTC engineers find a way to share the same UTXO (like Ark promises to do) in the same fashion like NAT does, that'll be a game changer for Bitcoin.

Keep in mind that RFC 1918 came out 15 years after IPv4 and it took even more years to become truly mainstream in home routers (early 2000s) and I didn't even mention UPnP which came later on:

https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1918
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

I have to mention this for people who are generally impatient and want a solution right now.

If you believe that BTC is the TCP/IP of money, then honestly I don't see any delays here. Smart solutions take time to be devised and implemented.

IMHO, BTC follows the exact same trajectory as gold... people used to use gold coins for daily payments hundreds of years ago, but not anymore.

That would be bad. I want money without someone with a printer that goes brrr. Gold was replaced by gold certificates, which turned into banknotes, which were eventually decoupled from gold. I don't want fractional reserve Bitcoin.

I feel you, but history tends to repeat itself.

If he wanted BTC to be more attractive as p2p cash, he would have made it inflationary (no halvings)

I disagree. I love deflationary money. I don't need my money to lose value if I keep it for later.

Oh, I love it too!

I'm just saying you can either have deflationary money + high fees (in the long term I expect fees to reach $1000) or inflationary money (EUR/SEPA, DOGE) + low fees.

As a thought experiment, imagine there was a base metal as scarce as gold

Gold isn't scarce, it's just hard to get. There's enough gold in the earth's core to cover the entire planet with half a meter of gold. That's about the total amount of gold ever mined per person.

There's tons of gold even in asteroids waiting to be mined (imagine if SpaceX invents an AI-controlled spaceship for gold mining...), but for the time being we treat gold as a scarce commodity:

https://theprint.in/opinion/giant-asteroid-has-gold-worth-700-quintillion-but-it-wont-make-us-richer/260482/

Nobody will mention the fact that the exact same €50 banknote buys less and less stuff over time (covert robbery by ECB's inflation).

Actually.... Everyone mentions that. What truely amazes me is that people just accept it. Barely anyone points at central banks for causing infinite inflation. This quote comes to mind:

It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.

Henry Ford

No, they don't.

I know tons of anti-CBDC/pro-cash people (99.99% of them are no-coiners) and they don't seem to care about inflation (they do cry about it, but they don't take any action).

That's like crying that your husband beats you every single day, but you don't dare to ask for a divorce, FFS!

[LoyceV]

So if BTC engineers find a way to share the same UTXO (like Ark promises to do) in the same fashion like NAT does, that'll be a game changer for Bitcoin.

I don't know Ark, but LN kinda does this: one on-chain transaction can be used for many follow-up transactions. Your NAT comparison doesn't really work though: the number of IPv4-addresses is much larger than the number of Bitcoin transactions we can handle per year. We now have houses behind NAT, in Bitcoin-terms it would be more like having an entire city behind one IPv4-address. And that's why I don't think non-custodial LN can really scale. If it's custodial, then indeed one entire city can make all their payments through one node.

I'm just saying you can either have deflationary money + high fees (in the long term I expect fees to reach $1000) or inflationary money (EUR/SEPA, DOGE) + low fees.

I'm not ready to give up just yet

I know tons of anti-CBDC/pro-cash people (99.99% of them are no-coiners) and they don't seem to care about inflation (they do cry about it, but they don't take any action).

Can you blame them? Investing in Bitcoin means risking a 80% drop just because you want to avoid 20% inflation. Once central banks started raising interest rates, there wasn't really any safe way to avoid the high inflation. I'd say interest rates shouldn't have been that low to begin with, but that's for a different discussion.