The average joe would never accept bitcoin as means of payment due to tx fees

[ajaxtempest]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious achilles heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are levied fees.  

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers i.p ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

[1715257201]

1715257201

[hZti]

In my opinion you are right with that. There is the need for a consumer friendly option to send small amounts without TX fees and also with a very low verification time (10 seconds maximum). If that does not happen then there is no way bitcoin is used daily. In my option the fact that you have to wait 30-40 min for verification is even more important than the fees.

[Tytanowy Janusz]

The average joe would  never accept bitcoin as means of payment due to tx fees

Tell that to El Salvador citizens that use bitcoin as legal tender for everyday paymants by crypto wallet with build in lightining network.

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement

Tell me how big reimbursement you will get after loosing your wallet full of paper cash. Or how big reimbursement average joe would get after his bank account hack.

[Kemarit]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

Have you used Bitcoin though?

Transaction fees are very cheap right now, as compare to previous years, Segwit might be one reason why the fees are getting cheaper.

I guess you have to look at LN here; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202798.0 and https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.0.

[ajaxtempest]

The average joe would  never accept bitcoin as means of payment due to tx fees


Tell that to El Salvador citizens that use bitcoin as legal tender for everyday paymants by crypto wallet with build in lightining network.

Whats the percentage of el savadorians using btc over cash?
https://www.pymnts.com/blockchain/bitcoin/2021/poll-shows-70-pct-of-salvadorans-are-anti-bitcoin/
https://www.pymnts.com/cryptocurrency/2022/study-finds-el-salvadors-bitcoin-as-currency-experiment-costly-failing/

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement

Tell me how big reimbursement you will get after loosing your wallet full of paper cash. Or how big reimbursement average joe would get after his bank account hack.

[/quote]
you will get $250000 if the bank fails. How much you will get if btc fails or your hardware\non custodial wallet is hacked or lost?


Bitcoin might have utopian and idealistic ambitions but unless it can solve sending and buying btc without fees and restoring lost\hacking coins, it will never be used as commonly as cash.

Bitcoin might force govts to go back to gold standard but to replace all currencies is a fools dream.


lightning network is not private as thought to be!
https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/11/06/lightning-network-privacy-really-that-private/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89GJH4PgG6M

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees.  

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

Have you used Bitcoin though?

Transaction fees are very cheap right now, as compare to previous years, Segwit might be one reason why the fees are getting cheaper.

I guess you have to look at LN here; https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5202798.0 and https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5158920.0.

since 2011


The key problem is TX fees, as long there is a fee to pay, it will not be attractive to the avg user. Why not use cash or card where there is no fees?

[Tytanowy Janusz]

you will get $250000 if the bank fails. How much you will get if btc fails or your hardware\non custodial wallet is hacked or lost?

Those are money if bank fails not user hack. I was talking about situation in which your phone/pc was hacked and hacker get access to your bank account and stole your money. Most likely you will get zero. Same with lost wallet full of cash.

The key problem is TX fees, as long there is a fee to pay, it will not be attractive to the avg user. Why not use cash or card where there is no fees?

With fiat money there is not TX fee. you right. But there is 5-20% "inflation fee" annually.

[raidarksword]

I don't think transaction fees are the burden for making bitcoin as legal tender of payment system in fact El Salvador citizens embraced bitcoin and used it for their payment as for daily basis usage. Still bitcoin is the biggest solution for inflation and this will be the biggest factor for bitcoin to be adopted world wide.

[TheNineClub]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

That's definitely something BTC will have to, and ETH is trying to resolve, and honestly, if it doesn't get resolved then it could jeopardize cryptos' future. It's one of those things that need to be addressed for crypto to step to the next level of adoption and value. As you mentioned, it's still not that applicable for the average person and if it's not, then the price might not be what we think it might be, and then the store of value thing comes into question...

[Poker Player]

I do not believe that it will be used as a means of payment in a generalized way because of Gresham's Law, which is not a lucubration or abstract law but derives from the observation that when citizens have a good currency (such as gold in ancient times, or Bitcoin today) and a bad one (such as the currencies issued by states and central banks), citizens tend to keep the good one, to save it, and to spend the bad one.

If I have to pay for something, it is more logical to pay for it in a currency that will be worth less in a year and keep the other one that will be worth more in a year.

[Apocollapse]

You're correct if it's an average joe since they're don't really understand about Bitcoin, most of average joe still using legacy address, using wallet with bad fees estimator or even hold their coins on exchanges. As we know how ridiculous exchange charge the fees.

If you're using segwit address and doesn't have a lot input and output, you only pay less than $1 for each transactions, it's cheap. However if you use lightning network, you only pay for few cents.

[Fortify]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

Over time Bitcoin fees have come down, as they used to cost a much bigger chunk of every transaction. What you need to do is compare the fees to the existing payment networks and determine how the transaction fees stack up. If you look at things like Visa and Paypal, you are looking at a 3% ish fee and it does seem possible for Bitcoin to get below this at some point if the developers and network continue to make improvements. However I think the real obstacle to adoption, at least via individually controlled wallets, is going to be how long it takes for transactions to be processed. Nobody is going to want to wait around for a long time in a shop as transactions confirm, you can avoid this through an exchange like Coinbase, but then you're just relying on a third party again so might as well stick with existing providers outside of crypto.

[BlackHatCoiner]

If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash.

Depends on what you're buying. If you've fulled the supermarket trolley, then an extra $0.10 - $0.50 isn't going to harm much. I agree that for micro-transactions, cash is instant and transactions are settled without fees. This is why we have Lightning.

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

What's "sellers ids"?

In my option the fact that you have to wait 30-40 min for verification is even more important than the fees.

But, you don't have to. If you opt-out RBF, it's realistically impossible to double-spend. Only if you bribe a miner, you increase your chances of having it replaced by another transaction. For weekly transactions, wherein you pay $100 - $500 to the supermarket, it's fine to accept unconfirmed transactions.

Even with 1 sat/vbyte, it's very improbably to not be confirmed within 2 weeks, which is the default time required to dump it from the mempool.

[slaman29]

What you believe doesn't sync with what's happening, though.

I'm an average joe, and living in Asia, so those fees are about 4 to 5 times more here in terms of spending value than to most of Europe I guess and still I'm okay with the fees.

Okay there were times it was ridiculous but now 1 satoshi per byte equates to a few cents not even 10 cents. I'd pay that anytime for something that's valuable, can be used in so many places I couldn't access without BTC. And secure and won't go to zero like some dumb stablecoin.

[Jating]

On the contrary, I think average joe might think that bitcoin might be a good option for them. And I don't think that fees will be a big hindrance. What if there are countries that will accept bitcoin as legal tender in the future? We have one right now and it could have a domino effect and those average joe will have to used bitcoin. And this is not the first time that we have heard this kind of argument against bitcoin and yet it continue to flourished and mostly those average joe are using it.

[Ziskinberg]

That's correct, it's more like a store of value because fiat is still better than bitcoin when it comes to transactions. However, with its anonymity, people will choose crypto over fiat, and the fact that you can bring crypto anywhere in the world, you have the advantage when you love to travel as you can easily convert it to cash with bitcoin or crypto ATMs.

[hZti]

I think many people forget how often they use fiat money in their daily life. If you make an average of 5 transactions per day at around 0.8 USD fees this is: 5*0.8*30=120 USD just in fees per month. This is by no means acceptable or usable for 99% of people.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Why not use cash or card where there is no fees?

Lol? Have you ever accepted cash or card as a business? Card transactions generally levy a fee of around 3% per transaction, which is far higher than what most bitcoin transactions charge. And yes, a customer handing you cash might not cost you anything right there, but at some point you need to get that cash in to your bank account. Forgetting for a second the direct costs of securely transferring large amounts of cash to a bank for it to be counted, then business bank accounts also charge a variety of fees including monthly fees, deposit fees, cash counting fees, transfer fees, and so on, depending on your country and the exact type of business account you have.

Just because the consumer doesn't see the fees does not mean they aren't there and they aren't substantial. And the consumer ends up paying these fees, as reflected by higher prices on goods and services. In contrast, it is significantly cheaper all round paying 5 cents for a bitcoin transaction which is received directly in to the merchant's wallet and they can do whatever they want with it without getting hit by a bunch of third party fees.

And let's not even touch on things like currency exchange fees or international transfer fees.

[BlackHatCoiner]

I think many people forget how often they use fiat money in their daily life.

Again, it depends on the amounts. I don't do 5 transactions everyday, but when I do, they're micro-transactions and can be accomplished with Lightning as well, with nearly zero fees. For amounts greater than $50, I use bitcoin on-chain. I also don't pay $0.80 for each of my transactions. Last time, I paid 300 sats which is about 9 cents. I must have never given more than $1 in a transaction.

[jrrsparkles]

So you think that those poor people who you are talking about can afford the hidden fees of banks? Banks offers everything for free but this is only for rich but for an average joe who have to keep certain amount as minimum deposit, debit/credit card annual fees and while transacting overseas imagine how much fees the banks are taking form the average joe?

So while comparing all these I don't mind paying few cents for every transactions assuming the transaction contains 1 input and 1 output.

[hZti]

I think many people forget how often they use fiat money in their daily life.

Again, it depends on the amounts. I don't do 5 transactions everyday, but when I do, they're micro-transactions and can be accomplished with Lightning as well, with nearly zero fees. For amounts greater than $50, I use bitcoin on-chain. I also don't pay $0.80 for each of my transactions. Last time, I paid 300 sats which is about 9 cents. I must have never given more than $1 in a transaction.

Yes they can be accomplished with lighting if you are educated about it. Also many mobile wallets don't even support it.

For the fee of 0.8 USD: Currently the network is not crowded at all, still the average fee per transaction is 0.5 USD. So maybe you don't pay that fee but you will also wait for a quiete long time or when the network is crowded can't get a confirmation at all. This is again a problem as you would have to wait for a few hours in a store to be able to leave with whatever you bought. For example the transaction to the address in my signature took several days to be confirmed with a fee of 288 sats and the current network load. And this is always considering your transaction is not based on many micro transactions like here https://mempool.space/de/tx/b2a01dc1111c2ff2b327774498bdd21dda29f5bc4a69c784bb96ef1ce9d37f0d where a fee of more then 600 USD had to be payed.

[Stalker22]

The key problem is TX fees, as long there is a fee to pay, it will not be attractive to the avg user. Why not use cash or card where there is no fees?

As others have already pointed out, there is no card without a transaction fee, no matter who pays for it. And as for cash, can you recommend the best way to accept cash at an online store or for online services?
And, by the way, I consider myself an average user and bitcoin is very attractive to me.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Also many mobile wallets don't even support it.

The good ones do.

So maybe you don't pay that fee but you will also wait for a quiete long time or when the network is crowded can't get a confirmation at all.

Yes, but once the RBF-disabled transaction is broadcasted, you can't take it back. If the merchant wants to speed up the confirmation, he can pay the parent with a higher fee. Still, the fees he'll have to pay in bitcoin are less than with credit cards and other third parties.

[hZti]

So maybe you don't pay that fee but you will also wait for a quiete long time or when the network is crowded can't get a confirmation at all.

Yes, but once the RBF-disabled transaction is broadcasted, you can't take it back. If the merchant wants to speed up the confirmation, he can pay the parent with a higher fee. Still, the fees he'll have to pay in bitcoin are less than with credit cards and other third parties.

There are ways to take it back, like double spend with a high fee or it will be thrown out of the mempool after some time if the fee is to low.

[Ultegra134]

The key problem is TX fees, as long there is a fee to pay, it will not be attractive to the avg user. Why not use cash or card where there is no fees?

As others have already pointed out, there is no card without a transaction fee, no matter who pays for it. And as for cash, can you recommend the best way to accept cash at an online store or for online services?
And, by the way, I consider myself an average user and bitcoin is very attractive to me.

Card payments also have excessive fees, but they don't directly burden the consumers, since it falls on the vendors. However, to be honest I've found Bitcoin's fees excessive at times, especially during periods of bull market. For instance, back in December 2020, I had to pay a $25 fee for a 0.03 BTC transaction.

[kryptqnick]

Somehow transaction fees have been miraculously okay for almost a year now. Sure, sometimes they were higher than one would wish, but most of the time the fee is below $2, which is quite acceptable. Of course, if we're talking about paying for coffee, and then $1.5 of fees, it's not good. But if it's a solid purchase, such as groceries for a few days or a monthly pass for transport, or utility bills, the fees are, IMO, very acceptable. The problem might be with waiting if 0-confirmation transactions don't get accepted. But realistically, to pay for things that require fast processing of a transaction (in a physical shop or at a train station), custodial wallets or something like the LN would be needed.
But of course, for countries where many live in poverty, even $1.5 is significant and unacceptable as a fee. So yeah, it's not for everyone and not for every place.

[BlackHatCoiner]

It's possible to reverse an unconfirmed transaction, but much harder if it doesn't have opted-in RBF. Same can be said for a transaction with 1 confirmation. It's just very unlikely to be reversed.

like double spend with a high fee

If it has RBF disabled, then it'll be rejected from the overwhelming majority of nodes. You can bribe a miner do this for you, but still, it's not worth it. You'll have to pay the pool a decent amount and it's significantly uncertain. Since most pools will have the first transaction, it has more chances to be confirmed. And all this hustle and bustle for what? A hundred dollar bill in the supermarket?

Besides, credit card transactions are also reversible within the next few months. Remember, trust comes with a cost.

With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party.

[hZti]

like double spend with a high fee

If it has RBF disabled, then it'll be rejected from the overwhelming majority of nodes. You can bribe a miner do this for you, but still, it's not worth it. You'll have to pay the pool a decent amount and it's significantly uncertain. Since most pools will have the first transaction, it has more chances to be confirmed. And all this hustle and bustle for what? A hundred dollar bill in the supermarket?

Its not the point that it is unlikely to happen, but that it can possibly happen. For example I can see many people go shopping and just use a fee of 1,01 Sats vBite and get the transaction refunded after a few days without any effort.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Its not the point that it is unlikely to happen, but that it can possibly happen.

No, the point is the likelihood. Everything's possible to happen. The entire game theory can be proved wrong. Everyone can reverse transactions and destroy bitcoin. What matters is that it's highly unlikely, because everyone's discouraged from doing it.

For example I can see many people go shopping and just use a fee of 1,01 Sats vBite and get the transaction refunded after a few days without any effort.

I've never had any transaction with 1 sat/vbyte reversed. The longest I've waited is 1 week. Even if they do, which I find unlikely, they shouldn't revisit the same store. The reversal is, also, down to the merchant. If the merchant pays the parent, as I've said, your friends will normally have their transactions confirmed.

[DaveF]

And don't forget all the other bank fees and issues.

With cash you not only have to worry about out and out theft but also counterfeit bills and honest mistakes of wrong change amounts given.
More and more banks are charging fees to smaller businesses for certain types of transactions. Night deposit? Fee every month. Want a standing order for your opening cash in the morning? Fee every month. And so on. Do you think your or your employees time to count out the cash is free?

CCs have their own issues.

BTC is not perfect, but you can work with one of many payment processors, who for the most part take a smaller fee then CC processors, and you don't have to worry about anything and your fiat is transferred to your account daily, or however often you want it to be.

-Dave

[o_e_l_e_o]

Currently the network is not crowded at all, still the average fee per transaction is 0.5 USD.

The average fee is meaningless, because many exchanges and other centralized services which account for a large proportion of all transactions use unnecessary high fee rates at all times. The average fee I use, and I spend bitcoin far more frequently than most, is around 5 cents, not 50.

This is again a problem as you would have to wait for a few hours in a store to be able to leave with whatever you bought.

Then either the store owner accepts zero confirmation transactions or they accept Lightning.

Card payments also have excessive fees, but they don't directly burden the consumers, since it falls on the vendors.

Vendors don't just eat those fees though. They are priced in to everything you buy. You, the consumer, pays them, you just don't realize it.

For example I can see many people go shopping and just use a fee of 1,01 Sats vBite and get the transaction refunded after a few days without any effort.

I would challenge you to go and make a non-RBF 1 sat/vbyte transaction right now and then try to reverse it. I am certain that you will find it near impossible. It is certainly orders of magnitude more difficult than reversing a credit card transaction, which can be done with a simple phone call at any point in the next 6 months.

[Bitcoins101]

For small transactions you may be right, but it's used internationally more than you might think. There's a disappointingly small amount of development in regards to making bitcoin easier and faster to use for everyday transactions.

[hatshepsut93]

Bank fees are way higher than LN fees, it's just that typically merchants pay them, so customers don't notice it, because it gets priced into the goods. Idk what you mean by LN exposing merchant id, sounds like you are misinformed.

The bigger reason why Bitcoin is not adopted for payments is its volatility, it's frustrating to use a currency that changes its value every week.

[franky1]

The average joe would  never accept bitcoin as means of payment due to tx fees

Tell that to El Salvador citizens that use bitcoin as legal tender for everyday paymants by crypto wallet with build in lightining network.

DO YOUR RESEARCH

1. LN is not bitcoin. this topic is about bitcoin.. THE BITCOIN NETWORK and its fee's
please stop trying to advertise other networks.

2. EL salv' used a chivo wallet that was not bitcoin, the balance screen was measured in dollar not btc. . it allowed them to convert, but most payments were done within the chivo wallet system.. NOT BITCOIN and not LN

3. when el salv users using LN for 'payments' (as an option) they found using LN to be a failure with many payments failing and lots of liquidity problems with their exit hubs

4. el salv' actually dropped its lightning support many months ago. they now use a custodial service, because they seen first hand how many bugs, flaws and issues LN has

yep they now use alphapoint, a custodial service much like coinbase which handles merchant shopping cart tool, exchange and custodial wallets.

so please stop holding onto the utopian dream of LN being the answer..el salv tried it and dropped it in months.
LN is not the solution.
LN actually causes more headaches and issues for people. and the promise of cheap fee's is a lie if you do the maths of adding up all the micro fee's of the many hops needed per payment. aswell as how much value is locked up from use to open/close sessions, along with having your liquidity raided by other 'routers' using your balance before you can.

LN is not the solution
DO YOUR RESEARCH

Bank fees are way higher than LN fees, it's just that typically merchants pay them, so customers don't notice it, because it gets priced into the goods. Idk what you mean by LN exposing merchant id, sounds like you are misinformed.

to even be able to route. you, the nodes on the route and even the destination actually need to make all make their nodes and channels public, available and online. just to make a payment
 
yep.
there is even a LN statistic/explorer website that can tell you the identity of many merchants.. im sure you know it. so dont pretend you dont

ill give you a hint without linking it directly.. it sounds like 'wonemel'
1ml  .. but personally with all the boys club ass kissing and hugging each other i hear it more like 'wanna male?'

[Henrobakkara]

In my opinion you are right with that. There is the need for a consumer friendly option to send small amounts without TX fees and also with a very low verification time (10 seconds maximum). If that does not happen then there is no way bitcoin is used daily. In my option the fact that you have to wait 30-40 min for verification is even more important than the fees.

You could be right and we can also look at its volatility that will also stop some from accepting Bitcoin as a means of payment. Who wants to accept a certain amount only to fall in value in the next hours? However, I believe the market's varying times might spell different for Bitcoins acceptance as a means of payment since, during some times, it could be profitable to accept Bitcoin cos it will just increase in price. 

[PepeLapiu]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

You must be young, as in below 40 years old.
I'm 54 y/o and when I was a kid there were no bank cards, no PayPay, no banking machines, and credit cards were for the rich. I would say that 90% of all transactions were done with cash, 5% were done with cheques, and less than 5% with credit cards.
Now, with the 90% done with cash, there was no such this as "consumer protection". Once you paid for your coffee, the deal was done, you couldn't reverse your transaction.

And at the time, there was very little fraud. Most of the fraud was done with cheques and counterfeit fiat.

Today credit card fraud, bank fraud, and banking card fraud are big business. Nobody robs a bank at gunpoint anymore, they rob the bank at mouse cursor point now. And it's a far bigger problem than most people imagine.

The problem is that you no longer walk around with a few $20 bills in your wallet. Now you walk around with the keys to your entire bank account on your phone or plastic card. That has caused a great deal of fraud.

People just have to relearn how money is supposed to work, like it did 40 years ago.

Money is supposed to be a store of value. It's not supposed to be a store of value you can manipulate or take back any time you want.

You just have to learn to be responsible with your money. You have no idea the cost of accepting payments that can be reversed for businesses.
Most businesses prefer cash over digital payments because the digital payments always comes with strings attached and fees. That gets baked into the price of everything you buy.

And you haven't looked very well into LN. It is far more private than any credit card payment you could ever think of.

[Lucius]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

Bitcoin was not created for those who are afraid of new challenges and for those who are blind followers of a system that keeps them on a short leash. Also, Bitcoin is not the ultimate solution to all our problems, but only an alternative for people who are able to be their own bank and accept all the risks that come with such responsibility.

Fees are never too high if you understand what input, output, transaction size, and mempool mean - I agree that the average Joe doesn't want to understand that, but Bitcoin is still for those who use a little more brain than the average Joe who has a plastic card and PIN and is incapable for nothing more than that.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

For some, Bitcoin is nothing more than that - but everyone has the right to interpret it in their own way. Find out what the director of the ECB thinks about Bitcoin, and what the governor of the Bank of England or maybe the famous Warren Buffett thinks? Should they determine our destiny or maybe it’s time to start thinking with our heads?

[ranochigo]

Reimbursement of lost/stolen funds isn't a point that should incentivise people to use fiat/whatever payment method there is. It is a stupid excuse for people to have and it acts too much like a safety net that people can rely on. That shouldn't be the case, each individual is responsible for their own funds and in no circumstances should anyone be babysitting you or reversing your transactions at will. Coincidentally, payment methods like those also highlights the flaw with certain transactions that deals with intangible items, and resulting in a hard to proof scenario.

The main problem isn't the fees, it is the scalability and the transaction settlement. On-chain transactions cannot scale nor can it be faster than traditional payment methods. You are bound to face certain instances where you find the transaction fees surging after you send the transaction, and you end up waiting a ridiculous amount of time and spending more time trying to RBF it.

I agree, LN is not a solution. It merely alleviates the problem to a certain extent because you would still eventually be bounded by on-chain capacity when it gets large enough.

[goldkingcoiner]

For the love of all that is holy, if you use the lightning network and compare that to your regular joe's bank fees, you will realize that its the bank thats demanding the higher fees not Bitcoin. Furthermore, Joe has absolutely no control over his bank account and he is at the mercy of the government and the bank. Freezing accounts, forcefully withholding money, demanding arbitrary fees for the simple act of holding on to his fiat, which is becoming more and more worthless over time as the government just prints more and more as much as they want.

You really do not see how average Joe might prefer Bitcoin? Because everyone here on this forum definitely does.

[Ultegra134]

Card payments also have excessive fees, but they don't directly burden the consumers, since it falls on the vendors.

Vendors don't just eat those fees though. They are priced in to everything you buy. You, the consumer, pays them, you just don't realize it.

Indeed, that's why I mentioned that card transaction fees don't burden the consumer directly. Vendors pay an approximate 1.5 - 2% fee per card transaction, which has been factored into the consumer of course. Vendors take into account such costs when they create their pricing policy, however they are not directly visible to the consumer.

[Cling18]

I don't think Bitcoin transaction fees are hard to bear compared to the convenience that it could provide. Transaction fees in any form of payment are necessary even with banks. Bitcoin provides anonymity that no other mode of payment can do so its transaction fees are justifiable. Also, the tx fees nowadays aren't that high so it isn't a burden for most of the users.

[PepeLapiu]

Tell me how big reimbursement you will get after loosing your wallet full of paper cash. Or how big reimbursement average joe would get after his bank account hack.

To be fair here, very few people in El Salvador uses Bitcoin. It's used in touristic places, but not really at all anywhere else.
I think it will be gradual. But I'm cool with that.

The world is not ready for Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is not ready for the world either.

[ChiBitCTy]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

First of all you can adjust the fee level and it’s not that expensive. Things will only get better over time and to completely rule out lightning network already is foolish.

Also your comparison of saying people in poor countries use cash with no extra fees is misguided. Many people in those countries can’t trust their government or banks or possibly even able to open bank accounts due to poor credit standing. Also fiat carries the risk of high inflation which essentially is a fee.

[PepeLapiu]

I don't think Bitcoin transaction fees are hard to bear compared to the convenience that it could provide. Transaction fees in any form of payment are necessary even with banks. Bitcoin provides anonymity that no other mode of payment can do so its transaction fees are justifiable. Also, the tx fees nowadays aren't that high so it isn't a burden for most of the users.

You haven't made the math on this.
Right now the Bitcoin blockchain can only process 7 or 8 transactions per second at the very most. In reality, it's closer to a maximum of 5 or 6.
That's not enough to serve a small city of less than 1 million people, much less a large city like LA or Paris. And don't even mention a whole country or the world.
Bitcoin needs to scale, by an order of magnitudes, even with LN in tow.

I do think in the next 10 years an other fork will need to happen to increase block size. There is no way around that. 1mb doesn't mean today what it meant 13 years ago.

First of all you can adjust the fee level and it’s not that expensive. Things will only get better over time and to completely rule out lightning network already is foolish.

This reminds me of some guy on Quora who postulates as some sort of crypto expert. Everything he posts is about crypto and he is doling out "crypto investment advises" by the truckload.

He said 2 years ago when BTC was below $10k that the network can't handle the load and at it reaches $40k it will likely collapse due to ridiculously high miner fees.

Small minds can't see big things.

[Xch4ng3]

Lightning Network solves this, right now the fees are nothing for the security it provides. We lose 10% each year due to inflation anyway so a $1-2 fee on a tx is negligible.

[hZti]

For example I can see many people go shopping and just use a fee of 1,01 Sats vBite and get the transaction refunded after a few days without any effort.

I would challenge you to go and make a non-RBF 1 sat/vbyte transaction right now and then try to reverse it. I am certain that you will find it near impossible. It is certainly orders of magnitude more difficult than reversing a credit card transaction, which can be done with a simple phone call at any point in the next 6 months.

Right now the network is empty and it would not easily possible. In times where the price was high you had to pay 200+ sats per vBite to get instant confirmation and a 1 Sat vBite transaction would be refunded in 99% of the cases.

[PepeLapiu]

Reimbursement of lost/stolen funds isn't a point that should incentivise people to use fiat/whatever payment method there is. It is a stupid excuse for people to have and it acts too much like a safety net that people can rely on. That shouldn't be the case, each individual is responsible for their own funds and in no circumstances should anyone be babysitting you or reversing your transactions at will. Coincidentally, payment methods like those also highlights the flaw with certain transactions that deals with intangible items, and resulting in a hard to proof scenario.

I agree. But the reason why people think otherwise is because a large portion of the population never really used cash in their lives. They have lived their entire life with the bank's safety net under them to baby them.
If your bank can reverse your transactions, or block them from every occurring, that's not a feature, it's a bug. And a very bad one too.
Unfortunately we have on our hands an entire generation completely unable to assume their own responsibilities because they have never been given financial freedom.
Freedom comes with responsibility over your own life. Sadly, most people nowadays don't understand that and they have a warped view of what freedom is.

[amishmanish]

Every technology when new has high cost, the simple reason of high cost is  non viable or high operational  costs. But with mass adoption operational costs come down. ANd little Joes adopt the most premium material the last and this is the reason why they remain averege

[OgNasty]

In my opinion you are right with that. There is the need for a consumer friendly option to send small amounts without TX fees and also with a very low verification time (10 seconds maximum). If that does not happen then there is no way bitcoin is used daily. In my option the fact that you have to wait 30-40 min for verification is even more important than the fees.

As Elon Musk has stated a number of times already, this is where he feels 3rd party solutions will takeover.  For example, many vendors today use Coinbase to accept payments.  You can log into your Coinbase account, finish their invoice, and you have 0 fees with an instant payment.  Sure, this isn't exactly how Bitcoin should be used, but it is the custodial solution that gives people what they want.  Those who are more versed with crypto can use other solutions that offer more privacy and security, but for a majority of people, a service like Coinbase payments is what they are looking for to use their Bitcoin.

[hZti]

The Coinbase solution works until coinbase decides that it doesn't work anymore. For me you could use paypal instead I don't see the benefits of coinbase then.

[franky1]

Lightning Network solves this, right now the fees are nothing for the security it provides. We lose 10% each year due to inflation anyway so a $1-2 fee on a tx is negligible.

NO IT DOES NOT SOLVE IT
DO THE MATH

first of all..
LN fee's are not cheap.

when someone has a channel balance liquidity of say $100. and knows the fee is $1 to close the channel and $1 to open it to 'rebalance' he is going to math out the fee being $2. or 2% of balance

meaning yes if you are only using up $5 of the $100 balance your payment fee is going to be 2% of $5. which is 25cents.
(please read on, the story is not over.)


but if you are going to want to do a payment of $50 then you are using up 50% of the liquidity meaning they will charge you 2% of $50 which is $1
(please read on, the story is not over.)

.. then you have to realise that a $5 payment is only 25cent fee or a $50 payment is only $1 fee IF you only want to make a payment 1x'hop' away
because, the thing you forget and all LN fangirls do not like to reveal is that you have to pay a fee to EACH 'hop' along a route.
(here is the part the LN fangirls never tell you when they read you their story)

so if you are moving 10 hops to get to a destination. thats 9 payment fee's .. which soon add up
9X25c or 9x$1.. do the math

now have a nice day doing some actual math and not waste your time on utopian dreams of pretend cheapness that you have not actually thought of independently

please do your research, LN is not as cheap as you think unless you are only doing very small purchases and only using route with very large liquidity. and only to a channel partner. not a distant user many channel hops away
(in short its only cheap when very few are using it to fight over liquidity and not need to have lots of 'hops' to travel through to reach certain destinations and not need to dilute/spread their value into separate channels)

now go open excel, and run some scenarios. not on dreamed up best case utopia. but on realistic use-cases.

[o_e_l_e_o]

In times where the price was high you had to pay 200+ sats per vBite to get instant confirmation and a 1 Sat vBite transaction would be refunded in 99% of the cases.

And during the very rare times where the minimum fee was 200 sats/vbyte then you wouldn't even be able to broadcast a 1 sat/vbyte transaction because it wouldn't be relayed. You would instead be forced to use a much higher fee that would ensure your transaction isn't immediately dropped. And in these very rare times, then the merchant can just refuse to accept transaction with low fees. There are plenty of payment processors out there which already give you a minimum fee rate for your non-RBF transaction to be accepted with zero confirmations. If you pay above this rate, then it is essentially impossible for your transaction be replaced/cancelled/double spent, and so the merchant will accept it with zero confirmations. If you don't mind wanting, you can pay below this rate but the merchant will wait for 1 or more confirmations. Simple.

And if that still isn't good enough for you, then just open a Lightning channel with a fee rate of 1 sat/vbyte when the mempool allows.

[romero121]

What OP said is a part. People are much connected with making budget for the month's spending. A separate column gets added when paid with bitcoin to mention the transaction fee. From a common man's view, he/she will surely think twice before spending when there is access to spend free as well as cashbacks. How far this works isn't known, but in each and everything something return is assured though the mentioned things will be useless.

[Nrcewker]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

Yes I completely agree with you . But who told you that Bitcoins should be used as a payment method?
We trade Bitcoins and hence treat it as a digital asset.
Yes it’s not limited to asset only, we have the feasibility to use it as a payment method also.
But now it completely depends on individuals and varies from users to users.
I too don’t like to use Bitcoins to buy groceries from my local supermarket, as who will spend the extra transaction fees(though it is very less).
Also rather spending the Bitcoins, if I manage to hold it for more time then I might get more profit while selling it.
So yes we shouldn’t use it as a local means of payment.

[PepeLapiu]

Bitcoin was not created for those who are afraid of new challenges and for those who are blind followers of a system that keeps them on a short leash.

That is EXACTLY RIGHT. You win the internet today, my friend.
If having bankers and bureaucrats control your every financial move all for the promised of safety and protection, Bitcoin is not for you. Pay your taxes, make sure all your transactions are approved, tracked, documented, and googlelized.
Freedom is not for pussies and mommiesboyz.

[buwaytress]

As Elon Musk has stated a number of times already, this is where he feels 3rd party solutions will takeover.  For example, many vendors today use Coinbase to accept payments.  You can log into your Coinbase account, finish their invoice, and you have 0 fees with an instant payment.  Sure, this isn't exactly how Bitcoin should be used, but it is the custodial solution that gives people what they want.  Those who are more versed with crypto can use other solutions that offer more privacy and security, but for a majority of people, a service like Coinbase payments is what they are looking for to use their Bitcoin.

Much as I detest that, it's true.

Even my preference for a direct and on-chain settlement is an outlier. If I actually did get to the point where I'm transacting daily, replacing current methods like inter-bank network or visa, I'd really like it to be simpler, dumbed-down fee payment.

I don't mind checking up on fees to find the efficient cost-speed ratio but I accept it's time-consuming and only for non-urgent transactions. I will pay the required fee, even a bit more, just to ensure next-block confirmation, and that, while "affordable" is more fees than I pay for other methods.

And I do remember coming from where I do (Southeast Asia), even if the fee is small, you'll always choose the fee-free option at some inconvenience.

I suppose LN-apps is the future. Scan, pay, fuss free. And I think guys like Synonym might be on to something.

[PrivacyG]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

Maybe it is time for people to assume their wrongdoings instead of blaming a decentralized system for not helping them out.  If we want something decentralized, there is really no way we can have reimbursements or some kind of 'I lost my password' recovery.

I rather believe there is still a lot of time Bitcoin needs before it can become an understood system in the average Joe's mind.  The newborns of today will understand Bitcoin so much easier than we did.  The newer generations there are, the easier advanced technology is for them to understand.  Only recently did 2FA and encryption become a more widely used thing, and most humans still have no idea why and how that works.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

I get what you mean.  But maybe we have to understand one particular thing.  This is how I see it.  When you are on your own, you have to pay the price to continue being on your own.

Take a bank safe for example.  A bank safe is the easy way out.  You just pay a fee and they take maximum care of your stuff.  If you want to store your stuff with the same security in your own home, you have to pay a price for it.  You have to dig holes, buy safes, create a properly hidden environment with the proper storage conditions et cetera.

Same with Bitcoin.  You are your own bank, so you have to pay a price for that.  You pay a few cents or dollars in fees, but at the end of the day look.  You can have one million moving around and no bank will ask why, where, what and who for.  You can have multiple wallets without having to sign agreements.  You can do whatever, you are now on your own.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

And that is really not a bad thing.  I think we are very close to defining what Bitcoin actually is.  A payment system?  A store of value?  Or maybe a combination of both.  You can see there is a pretty long list of merchants accepting Bitcoin payments, so the beauty of it all is that even as a store of value, you can still use it as a payment system as well.

You can not do that with Gold.  I mean you can, are Gold coins with tender value not accepted in the USA?  They are, if you want to give one ounce of gold in exchange for a one or five dollar item.  To make both equal, we would have to have merchants accepting grams of Gold for payment and, since Gold is not as easily divisible as Bitcoin is, they would have to give you back change in grams of Gold.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[noormcs5]

I don't think Bitcoin transaction fees are hard to bear compared to the convenience that it could provide. Transaction fees in any form of payment are necessary even with banks. Bitcoin provides anonymity that no other mode of payment can do so its transaction fees are justifiable. Also, the tx fees nowadays aren't that high so it isn't a burden for most of the users.

Yeah, the payment processosrs like western union or paypal charge much more fee as compare to the bitcoin transaction fee. Secondly with the implementtion of lightening network, both the speed and fee of the bitcoin transaction fee  will be reduced to a good extent. Bitcoin payment has so many advantages that people will prefer it over the fiat currecny. It's just a matter of adaoption before we see this change.

[Lucius]

That is EXACTLY RIGHT. You win the internet today, my friend.
If having bankers and bureaucrats control your every financial move all for the promised of safety and protection, Bitcoin is not for you. Pay your taxes, make sure all your transactions are approved, tracked, documented, and googlelized.
Freedom is not for pussies and mommiesboyz.

Freedom of choice is the most important thing in my opinion, and people are so deep in the mud of centralization that they no longer want to think that there is an alternative. However, people are completely wrong if they think that Bitcoin can become something that will interest a significant percentage of people in such a short time - changes will take decades if they happen at all.

The average Joe is not at all interested in Bitcoin, and far from being bothered by some fee he doesn't even know exists. When I came to this forum in 2015 it was said that Bitcoin is used in some way or owned by 1-2% of the total population, and today it is maybe 5% (although some claim it is much more). So I don’t think the problem is how Bitcoin works, but how people think about it.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Same with Bitcoin.  You are your own bank, so you have to pay a price for that.

Actually, there's no property confiscation risk with bitcoin, in contrary with gold, houses, cash. If you've taken the steps to secure your coins and don't have your seed phrase lying around, nobody can steal them from you - without your permission. Write the seed phrase in bunch of pieces of paper, hide it under the ground, inside your walls, into your books, etc; it's a matter of creativity after a certain point.

[PepeLapiu]

Are you old enough to remember when credit cards were in their infancy?
Only the well to do had credit cards. And if you had Visa while the merchant only accepted MasterCard, you were out of luck unless you also carried cash at all times. In fact everyone carried cash at all times, even those with a credit card because they knew they could not depend on it.

And if you were lucky enough to find a merchant who accepts your brand of credit card, you would have to show ID to make sure you are the holder of the card. Than it would be put in a card scrapper where the card would be scrapped to produce 3 carbon copies. And those had to be filled manually with items bought, price, taxes, and total. Than you had to sign it.
You kept a copy, the store kept a copy, and the 3rd one would be sent to the credit card company.

It was a lengthy and tidious process. Expensive too. Not something the common man would use.

If you had told me 50 years ago that even students will use credit cards in the future to buy a coffee, I would have called you a nut job. Nobody is going to fill out a triplicate carbon copy to buy a coffee. Are you insane? Do you really think you will have to run around town to look for that one coffee shop that accepts your brand credit card? You think shops will all accept to fill out tons of paperwork for every coffee they sell?

So all those who tell me Bitcoin is not a viable payment system, you sound a lot like the naysayers 50 years ago.

I imagine in the future it will look like this: you have your wallet and your LN node running on your phone. When you want to pay for something, you just tap your phone or flash the QR code. Your phone will automatically decide if it should be an on chain payment or LN, or something else we come up with in the future. It will automatically adjust miner fee, rebalance your LN channels, and send the payment.

So you have BTC and the coffee shop only accepts Monero or fiat? No problems. LN just does an atomic swap from your BTC to whatever the shop takes. All done for under a penny.

Most people won't even know the difference between LN and on chain payments. It's all done in the background by your wallet. Just like most people who use email don't even know what a POP server eats during mating season.

[o_e_l_e_o]

On-chain transactions cannot scale nor can it be faster than traditional payment methods.

I disagree with this. On chain transactions are exponentially faster than every traditional payment method other than handing physical cash to a merchant. See this post of mine:

The problem here is that people compare a credit card transaction being broadcast to a bitcoin transaction being confirmed, and then say bitcoin is too slow to use in person.

When I pay with a credit card:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 3-5 business days
• The transaction can be reversed for 180 days

When I pay with bitcoin:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 10 minutes
• The transaction can be reversed for 10 minutes

The two lines I have bolded are what people compare. Credit card transactions are hugely risky for the merchant. They don't receive any money for days, and the transaction be reversed for months. It is also almost trivial to reverse a credit card transaction. I can phone my card provider any time in the next 6 months and say my card was lost, stolen, skimmed, phished, whatever, and for a value of $200-300 most will reverse it without question. Compare this with how difficult and costly it is to reverse a non-RBF bitcoin transaction, which must be done within a time frame of only 10 minutes on average.

And yet, almost every merchant accepts credit card transactions and experiences minimal fraud.

So yes we shouldn’t use it as a local means of payment.

If you don't want to use it as payment, fine, but blanket statements like "we shouldn't use it as payment" are stupid. I use bitcoin as a payment method for something or other near enough every day. I have never paid a fee of more than a few cents, and sometimes I even get a discount for paying in bitcoin since the merchant doesn't have to eat a 3% credit card fee.

Just like most people who use email don't even know what a POP server eats during mating season.

What protection should I use during mating season to stop my emails getting viruses?

[ranochigo]

I disagree with this. On chain transactions are exponentially faster than every traditional payment method other than handing physical cash to a merchant. See this post of mine:

The problem here is that people compare a credit card transaction being broadcast to a bitcoin transaction being confirmed, and then say bitcoin is too slow to use in person.

When I pay with a credit card:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 3-5 business days
• The transaction can be reversed for 180 days

When I pay with bitcoin:

• The merchant sees the transaction immediately
• The merchant receives the money in 10 minutes
• The transaction can be reversed for 10 minutes

The two lines I have bolded are what people compare. Credit card transactions are hugely risky for the merchant. They don't receive any money for days, and the transaction be reversed for months. It is also almost trivial to reverse a credit card transaction. I can phone my card provider any time in the next 6 months and say my card was lost, stolen, skimmed, phished, whatever, and for a value of $200-300 most will reverse it without question. Compare this with how difficult and costly it is to reverse a non-RBF bitcoin transaction, which must be done within a time frame of only 10 minutes on average.

And yet, almost every merchant accepts credit card transactions and experiences minimal fraud.

As a consumer, I cannot afford to wait for 10 minutes, or potentially longer. It just seems absurd to have to wait 10 minutes (or sometimes more) for a cup of coffee for my morning commute. That is assuming there isn't any network congestion that would result in a far longer wait.

The reality is, the whole payment process was never designed for the merchants to get their money as fast as possible. It has always been to get the cup of coffee from the barista to the consumer as fast as possible. Agreed on the point about the reversibility but in reality, the risk is something that any merchant would be able to stomach without much difficulty. At least for where I live, each of the claims are to be filed with a police report where investigations would reveal either the person that is paying for the transaction is in fact the owner of the card. Not to mention that fraud is highly illegal and having something that ties the identity to you makes this a difficult task to justify for the profit.

The argument on reversibility would only be valid, if you assume that consumers won't be turned off by any delay during the payment process, which could very well result in consumers either opting for other payment methods or other stores entirely.


Non-RBF transactions are not ideal for users, or you'll end up waiting hours for a cup of coffee. The problem with this is that it is so trivial to RBF a transaction that can be RBF'ed and there is no concrete proof that the customer did it; your local police probably wouldn't care about some signed raw transaction.

[Silberman]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

We will have to wait and see if your prediction is in fact right, some have indeed speculated that bitcoin will become simply too valuable to be used in everyday transactions and it will become like gold, and they may have a point, during the gold and silver era in which they dominated the world economy it was silver the one that saw the most use during your everyday transactions, so it would be interesting to see if a similar pattern emerges here and another coin becomes the silver of this market.

[o_e_l_e_o]

As a consumer, I cannot afford to wait for 10 minutes, or potentially longer.

That's the point I'm making - you don't need to. Nobody waits 180 days for their credit card transaction to become irreversible, and yet everyone accepts credit cards. So you don't need to wait 10 minutes for your bitcoin transaction to be irreversible, especially when reversing a non-RBF bitcoin transaction with an appropriate fee is exponentially harder than reversing a credit card transaction. And if we still don't want to accept that, then we can just use Lightning.

There are already plenty of payment processors and places online which will accept zero confirmation transactions which are non-RBF and pay an appropriate fee. There is absolutely no reason a coffee shop couldn't do the same for transactions in the region of $5-10 and experience minimal, if any, fraud.

[ranochigo]

That's the point I'm making - you don't need to. Nobody waits 180 days for their credit card transaction to become irreversible, and yet everyone accepts credit cards. So you don't need to wait 10 minutes for your bitcoin transaction to be irreversible, especially when reversing a non-RBF bitcoin transaction with an appropriate fee is exponentially harder than reversing a credit card transaction. And if we still don't want to accept that, then we can just use Lightning.

There are already plenty of payment processors and places online which will accept zero confirmation transactions which are non-RBF and pay an appropriate fee. There is absolutely no reason a coffee shop couldn't do the same for transactions in the region of $5-10 and experience minimal, if any, fraud.

I've addressed the scalability of Bitcoin as a network and with the use of lightning, I don't think you can possibly support mass adoption with lightning without having to increase on-chain capacity eventually but that becomes a slippery slope. It is a topic for another day.

But the point is that transactions cannot be non-RBF. If you have a non-RBF transaction, then what happens to the customer when the transaction gets stuck (over a sudden surge of fees)? I've paid more than sufficient fees (est. conf within 2 blocks) more than once, and had to deal with a sudden surge of transactions on the network and ended up having to wait hours. The point with chargebacks is that there is always an intermediary investigating for the legitimacy of such claims and more often than not, the banks would side with the merchants. I'm speaking from my own experience, but perhaps the place where you are at might have different policies.

Depending on where you live, having double spends on Bitcoin might not necessarily be considered a crime worth investigating.

[PepeLapiu]

As a consumer, I cannot afford to wait for 10 minutes, or potentially longer. It just seems absurd to have to wait 10 minutes (or sometimes more) for a cup of coffee for my morning commute. That is assuming there isn't any network congestion that would result in a far longer wait.

The reality is, the whole payment process was never designed for the merchants to get their money as fast as possible. It has always been to get the cup of coffee from the barista to the consumer as fast as possible. Agreed on the point about the reversibility but in reality, the risk is something that any merchant would be able to stomach without much difficulty. At least for where I live, each of the claims are to be filed with a police report where investigations would reveal either the person that is paying for the transaction is in fact the owner of the card. Not to mention that fraud is highly illegal and having something that ties the identity to you makes this a difficult task to justify for the profit.

The argument on reversibility would only be valid, if you assume that consumers won't be turned off by any delay during the payment process, which could very well result in consumers either opting for other payment methods or other stores entirely.


Non-RBF transactions are not ideal for users, or you'll end up waiting hours for a cup of coffee. The problem with this is that it is so trivial to RBF a transaction that can be RBF'ed and there is no concrete proof that the customer did it; your local police probably wouldn't care about some signed raw transaction.

You sound like a credit card naysayers from 45 years ago.
If I told you in the future credit cards will be used to buy coffee, you would have called me insane. Who's going to show an ID to buy a cup of coffee, sign a triplicate carbon copy of the transaction, and get charged 10% on all transactions? You?

First you would do well to think of the internet as it's own sovereign country. While every other country has it's own central bank and currency, now the internet has it's own central bank and currency.

You tell me my internet currency is not well suited to buy a cup of coffee in your country? Well, your country fiat is not well suited to buy a cup of coffee in my country either.

When you are in your own country, if you have a stable currency, use that. And use my country's currency when you are in mine. And soon you will be able to use Bitcoin in it's native country too: the internet.

And in you still insist on using a foreign currency (BTC) in your country to buy a cup of coffee, don't be an ass and use LN. No waiting 10 minutes, no paying $1 of miner fee.

[ranochigo]

You sound like a credit card naysayers from 45 years ago.
If I told you in the future credit cards will be used to buy coffee, you would have called me insane. Who's going to show an ID to buy a cup of coffee, sign a triplicate carbon copy of the transaction, and get charged 10% on all transactions? You?

Precisely why PayWave and contactless payment are growing so rapidly. Because you no longer have to do anything like that. Do stores really add on any percentage to your transaction when you pay by card vs cash? My experience is that it has always been factored-in the item price and it doesn't make a difference whatever payment method you use.

First you would do well to think of the internet as it's own sovereign country. While every other country has it's own central bank and currency, now the internet has it's own central bank and currency.

You tell me my internet currency is not well suited to buy a cup of coffee in your country? Well, your country fiat is not well suited to buy a cup of coffee in my country either.

When you are in your own country, if you have a stable currency, use that. And use my country's currency when you are in mine. And soon you will be able to use Bitcoin in it's native country too: the internet.

And in you still insist on using a foreign currency (BTC) in your country to buy a cup of coffee, don't be an ass and use LN. No waiting 10 minutes, no paying $1 of miner fee.

You're missing the whole point of my argument. I'm not saying you cannot use Bitcoin to pay for your coffee. Duh, you can. I've been using Bitcoin to transfer funds, pay for my servers for the past 10 years. I've never disputed this.

The whole thread is about Bitcoin in a specific use case, when compared against other payment methods. If you like to use it, please do, by all means. All I'm providing is an alternative point of view, or criticisms of what Bitcoin has to improve on. Ditto on the LN part, I've addressed it in my other post.

[Fivestar4everMVP]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees.  

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

Even though bitcoin transactions fees currently have dropped significantly compared to what they used to be, I still agree with you, and this is because I used myself and my experience as a yardstick or something to base my argument on.
I remember a time I stopped buying and holding bitcoins because I didn't have plenty money majorly because when I buy bitcoins and withdraw it to my private wallet, more than half is taken by the exchange as a withdrawal fee, and when I wanna send out the coins, I spend almost half again on transaction fees, I practically stopped buying bitcoin because of that, though things have changed a bit now cus transactions fees have become quite low, but I still feel it's not low enough for the average business men and women to want to accept it as a means of exchange.

[Anonylz]

Speaking from the average Joe's perspective, I would say No btc won't be used by them to transact. Let's keep the transaction fees aside and look at the security aspect, the probability of an average Joe getting hacked and losing funds is very high.
Everyone needs a device and working Internet to transact with btc, lots of average Joe's don't know how to be security conscious, people use their smartphones to visit all kinds of sites and download anything they find interesting which is a major limitation.

And if you go by some suggestions that say keep the majority of your btc in a cold wallet at home (since you can't carry your laptop or hardware device about) and only load your device with what you need, that's a tough thing to do, how would you know what you will need! there are unexpected situations that will occur and requires funds, what will you do! Run back home to reload?
The truth is it is not as simple as some btc enthusiasts want it to be, there are lots of processes and procedures which will definitely prevent an average Joe not to use btc for everyday transaction.

[GeorgeJohn]

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

I think this wrong concept, from my view because it seems that in any transaction or fiat currency kind of payment their is atoms of transaction levied performed, if you pay through your debit card for the countries that uses debit card, their a charge of each transaction, and if your country is using credit card, same thing is applicable. Don't think that it's only bitcoin or cryptocurrency that charge for fees if you make payment through cryptocurrency. Banks charge when you withdraw money from fiat ATM machine, so its the same charge as same of any cryptocurrency levied. Flashback you will comprehend my scenario.

[PepeLapiu]

Speaking from the average Joe's perspective, I would say No btc won't be used by them to transact. Let's keep the transaction fees aside and look at the security aspect, the probability of an average Joe getting hacked and losing funds is very high.
Everyone needs a device and working Internet to transact with btc, lots of average Joe's don't know how to be security conscious, people use their smartphones to visit all kinds of sites and download anything they find interesting which is a major limitation.

And if you go by some suggestions that say keep the majority of your btc in a cold wallet at home (since you can't carry your laptop or hardware device about) and only load your device with what you need, that's a tough thing to do, how would you know what you will need! there are unexpected situations that will occur and requires funds, what will you do! Run back home to reload?
The truth is it is not as simple as some btc enthusiasts want it to be, there are lots of processes and procedures which will definitely prevent an average Joe not to use btc for everyday transaction.

I'm not aware of a single person who had his coin stolen out of his hot wallet. I'm sure it has happened, but not something frequent.
With my hot wallet, you will have to steal my phone, crack the phone unlock, crack the wallet password, and take the coin from there.
If you can do all that, you deserve to have my bitcoin 'fortune'.

Let's be realistic here. Hacking individual wallets is too much work for not enough rewards. They don't hack individual wallets, they hack exchanges.

Your coin is far more safe in your hot wallet than it would ever be in any bank vault.

[Oilacris]

You do really got the point but in return with the fees you do pay is on having;

1. Anonymity
2. Decentralized

which is something that you cant really be having when you do have or dealing with fiat.
What would be those fees for or bothering yourself with that if you could really have these kind
of benefits. Pro's outweighs its con's so i dont see much of an issue. Let adoption and recognition
move normally or naturally.Also, fees now arent that high for you to bother yourself. 

[PepeLapiu]

You do really got the point but in return with the fees you do pay is on having;

1. Anonymity
2. Decentralized

which is something that you cant really be having when you do have or dealing with fiat.
What would be those fees for or bothering yourself with that if you could really have these kind
of benefits. Pro's outweighs its con's so i dont see much of an issue. Let adoption and recognition
move normally or naturally.Also, fees now arent that high for you to bother yourself.  

Well, the big difference here is that bitcoin fees are up front and transparent for everyone to see. But fiat fees are hidden and baked into the cake so most people are not aware of them even paying those fees.
.inflation is a hidden fee baked into the cake. And all digital fiat payments come with their own fees, almost all of them hidden and baked into the price of everything.

Most of those fees ate charged to the merchant who accepts the payment. So it's included into the price of everything. Credit card payments and banking card payments all require some sort of paperwork and separate accounting. Than you have your bank fees and you credit card fees and interests.
It goes on and on..... People have just no idea what % of they transactions go to various fees. So they just assume it's all 'free'. But it ain't.

I would argue fit payment fees are much higher than with Bitcoin, just not as honest

[PepeLapiu]

Precisely why PayWave and contactless payment are growing so rapidly. Because you no longer have to do anything like that. Do stores really add on any percentage to your transaction when you pay by card vs cash? My experience is that it has always been factored-in the item price and it doesn't make a difference whatever payment method you use.

I am in Canada. I bough an aircraft parts kit in the USA 5 years ago. They told me they will give me a 2% discount if I don't use a credit card. And when I mentioned I was paying cash, they offered me an other 3% discount on top of the original 2%.

Granted, it's not worth paying coffe with cash to save 2%. But the point is it's baked into the price of everything. Along with inflation which is also an other hidden fee.

Than you have to consider stores, banks, and payment processors don't work for free. They have to tabulate all these transactions, and invoice the next middle-man until it gets to you seemingly for free. A.k.a baked into the price.

[LeGaulois]

@PepeLapiu

Fees taken by Visa and the gangs are not hidden, it's rather people who don't care since it's included in the price item. At best, they can ask any merchant and they will answer.
But if we told people "if you pay cash, you get a 2% discount +0.20 cents" believe me they would use the cards a lot less

I don't know how old you are to have known the time when you needed an ID card to use a bank card, but you must be a dinosaur ,
I have never heard of such


@ranochigo @o_e_l_e_o @PepeLapiu

You're debating on different stuff. You're confusing shopping on the internet and shopping IRL. @ranochigo was more referring to using BTC IRL (i.e to pay for a coffee) than using it online. While it's easy to shop online with it (and he agreed with it), it's another story to do it at the bakery for example (unless LN is adopted as @o_e_l_e_o then argumented)

@o_e_l_e_o and @PepeLapiu were more considering it for online cases but that's not how we should use it. I mean, it's supposed to be used for our daily lives, I don't live on the web, I don't eat virtual food, I eat real chickens lol.

And yes about LN, but the time when it will be massively used is very far. Perhaps, we won't be alive, since it will take decades after Bitcoin is accepted everywhere (if it is)

[PepeLapiu]

@PepeLapiu

I don't know how old you are to have known the time when you needed an ID card to use a bank card, but you must be a dinosaur ,
I have never heard of such

Not bank cards, credit cards.
Credit cards were around before bank cards. And before the internet too. I am 59 years old. When I worked at a gas station as a kid, we had to request an ID, put the card in a contraption to "scrape" it to show through triplicate carbon copies.Than I would fill out the date and amount, and the customer would sign it. I kept two copies, he kept the third one.

[adzino]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

You keep your fiat money in your "wallet". There is a chance you can get robbed on the street or lose your wallet. Does that mean you will stop using your fiat money? You have to keep your wallet safe. The same way, you have to protect your crypto wallet. If you follow the basic security steps and don't be stupid, no once can hack your wallet. If you store your crypto wallet properly and back up all the required things, you won't lose your wallet.

Do you know all the transactions you do with your credit card, you have to pay the fee? The merchant usually pays the payment processing fee which is usually 0.5% to 1.5% of the total amount. Compare this with your btc transaction fee and you will see that the fee is actually much more cheaper.

[larry_vw_1955]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees.  

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

if you think bitcoin is bad with fees, try using ethereum. people on there can pay thousands of dollars in fees sometimes for a single transaction. and they don't complain (too much).

but that does bring up a good point which is that bitcoin needs some type of cash equivalant (non-electronic pure physical) that you could just hand to someone as a means of payment without the transfer being recorded on the blockchain. that would then have no fees. unfortunately they don't invent that yet. probably never will. that's what gold is for in other words. bitcoin can't do that.

[PepeLapiu]

but that does bring up a good point which is that bitcoin needs some type of cash equivalant (non-electronic pure physical) that you could just hand to someone as a means of payment without the transfer being recorded on the blockchain. that would then have no fees. unfortunately they don't invent that yet. probably never will. that's what gold is for in other words. bitcoin can't do that. r words. bitcoin can't do that.

The way I look at it is every country has it's own money and central bank. Now the internet has it's own money and central bank: Bitcoin.
You want to buy a cup of Joe in your town with Bitcoin?
In my book that's like trying to buy a New York hot dog with Japanese Yen. The Yen was not designed to do that, neither was Bitcoin

In think we should focus on Bitcoin's use case and design purpose: internet money. Not Japanese or American money, internet money.

Asking Bitcoin to become physical is like asking PornHub actresses to kiss you through your screen. Neither were designee to do that.

You want money you can touch, but you already have that. Let it be the money you can touch. Biitcoin finds you creepy with your grubby hands trying to grope it.

Maybe at some point Bitcoin will be 'street money' you can use at your coffee shop. But I think we are getting ahead of ourselves here. We are at the very early stages of adoption. Let Bitcoin be internet money and keep your greasy fingers in your pocket. Bitcoin doesn't like to be fondled like that.
 

[NotATether]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

Achilles heel! And you want to know how many hacks MasterCard has sustained on ts network in total? Over 300 thousand!

Banks with even worse security than Windows XP are getting hacked all the time but you know why the customers get reimbrusement? Because the government compensates them with taxpayer money.

So either way, you still got milked out of your money. One was just done outright, the other by means of an "extortion racket" that is federal taxes in general.

Fees are never too high if you understand what input, output, transaction size, and mempool mean - I agree that the average Joe doesn't want to understand that, but Bitcoin is still for those who use a little more brain than the average Joe who has a plastic card and PIN and is incapable for nothing more than that.

Hopefully BTC infrastructure will evolve to such a point where LN becomes the primary means of BTC payment thuse Joe won't have to understand these terminologies. (But I still feel uneasy that your having a LN node depends on your ability to create a Tor hidden service as clearnet IP address nodes are out of the question).

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

That's not what Satoshi had in mind when he put "Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks" in the Genesis block.

[SpenserReed]

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

Interesting, that's a real cash advantage. I don't even know what crypto can do with that...

[worle1bm]

So you have not heard about lightning channels I think as there are many people making payments through it and it's instant while if we also say about fees it's not too much for an average transaction.The fees also don't depends on the amount but size of transactions and many average Joe's are paying with it don't know how you come up with this.

[PrivacyG]

but that does bring up a good point which is that bitcoin needs some type of cash equivalant (non-electronic pure physical) that you could just hand to someone as a means of payment without the transfer being recorded on the blockchain. that would then have no fees. unfortunately they don't invent that yet. probably never will. that's what gold is for in other words. bitcoin can't do that.

Look at Bitcoin as the Money of the Internet.

Now here is what I think about Bitcoin bank notes.

For now I think there is no way to safely transfer Bitcoin through 'bank notes' unless a central, trusted entity produces them and we trust their words, their work and the employees.  They can implement QR codes to verify balance and serial numbers, they can have scratch to reveal or peeling private keys in case you want to invalidate the bank note and take the balance off it but just because it requires a TRUSTED third party it immediately makes pretty much no sense to produce them.  That is because if you have no internet there is no way to validate the bank note's legitimacy anyway, and if you have internet then you do not need the bank notes in the first place.

On the other hand.  A positive note would be how easy you can remain private with the bank note, similar to cash.  But for me, the trade-offs are too large and against Bitcoin's core principles.  But since you say Gold is for barter, if Cash became inexistent or worthless right now how many average Joes do you think would have Gold in their house to buy food with?  Gold is not as popular as it used to be for the average person and the ones to benefit would be once again the rich, the billionaires, the one percent of the population.  When Cash becomes worthless, for the average population barter will more likely happen between goods and not between precious metal and goods.  During hard times like that people become hungry, but for food and not for Gold.  The only ones who will be hungry for precious metals are the ones who today decide our fate and freedom.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

[o_e_l_e_o]

more than half is taken by the exchange as a withdrawal fee

That has nothing to do with bitcoin and everything to do with whatever exchange you are using blatantly ripping you off. You should stop using that exchange.

And if you go by some suggestions that say keep the majority of your btc in a cold wallet at home (since you can't carry your laptop or hardware device about) and only load your device with what you need, that's a tough thing to do, how would you know what you will need! there are unexpected situations that will occur and requires funds, what will you do! Run back home to reload?

I have never ran in to this situation despite spending bitcoin regularly in person for 5+ years. A few hundred bucks will cover almost everyone's daily spending money. If you are going out with a plan to buy something more expensive like a tablet or a laptop, then you can load up a bit more in advance. If you still want to carry more around with you, then do so with a hardware wallet. Simple.

@o_e_l_e_o and @PepeLapiu were more considering it for online cases but that's not how we should use it.

No, I was talking about in person shopping as well. My argument is that people accept credit card transactions all the time, which take exponentially longer to finalize than a bitcoin transaction (180 days versus 10 minutes), and are significantly easier to reverse during that time (a simple phone call versus trying to convince a miner to include a malicious double spend of a non-RBF transaction). Accepting a zero confirmation bitcoin transaction which is non-RBF and pays an appropriate fee for something low value like a coffee or some fast food is less risky than accepting a credit card transaction for a large purchase, and yet the latter is ubiquitous.

put the card in a contraption to "scrape" it to show through triplicate carbon copies.

Oh, I remember the CLU-CLUNK sound of those damn things very clearly. As an aside, this is why credit cards used to have raised numbers on them - so they would imprint on to the carbon paper.

[Pmalek]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

That's a feature of Bitcoin, not a bug or an oversight by satoshi. The goal is that you and you alone control what happens with your money. That also means being responsible of how to secure your keys and being careful who you transact with. 

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees.

The future will be a cashless one, not one where everyone carries paper bills in their pockets. It already kind of is. Bank and card transactions also entail fees. If you ever worked with a client who sends you money from abroad, you would know.

Your bank charges you a fee for incoming international transactions, not to mention currency exchanges, and routing fees for intermediary banks (if applicable). Online banking? You pay for that too. As well as the SMS and email notifications you get about account balances and transactions made. Then there are monthly fees just for having a bank account and other fees the banks think of to take more money from you.

Credit card transactions aren't free. Ask the person and shop owner behind the register and they will tell you. Have you ever been asked if you are paying by cash or credit card when you shop? That's most probably because you will be charged a bit more if you pay with a card.

And what about the people that are unbanked? Depending on what sources you find, they claim that hundreds of millions of people (maybe even over a billion) are unbanked. Imagine what fees they have to pay to Western Union or similar services that hold a monopoly on that market!   

[mindrust]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

That's a known issue. Nobody's denying it. If the fees are too high for you then you should use LN, alts or simply your credit card. Personally I find it completely unnecessary to make payments via crypto. My credit cards work very fast and precise. Why would anybody even care to use a decentralized payment system in the first place? As a store of value, bitcoin works quite good however.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Why would anybody even care to use a decentralized payment system in the first place?

Privacy, censorship-resistance, fast transaction settlement, lower costs, irreversible transactions, half of which are written literally in the first page of the whitepaper. Please read the replies before making one.

The fees also don't depends on the amount but size of transactions and many average Joe's are paying with it don't know how you come up with this.

Not for Lightning, that you've mentioned. Lightning transactions' fees depend on the amount that is transacted, and other things such as how much routing, at which fee rate etc.

[larry_vw_1955]

You want money you can touch, but you already have that.

Who, me? I don't have money I can touch. It's all digital. Never see actual physical cash anymore. But I think bitcoin needs a physical form so I could just hand it to people and avoid the network.

Maybe at some point Bitcoin will be 'street money' you can use at your coffee shop. But I think we are getting ahead of ourselves here.

why are we getting ahead of ourselves? there are certainly challenges in creating a physical object that represents some fraction of a bitcoin but that doesn't mean they shouldnt try. it would have alot of use cases.

one day the us dollar may be valued at some fraction of a bitcoin rather than bitcoin being valued at some fraction of a dollar. when that happens, bitcoin would need to go into a physical form too.

[PepeLapiu]

why are we getting ahead of ourselves? there are certainly challenges in creating a physical object that represents some fraction of a bitcoin but that doesn't mean they shouldnt try. it would have alot of use cases.

What gives Bitcoin it's valuebis the blockchain. If you take it off the blockchain all you have is a worthless random bunch of code.
Who you gonna trust to back a physical coin with a Bitcoin? What are you going to do with the physical coin when you put the bitcoin back online?
And why do you think there would be a use case for a physical bitcoin? You plan on trading it on a dessert island with no internet?
If you want anonimity with your coin, use the Lightning network for total privacy.
There is a reason why the IRS is offering private contractors a ton of money to break the privacy features of Monero and LN.
Asking for a physical Bitcoin to use in the physical world is like asking for a Japanese Yen to be used in Congo.
We already have enough of those bitcoin derivatives, we don't need an other one to keep down the price of Bitcoin.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Who, me? I don't have money I can touch. It's all digital. Never see actual physical cash anymore. But I think bitcoin needs a physical form so I could just hand it to people and avoid the network.

I don't really follow your logic here. You've just admitted that you never use physical cash and do all your transactions electronically, but then you want physical bitcoin? Why?

why are we getting ahead of ourselves? there are certainly challenges in creating a physical object that represents some fraction of a bitcoin but that doesn't mean they shouldnt try. it would have alot of use cases.

It already exists in things like Casascius coins and OpenDimes. They fulfill a niche but they are not widely used because they are not widely needed.

one day the us dollar may be valued at some fraction of a bitcoin rather than bitcoin being valued at some fraction of a dollar. when that happens, bitcoin would need to go into a physical form too.

Why would it? If we reach the point that everyone thinks in bitcoin and uses bitcoin daily, then everyone is going to have an open Lightning channel or some other second layer solution for instant and feeless transactions.

[Oasisman]

~snip~

I guess average joes doesn't want to accept Bitcoin not because of the tx fees, but because they don't understand how to minimize Bitcoin tx fees as they might think it would be too complicated than using credit and debit cards which also has tx fee too.

Bitcoin is already a currency and at the same time a store of value.

[bakasabo]

Bitcoin fees is one of the things that can scare people, mostly in age, from using it or even trying to understand. If we look on Bitcoin only as a payment systems and compare it to our regular banking system, it will be hard to explain people and convince that Bitcoin is better, when you start to explain that number of transactions in pool increase transaction time and in some cases cost. I pay about 30 euro cents for every transaction (no matter when) through internet bank and it takes half a day for money to reach received. And I can pay from 1 cent to infinity for a transaction in Bitcoin and it could take minutes of weeks for money to reach receiver. This little difficulty will scare average joe from Bitcoin.

[larry_vw_1955]

I don't really follow your logic here. You've just admitted that you never use physical cash and do all your transactions electronically, but then you want physical bitcoin? Why?

Because no one wants cash. the us dollar continues to deflate why would you want to hold it in physical form. better to get rid of it. but if i could have bitcoin in physical form that would be different.

It already exists in things like Casascius coins and OpenDimes. They fulfill a niche but they are not widely used because they are not widely needed.

i have heard of those 2 things but as you yourself admit they are just novelty items that no one is going to trust for useage as physical cash. just because someone hand me a coin with some security sticker on it that supposedly means the private key never been looked at, well, i woudln't trust that at all. neither can i trust some electronic device that if it fails would cause me to lose the funds stored inside it since it can't be backed up. plus, why should i have to pay to be able to have my bitcoin in a physical form?

Why would it?

well if the us dollar failed and the government switched over to bitcoin then everything would be based on bitcoin. the government would be printing bitcoins then.

[o_e_l_e_o]

i have heard of those 2 things but as you yourself admit they are just novelty items that no one is going to trust for useage as physical cash. just because someone hand me a coin with some security sticker on it that supposedly means the private key never been looked at, well, i woudln't trust that at all. neither can i trust some electronic device that if it fails would cause me to lose the funds stored inside it since it can't be backed up.

So what is your proposal for physical bitcoin then? To be analogous to cash, in that I can just hand you some physical thing and now you possess those coins with zero risk that I can still access those coins, then you need a trustless way to pass private keys to another person, entirely offline. OpenDime is the closest we have to that at the moment, but you don't want to use an electronic device. Paper wallets don't work since I can just make a copy of the private keys before I hand it over. How are you going to make this work?

well if the us dollar failed and the government switched over to bitcoin then everything would be based on bitcoin.

Sorry, I should have been clearer here. I was referring to the second half of your statement and asking "Why would bitcoin need to go in to a physical form?" Everything is going digital, money included, and this is only going to accelerate over time. If I can pay for anything instantly and feelessly by just scanning a Lightning invoice QR code with my phone, then why would the average person want to carry physical bitcoin as well?

[franky1]

in regards to the topic of acceptable crypt currency and certain idiots ploys of advertising LN as the solution

if luna(and its pegged stable coin) has taught anyone anything..
the currency that has no PoW blockchain, that currency/network has no underlying value, as there is no cost in the creation of the units of measure.. only in the main blockchain currency thats being pegged has some store of value. and if its PoW it has more than other blockchains that are not PoW.
but if that peg is bad and breakable . the bridged/peg network without the blockchain has no value.

if luna has taught anyone anything..for emphasis
if the pegging mechanism is not strong or guaranteed then the currency unit on the pegged network is not strong/guaranteed
learn lessons from the Luna fiasco

LN suffers this same fate.
infact a worse fate due to the crappy ways it locks bitcoin to create its msat equivalent units of measure.
these contracts are not audited at all... LN has no consensus network to ensure every Msat is accounted for on the LN side. its why turbo allows for fractional reserving(setting up balance without confirmed utxo). its why channels can be set up with unbacked balance in LN.
be warned about this.

goodluck to all the LN fangirls thinking LN is the solution.. enjoy your network when everyone catches up to the realisations of the issues with LN

an 1000msat is not worth 1sat if you can create msat balance without a firmly validated and network wide audited peg that cant be broken where by its impossible to create msat without a confirmed utxo

and i wont even go into the other flaws of how channel partners can cheat the balance in their channel against each other

let luna and its stablecoin be a lesson to people about how to perceive the LN peg flaw of LN, especially in regards to features like 'turbo'(unconfirmed(unpegged) msat balance)

[BlackHatCoiner]

its why turbo allows for fractional reserving(setting up balance without confirmed utxo). its why channels can be set up with unbacked balance in LN.

Who has implemented, released and used turbo? Cut the crap. Nobody. You've just read it in a Github issue/proposal and believe that's the way things are. Channels in Lightning are backed by their corresponding on-chain transactions which were used to open them. People own the digital signature(s) to regain access to that money whenever they want.

I know you're such a drama queen, but please, for once, don't spread your misery.

and i wont even go into the other flaws of how channel partners can cheat the balance in their channel against each other

I challenge you to open a channel with me, and try to cheat me successfully.

[Oilacris]

~snip~

I guess average joes doesn't want to accept Bitcoin not because of the tx fees, but because they don't understand how to minimize Bitcoin tx fees as they might think it would be too complicated than using credit and debit cards which also has tx fee too.

Bitcoin is already a currency and at the same time a store of value.

Fee complaints is into those times where market condition or network situation Is on the condition on having high traffic which do results into high fees which make people do really make out some complaints but if we do look as of this moment then I don't see for having some high fees and we've been staying a while onto this one where cent valued fees doesn't hurt at all.

I do agree with that store of value on which the reason on why people do really mind off on not to spend because of that long term perspective which isn't something surprising.

[franky1]

its why turbo allows for fractional reserving(setting up balance without confirmed utxo). its why channels can be set up with unbacked balance in LN.

Who has implemented, released and used turbo? Cut the crap. Nobody. You've just read it in a Github issue/proposal and believe that's the way things are. Channels in Lightning are backed by their corresponding on-chain transactions which were used to open them. People own the digital signature(s) to regain access to that money whenever they want.

I know you're such a drama queen, but please, for once, don't spread your misery.

you can keep loving your altnet as much as you like.. just dont sell the utopian dream to others.

and you ask 'who has implemented and lets users use turbo'.. well YOU definitely know the company that made it.. and called it 'turbo' in the first place, so dont play dumb.

also bolts is not even a consensus!!.. i cannot throw a turbo channel off the network or make it a fork or do anything.
when 'building' the routing table (via gossip) NONE of the wallets check the network of channel ID's exist against the blockchain and reject channels that have no confirmed UTXO.

https://github.com/lightning/bolts/blob/master/02-peer-protocol.md#definition-of-channel_id

Note that as duplicate temporary_channel_ids may exist from different peers, APIs which reference channels by their channel id before the funding transaction is created are inherently unsafe. The only protocol-provided identifier for a channel before funding_created has been exchanged is the (source_node_id, destination_node_id, temporary_channel_id) tuple. Note that any such APIs which reference channels by their channel id before the funding transaction is confirmed are also not persistent

yep not only can nothing be done to prevent false ID's
all they have provided is a way to have a mix of sham id's from different users so that when combined they create a further sham Id thats is unique. but in all cases none of this means that nodes reject these channels

what you are not realising is because the 'turbo' feature exists in a wallet. (and you know this)
users that are channel linked in this way to the company may think the 'liability' is on the company side, as YOU think they created the channel and the only route is through the company so they have the debt exposure risk
EG

U
   \
     C -- L
   /
U
where by in YOUR MIND, when a User 'spends' value via C to L, YOU think C has to have real confirmed value with L for L to be able to close session with value derived from U. meaning if C has faked the U value. only C loses out when L closes session

but you forget some basic things
if L is too in a turbo. then his balance is not real either. he has no confirmed/locked UTXO to sign if he wanted to close session after msat amounts have changed.
so L may have handed the products/services/goods to U, but then cant close session the CL channel as there is no confirmed UTXO to sign. meaning L cant get paid for the U payment amounts

also because the wallet allows it, the U people may want to connect together within the wallet.
because the wallet allows it..
    U
  /   \
U    C - L
  \   /
   U
where by one of the U's might have done a turbo with another U without the other U knowing.

yep due to silly GUI design that hides the true validation/vetting of channels(well truthfully complete LACK of validation/auditing even at code level to reject channels with no funding lock). these users may not even know their msat is even backed by a locked utxo OR NOT.
all they see is that msats balance exists. even if a UTXO doesnt.. and they only find out when they try to broadcast and find out there is no confirmed utxo to sign for,
..

and again.. LN has no consensus.. each wallet does not need to follow strict rules or get thrown out the network. wallets can set their own rules if they want. there is no network wide ruleset all wallets are forced to abide by.. bolts are more like guidelines. not network audited rules
..
oh and by the way.
i know people can steal value. so why would i put value into a channel with you.. i know 100% you would steal it.. yes you would, dont deny it. i know your game already. but thanks for the offer. but ill reject your offer to have my value lost to you.

however, you love LN so much. how about YOU use it and create your own channels with other nodes you own and try to steal from yourself. that way you can see the flaws, without actually physically losing (because your paying yourself back)
so go try finding the flaws to learn how to protect yourself rather than believing in trust and compassion of your peers being friendly.. because we all know LN fangirls are not friendly

bitcoin(yes the bitcoin network) has had 13 years of people trying to break it to see what it can handle and to ensure its safe.. unlike you that is too afraid to try and break LN(or probably more like you know its broke but dont want to admit it).
so i dare YOU. yes YOU, try and break your own favoured network, learn the flaws. as it seems you are too afraid to realise/admit LN has flaws.

stop living the utopian dream. and definitely stop trying to coax people to use LN with you just so you can steal from them because you are that much of a nefarious actor.

if the LN devs can admit the flaws.. so should you.
show some honesty, integrity and some actual insight into making people risk aware of certain things. stop trying to over sell the snake oil. you are not a good salesman. and a very poor PR guy
again the LN devs have lost value between themselves and admitted the flaws.. so stop pretending LN is utopia

people need to learn from terraUSD/Luna.. not be shuffled off into another altnet thats has poor pegs and fractional reserve option

[larry_vw_1955]

So what is your proposal for physical bitcoin then? To be analogous to cash, in that I can just hand you some physical thing and now you possess those coins with zero risk that I can still access those coins, then you need a trustless way to pass private keys to another person, entirely offline. OpenDime is the closest we have to that at the moment, but you don't want to use an electronic device. Paper wallets don't work since I can just make a copy of the private keys before I hand it over. How are you going to make this work?

Well a physical bitcoin would be a sophistocated manufacturing process so that it couldn't be counterfeited very easily. Think of having the characteristics of the opendime but in a purely physical device. But I don't see why it couldn't be done. It's just that no one has done it. The opendime never really needs to be opened up and used until someone holding it needs to pay for something electronically. So that might never be necessary. But if it is, then the opendime is destroyed because it can't be passed on anymore. Same idea with the physical bitcoin.

Sorry, I should have been clearer here. I was referring to the second half of your statement and asking "Why would bitcoin need to go in to a physical form?" Everything is going digital, money included, and this is only going to accelerate over time. If I can pay for anything instantly and feelessly by just scanning a Lightning invoice QR code with my phone, then why would the average person want to carry physical bitcoin as well?

more people would use bitcoin if it had a physical form too.

[ajaxtempest]

in regards to the topic of acceptable crypt currency and certain idiots ploys of advertising LN as the solution

if luna(and its pegged stable coin) has taught anyone anything..
the currency that has no PoW blockchain, that currency/network has no underlying value, as there is no cost in the creation of the units of measure.. only in the main blockchain currency thats being pegged has some store of value. and if its PoW it has more than other blockchains that are not PoW.
but if that peg is bad and breakable . the bridged/peg network without the blockchain has no value.

if luna has taught anyone anything..for emphasis
if the pegging mechanism is not strong or guaranteed then the currency unit on the pegged network is not strong/guaranteed
learn lessons from the Luna fiasco

LN suffers this same fate.
infact a worse fate due to the crappy ways it locks bitcoin to create its msat equivalent units of measure.
these contracts are not audited at all... LN has no consensus network to ensure every Msat is accounted for on the LN side. its why turbo allows for fractional reserving(setting up balance without confirmed utxo). its why channels can be set up with unbacked balance in LN.
be warned about this.

goodluck to all the LN fangirls thinking LN is the solution.. enjoy your network when everyone catches up to the realisations of the issues with LN

an 1000msat is not worth 1sat if you can create msat balance without a firmly validated and network wide audited peg that cant be broken where by its impossible to create msat without a confirmed utxo

and i wont even go into the other flaws of how channel partners can cheat the balance in their channel against each other

let luna and its stablecoin be a lesson to people about how to perceive the LN peg flaw of LN, especially in regards to features like 'turbo'(unconfirmed(unpegged) msat balance)

Interesting reply. LN already suffers from privacy issue as ip addresses of the seller or receiver is known. But this comment above is like a stake. Blockchain size would have to be increased but this will lead to more space taking up.

I still say bitcoin would be used as a store of value or could replace US dollar for cross border transaction for only GOVTS being the BANCOR currency which keynes originally envisioned

Bitcoin is the bancor that is required. Your local currency will be used but for international govt trade it will be bitcoin imo.

bancor history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qDGMzXiiIs

[peter0425]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

if you are truly a User of bitcoin and not just posting here about what you heard or read then  you misunderstood Bitcoin then .

because nowadays that the Fee is so much cheaper compared to what is last year and now getting lower as Segwit and Bench are there , also Lightning Network? it is indeed tend for small transaction with faster and cheaper fees.

[ajaxtempest]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

if you are truly a User of bitcoin and not just posting here about what you heard or read then  you misunderstood Bitcoin then .

because nowadays that the Fee is so much cheaper compared to what is last year and now getting lower as Segwit and Bench are there , also Lightning Network? it is indeed tend for small transaction with faster and cheaper fees.

Would you pay tx fees every time you purchase groceries, movie tickets, paying traffic fines?

I dont think avg joe would be comfortable with it.

[GeorgeJohn]

You keep your fiat money in your "wallet". There is a chance you can get robbed on the street or lose your wallet. Does that mean you will stop using your fiat money? You have to keep your wallet safe. The same way, you have to protect your crypto wallet. If you follow the basic security steps and don't be stupid, no once can hack your wallet. If you store your crypto wallet properly and back up all the required things, you won't lose your wallet.

No place of saving funds is better, you encouraged not to keep funds in the banking fiat, as a bitcoiner it's quite right, but from my perspective you have to comprehensively understand that even in your wallet you can lost your coins through hackers. Or through who monitors your method of securing your seed phrase to import your wallet. So no place is hundred percent sure of defence or security conscious. You can get rubbed everywhere, but what we need is carefulness and documentation

[BlackHatCoiner]

where by one of the U's might have done a turbo with another U without the other U knowing.

Yes, that sounds right. You only know the confirmation of the transactions you're sharing with other partners. You can't know if 2 partners across the network, who'll route your Lightning transactions, have setup a turbo channel, one of which might rip the other off by double-spending.

But, why is this a bad thing? Shouldn't I only be aware of my partners' intentions? What two individuals do isn't my concern; I don't lose any funds if one of the two cheat the other. Whether they route my transactions or not.

i know people can steal value. so why would i put value into a channel with you.. i know 100% you would steal it.. yes you would, dont deny it. i know your game already. but thanks for the offer. but ill reject your offer to have my value lost to you.

Any idea of penalty transaction?

Interesting reply. LN already suffers from privacy issue as ip addresses of the seller or receiver is known.

If you don't want to reveal your IP, use an onion service. Most Lightning nodes I've seen use Tor.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Well a physical bitcoin would be a sophistocated manufacturing process so that it couldn't be counterfeited very easily. Think of having the characteristics of the opendime but in a purely physical device.

And how do you do that without trust or destroying the physical item in question? If you put a raw private key on to the device, then you have to trust the manufacturer. Even if you use an encrypted key or some kind of split key, then it means you have to hand over a piece of data in addition to the coin which introduces a huge risk of loss, and still doesn't remove the need for you to trust the manufacturer and the other person aren't working together, or that the other person has tampered with the device and knows the full private key.

more people would use bitcoin if it had a physical form too.

Maybe they would, but only if they were secure and reusable. And no one has come up with a solution to that problem yet as far as I know.

[jaberwock]

I believe that transaction fees and losing your wallet or getting hacked and not receiving any reimbursement is a serious archilies heel preventing mass adoption for bitcoin.

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees. 

The so called lightning network defense is not prudent as in lightning network the sellers ids is being broadcasted to everyone.

bitcoin will only be like gold aka store of value.

Why not? They will only accept it and they aren't the ones that will use it. It was the other person that will pay the fees and not the receiver unless maybe if the receiver uses different kinds of wallets where he will then transfer the btc's that he obtained from his other wallet, well if that's the case then he will still be paying some fees but he can always use some third party sites to convert his btc to other cheaper and more lighter coin. That should save him some fees. Losing your wallet or getting hacked is a different thing anymore. That was not the fault of btc but it was the fault of the user if ever those horrible things happen to him.

[franky1]

where by one of the U's might have done a turbo with another U without the other U knowing.

Yes, that sounds right. You only know the confirmation of the transactions you're sharing with other partners. You can't know if 2 partners across the network, who'll route your Lightning transactions, have setup a turbo channel, one of which might rip the other off by double-spending.

But, why is this a bad thing? Shouldn't I only be aware of my partners' intentions? What two individuals do isn't my concern; I don't lose any funds if one of the two cheat the other. Whether they route my transactions or not.

there lays your deceptive mindset
you dont want others knowing your value so that you are not caught cheating your partner.
but here is the thing, majority of people do care that currency is accountable and unable to be double spent
although the nodes do broadcast TXID to announce channel. thus your privacy deception is defeated in the gossip stuff. there is no consensus code that all LN wallets have to abide by, that drops a channel from its routing table and refuses to treat them as a possible route/destination if the same txid is used in another channel.. thus a nafarious person can use the same 'lock' with multiple partners.. AKA FRACTIONAL RESERVE

i know people can steal value. so why would i put value into a channel with you.. i know 100% you would steal it.. yes you would, dont deny it. i know your game already. but thanks for the offer. but ill reject your offer to have my value lost to you.

Any idea of penalty transaction?

dont make me laugh.
those silly 'penalties' are broke. heck the LN devs are now trying to invent middlemen watch towers  so that you can pay a middleman to watch for broadcasts, because people have abused the current/old penalty scheme that required both parties to never sleep never be away from computer screen to hope to spot a broadcast.
there are other flaws in penalties too. so go research that.. and not from your fangirl friends but from the actual devs.
part of it is that channel partners cant broadcast to a network, they both have to agree and send through a middleman where the middleman does the broadcast to avoid individual broadcasts
(amungst many other things)

there are possible ways to achieve an effective way to deter cheating. but i am not going to help you altcoiners out.. if you lot cant figure it out, then let your network continue to fail

Interesting reply. LN already suffers from privacy issue as ip addresses of the seller or receiver is known.

If you don't want to reveal your IP, use an onion service. Most Lightning nodes I've seen use Tor.

goodluck with that in the very near future.
ALL 'routing' (aka currency transfer as a service for commission(MSB(money service business)) will require LN nodes to register as a MSB. just wait for the 'honeypot' traps agents set up to entrap certain nodes, while also refusing to partner with other nodes as they will be treated as unregistered services and avoided.
yep. goodluck setting up a channel with an exchange if your hiding behind proxies/tor and other things. and goodluck not getting caught if you try to offer DEX for fiat, because via the fiat side they will find you as the person doing wire transfers and having a tor node offering a financial service(msat routing).
and goodluck if your just a CEX customer wanting to convert your fiat in a CEX into LN msat in a tor hidden channel. the CEX will refuse to pay that tor channel
thus everyone would end up having to go public if they want to interact and receive funds from or to a service
where by trying to pretend to hide your location will work against you when trying to serve legitimate users. or get served by legitimate businesses

meanwhile bitcoin (yes the bitcoin network) can pay anyone and all they need is a bitcoin address.. no pre-planning how to stake funds across several channels to fund best chance of route. no need to pre-plan future spending to have to lock certain amounts. no need to negotiate or rely on the trust of partners to authorise payments or rely on legitimacy of oute options(or lack of). bit coin allows people to just pay anyone.
(and dont get me started on the limitation of how many people can connect to each other with the limits of the 20 hop and the under 500 possible promises issues.

LN is more flawed in many ways. its not a solution.

[BlackHatCoiner]

although the nodes do broadcast TXID to announce channel. thus your privacy deception is defeated in the gossip stuff.

Not the privacy of my micro-transactions that are onion-routed.

that drops a channel from its routing table and refuses to treat them as a possible route/destination if the same txid is used in another channel.. thus a nafarious person can use the same 'lock' with multiple partners.. AKA FRACTIONAL RESERVE

Could you explain me how's that possible? Can't you check that a Lightning nodes use a duplicate channel?

there are other flaws in penalties too. so go research that.. and not from your fangirl friends but from the actual devs.

I know there are flaws, but I don't consider this one. I'm normally running my own full node 24/7/365, checking the mempool in case someone cheats me.

but i am not going to help you altcoiners out..

Am I an altcoiner now?

ALL 'routing' (aka currency transfer as a service for commission(MSB(money service business)) will require LN nodes to register as a MSB. just wait for the 'honeypot' traps agents set up to entrap certain nodes, while also refusing to partner with other nodes as they will be treated as unregistered services and avoided.
yep. goodluck setting up a channel with an exchange if your hiding behind proxies/tor and other things. and goodluck not getting caught if you try to offer DEX for fiat, because via the fiat side they will find you as the person doing wire transfers and having a tor node offering a financial service(msat routing). [...]

I never said you can hide with it. I just said that it hides your IP address.

[franky1]

that drops a channel from its routing table and refuses to treat them as a possible route/destination if the same txid is used in another channel.. thus a nafarious person can use the same 'lock' with multiple partners.. AKA FRACTIONAL RESERVE

Could you explain me how's that possible? Can't you check that a Lightning nodes use a duplicate channel?

again there is no network wide consensus to enforce this check!!!!
thus guess what. people can make fake balance channels or many channels with the same utxo

also its not just about checking 1 node for its many channels.. to see if it has the same UTXO because a HUMAN can decide to 'sybil' many nodes and have them atleast 20 hops away from another node it owns. (outside the distance allowed in routing gossip) that way the partner(victim) again wont be checking the full network (yep another flaw) to even see the 'promised' utxo is not used elsewhere
there are many many many ways to cheat LN, and many flaws in LN that prevent those cheats being dealt with

again. its time you stop listening to your LN fangirl friends PR scripts. and start actually using LN as if you are critical bug finding/fixing and looking for flaws to fix, or speaking with devs about the actual issues you and your buddies should be aware of

you have spent too much time only learning the utopian fantasy stuff of positive PR spin of snake oil sales.
so now go spend some time learning about the risks and issues. if not for making others risk aware, but for your own regards to your own safety of joining partners that might secretly want to steal from you while they kiss your ass to sucker you into locking more value with them.

now go do some research

anyway folks. sorry for the interuption by the certain LN fangirl that plays dumb when they do know the available flaws he describes as features.. and earns the title of idiot by wanting to play the part of an idiot to avoid admitting he knows of the flaws.

i do occassionally act like he doesnt know the flaws(although this conversation with him is not the first). but thats more for the sake of other readers that might think he really is an idiot that doesnt know. so i pretend that im teaching him something new

but back to the topic.
LN is not the solution to the fee problem.
people in, for instance africa (min wage 20cent/hour) are not going to pre plan 6 months of spending. and then make 5 channels where they split up 6 months worth of spending into those channels for a weak hope of being able to make a possible future payments on a network that allows fractional reserving and balance stealing. where 6 months of spending is at risk, just for the hope of cheaper fee's
.. because the cost of setting up 5 channels to have a modecome of chance of reliable routes. is going to cost alot more in set up fee's than it costs for a few hours of real life wage..
EG if paypal said their fee's are 1cent to do paypal user to paypal user but it comes with a US $30(3x min wage) set up fee every 6 months. would you use it. . especially if your not even sure if all the people you desire to pay in the next few months are even paypal users
..or would you see what other payment methods have to offer.

they wont wont to have to keep having to open and close these channels(accounts) every one/two months either if they cant afford to lock up enough for lengthy 6-12 month spending plan timescale either, as the onchain fee's would ruin any net positive they can gain on any altnet.

the actual solution is to make bitcoin fee's cheaper and make bitcoin more accessible,
otherwise africans would prefer to use altcoins like LTC for the 'blockchain reserve' with cheap onchain fee's and then have LTC as the gateway blockchain to bridge to altnets. avoiding btc completely

..
eg ever noticed how although ethereums blockchain is bigger than bitcoin. no one is crying about the blocksize/blockchain length.. and yet ethereum is becoming more popular as a gateway blockchain to many altnets(NFT and such)

yep. FUD propaganda of "bitcoin shouldnt grow its blockchain size coz its 1990's dial up and computers cant handle it" is a dead argument.we are in 2022.. fibre and 5g exist.

ethereum has proven people dont care about stifling the blocksize.
ethereum is half the age but double the size and no one is crying that ethereum breaks their computer
the only reason certain people want bitcoin blockchain size halted and fee's to be made high is so they can advertise their crap-nets as solutions. again idiots. all they care about is profiting from off-ramping people into their risky and flawed altnets. its done out of greed

[TheGreatPython]

I guess average joes doesn't want to accept Bitcoin not because of the tx fees, but because they don't understand how to minimize Bitcoin tx fees as they might think it would be too complicated than using credit and debit cards which also has tx fee too.

Bitcoin is already a currency and at the same time a store of value.

The fact that bitcoin is volatile could be another big reason. Sure they could switch it as quickly as possible, and they could just let the buyer pay the fee and they could collect it as high as possible before they cash out and that would drop the tx fee issue and all of that. But at the same time, we are not going to be really worried about the situation because it is going to be volatile so that's the biggest trouble hence tx fee wouldn't be a big deal.

I personally would prefer if I could accept something like USDT or BUSD, which I dislike those but as a business I can't handle bitcoin in that situation. However, since I am just a freelancer and not a shop, I can accept bitcoin easily.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The fact that bitcoin is volatile could be another big reason.

So then the merchant can set up a process by which any bitcoin they receive is immediately converted to their fiat of choice. Or maybe a certain percentage is kept as bitcoin and a certain percentage is converted to fiat. Either way, the volatility can become a non-issue if the merchant desires.

I personally would prefer if I could accept something like USDT or BUSD

Centralized coins built on centralized fiat. All the risk of the altcoin scamming you or going bust (just look at Luna) along with all the downsides of rapidly inflationary fiat.

[larry_vw_1955]

Centralized coins built on centralized fiat. All the risk of the altcoin scamming you or going bust (just look at Luna) along with all the downsides of rapidly inflationary fiat.

Luna wasn't collateralized.  For every token there needs to be $1 in a bank account that they can prove.  That's the point of things like BUSD and USDC, etc. Tether is a little bit of a grey area but dyor and use what you think is best. or don't use ... as they say rapid inflationary fiat is better than no fiat at all just ask luna investors.

[Ale88]

In many poor countries people use cash as means of payment and no extra fees is levied. If each and every single transaction is levied fees, then people wont spend as much as they spend with cash. I mean if you even transfer from one wallet to another you are leived fees.

And in the rich countries now pretty much everyone uses credit cards to pays, and the commissions that the businesses pay to companies that process the transactions are way more expensive than bitcoin's fees right now since the get a fixed amount + a % of each transaction. Square for example takes $.10 + 2.6% per each transaction, I just sent a little payment in BTC and I paid a few cents, so less that the fix amount that a business would pay to Square, without considering the % of course.

[yazher]

Transaction fees don't matter when you have local exchanges in your country because they won't charge you any transaction fees as long as you are sending and receiving from the same local exchanges like ours. The good thing about it is you can also implement it in your stores and services because of these convenient features and some accept it as bus fare to promote the payment of bitcoins. There are lots of things to make it convenient just don't use the usual wallet you have because it would delay and probably you will gonna be stuck in the line which is really annoying.

[o_e_l_e_o]

as they say rapid inflationary fiat is better than no fiat at all just ask luna investors.

Sure, but rapidly inflationary fiat is also better than a shady, centralized, inadequately-collaterized altcoin based upon that rapidly inflationary fiat. Although I'd obviously prefer bitcoin, I'd much rather have plain old fiat over one of these fiat based altcoins every day of the week.

We know is Tether is fractional reserve. I haven't spent any time looking in to other centralized "stable" coins, but I doubt very much it is possible for you to independently verify that they are holding in reserve what they claim to be holding in reserve, not to mention these coins be seized out of your own wallets: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5204055.0

[larry_vw_1955]

Although I'd obviously prefer bitcoin, I'd much rather have plain old fiat over one of these fiat based altcoins every day of the week.

Me too but there are disadvantages to not using stablecoins for example you can't earn interest. Not sure if these places are sustainable but many of them paying 10% apr for holding something like usdc. Where can you get that with fiat with no risk?

We know is Tether is fractional reserve. I haven't spent any time looking in to other centralized "stable" coins, but I doubt very much it is possible for you to independently verify that they are holding in reserve what they claim to be holding in reserve, not to mention these coins be seized out of your own wallets: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5204055.0

USDC is fully backed by cash and short-dated U.S. government obligations, so that it is always redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars. Each month, we publish attestation reports by Grant Thornton regarding the reserve balances backing USDC. You can read that on their website.

If tether really is a fractional reserve then they can just get bitcoin for free. Mint tether, buy bitcoin, rinse and repeat.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Not sure if these places are sustainable but many of them paying 10% apr for holding something like usdc. Where can you get that with fiat with no risk?

But the 10% comes with a massive risk, far greater than the risk you take by holding fiat. When you hold a stablecoin, you assume all the risk of holding a centralized coin which can be seized out of your own wallet and could scam you, be hacked, or collapse at any time (as Luna just did), on top of all the risks of holding a rapidly inflationary fiat. If you think losing everything is worth 10% interest then go ahead, but the number of people who have lost everything by "investing" in similar altcoin scams is uncountable.

If tether really is a fractional reserve then they can just get bitcoin for free. Mint tether, buy bitcoin, rinse and repeat.

Correct. This is exactly what they do. Here are some relevant posts of mine examining the Tether fraud:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5129382.msg51051918#msg51051918
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5322147.msg56656992#msg56656992
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5279466.msg55352002#msg55352002

[larry_vw_1955]

But the 10% comes with a massive risk, far greater than the risk you take by holding fiat.

If you just withdraw interest earnings then it takes around 9 years to reach break even, just to get your money back. Everything after that is profit. So what you really doing is assuming nothing bad happens is you are betting that they will keep paying interest for 9 years. At least that long. If they don't pay for at least 9 years then you lost. That's how I look at it anyway.

When you hold a stablecoin, you assume all the risk of holding a centralized coin which can be seized out of your own wallet and could scam you, be hacked, or collapse at any time (as Luna just did), on top of all the risks of holding a rapidly inflationary fiat. If you think losing everything is worth 10% interest then go ahead, but the number of people who have lost everything by "investing" in similar altcoin scams is uncountable.

Well, I am not aware of any large scale seizure of usdc or gusd. neither had i heard of any largescale hack of them. how is usdc or gusd going to collapse if they are backed 1:1 with us dollar? you can lose everything by investing fiat into a scam. investing usdc or gusd into a scam is no different but usdc and gusd are about as solid as it gets when it comes to stablecoins. as far as i know. the main risk is going to be the company you give your stablecoin to. if they can't keep paying then that would be a problem. company's aren't like the government, they can't just print more money to pay their obligations.

If tether really is a fractional reserve then they can just get bitcoin for free. Mint tether, buy bitcoin, rinse and repeat.

Correct. This is exactly what they do. Here are some relevant posts of mine examining the Tether fraud:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5129382.msg51051918#msg51051918
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5322147.msg56656992#msg56656992
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5279466.msg55352002#msg55352002

so if they are minting tether out of thin air to buy bitcoin then they are just getting bitcoin for free. but someone has to pay the price. i wonder who that is.

[o_e_l_e_o]

So what you really doing is assuming nothing bad happens is you are betting that they will keep paying interest for 9 years.

That's a huge assumption to make, when you look at just how frequently altcoins come and go.

Well, I am not aware of any large scale seizure of usdc or gusd. neither had i heard of any largescale hack of them.

You can find such incidents with a simple web search, but even so, the fact remains that these coins are centralized and they can be frozen at any time. Justifying it by saying "Well, it hasn't happened yet" is the same as saying that it's safe to drive without a seat belt because I've done that before and I'm still alive. By using such coins, you do not have control over your money.

how is usdc or gusd going to collapse if they are backed 1:1 with us dollar?

Can you prove that?

but someone has to pay the price. i wonder who that is.

Users like yourself who end up holding bags of a worthless stablecoin when it collapses to zero.

To get back on topic, these are the reasons I would never accept such coins, regardless of the fees. If you can't pay me in Bitcoin (or Monero), then I'd much rather just have plain old fiat than a centralized fractional reserve scam built on top of fiat.

[sklopan]

It should be understood that the issue of taxes now is quite difficult and you need to be prepared for different options for solving problems.

[noormcs5]

It should be understood that the issue of taxes now is quite difficult and you need to be prepared for different options for solving problems.

Are you talking about the taxes or the transaction tx charges?

There should be no difficulty in collecting and calculating taxes when crypto is legalized. You will be taxed on the profit earned on your business and it does not matter if the mode of transactions will be crypto or fiat.

[Findingnemo]

It should be understood that the issue of taxes now is quite difficult and you need to be prepared for different options for solving problems.

Are you talking about the taxes or the transaction tx charges?

There should be no difficulty in collecting and calculating taxes when crypto is legalized. You will be taxed on the profit earned on your business and it does not matter if the mode of transactions will be crypto or fiat.

Well it depends on how the countries are regulating the assets, either they want to tax the profit or even for the capital but since we are talking about the mode of payment then we actually don't have taxes for fiat then it should be same for cryptocurrency as well.

[franky1]

Well, I am not aware of any large scale seizure of usdc or gusd. neither had i heard of any largescale hack of them.

You can find such incidents with a simple web search, but even so, the fact remains that these coins are centralized and they can be frozen at any time. Justifying it by saying "Well, it hasn't happened yet" is the same as saying that it's safe to drive without a seat belt because I've done that before and I'm still alive. By using such coins, you do not have control over your money.

how is usdc or gusd going to collapse if they are backed 1:1 with us dollar?

Can you prove that?

but someone has to pay the price. i wonder who that is.

Users like yourself who end up holding bags of a worthless stablecoin when it collapses to zero.

To get back on topic, these are the reasons I would never accept such coins, regardless of the fees. If you can't pay me in Bitcoin (or Monero), then I'd much rather just have plain old fiat than a centralized fractional reserve scam built on top of fiat.

quoting for historical sake. o_e_l_e_o knows why.
1. can you prove that all channel pegs are always, all, 100% backed by confirmed locked btc.
2. when it requires another party to sign.. are they really yours
(i did not mention certain network by name. nor mention anything but two simple questions)

[Jemzx00]

It should be understood that the issue of taxes now is quite difficult and you need to be prepared for different options for solving problems.

Are you talking about the taxes or the transaction tx charges?

There should be no difficulty in collecting and calculating taxes when crypto is legalized. You will be taxed on the profit earned on your business and it does not matter if the mode of transactions will be crypto or fiat.

Crypto taxation might be tricky in some point as if cause some confusion on identifying transaction if it's used for business transaction or a regular transfer transaction.

Anyways, the "tx" that the OP mentioned is not the same with taxes but rather it is short for Transaction. About that, I guess I somehow agree that it will be hard for an average joe to use Bitcoin as a currency itself due to transaction delays, fee and many more. However, I think other crypto such as stable coins might be a possible as transaction fee and delays are much more lower and faster with those.

[rby]

You keep your fiat money in your "wallet". There is a chance you can get robbed on the street or lose your wallet. Does that mean you will stop using your fiat money? You have to keep your wallet safe. The same way, you have to protect your crypto wallet. If you follow the basic security steps and don't be stupid, no once can hack your wallet. If you store your crypto wallet properly and back up all the required things, you won't lose your wallet.

Very cool instance that you brought here. People die in rood accidents and it doesn't stop people from using road again. The best is to learn how to secure your coins and then will be safe.
But the problem we have is that we have so much trusted our fellow men to secure our money for us. So it is as if we cannot secure it ourselves again.
Bitcoin is a good opportunity to reclaim our lost freedom.

[coolcoinz]

Bitcoin may be accepted as an alternative means of payment without any problems. Say you run an online store. If someone pays with bitcoin and you don't want to hold it, you can use services that automatically convert to your fiat of choice. You don't lose anything and get more sales. If they choose to pay with fiat that's also fine. You always win. Why not give yourself that additional 1% in sales from bitcoiners? If your revenue is 100k a year, that's 1k USD for free.

[uneng]

Transaction fees don't matter when you have local exchanges in your country because they won't charge you any transaction fees as long as you are sending and receiving from the same local exchanges like ours. The good thing about it is you can also implement it in your stores and services because of these convenient features and some accept it as bus fare to promote the payment of bitcoins. There are lots of things to make it convenient just don't use the usual wallet you have because it would delay and probably you will gonna be stuck in the line which is really annoying.

That is one possible solution for the issue presented by OP. Furthermore, there are websites dealing with bitcoin which don't charge expensive fees, because they are used to send large batches of transactions all day long and there is also the possibility to choose between fast or slow transaction speed. The second option demands cheaper fees. Perfect for those who don't want to spend too much and aren't in a hurry to complete their transactions.

About the hacking issue, there are many security mechanisms used nowadays to prevent this. Strong passwords containing letters - numbers - symbols, 2fa, deactivated withdrawal (until the setting is changed by the user, what takes few days to be done)... And in case of typing the receiver address wrongly, the person can always save an address on his favorites, so he just copy and paste it. After doing this few times there are no mistakes. But of course attention is always a must.

[BlackHatCoiner]

1. can you prove that all channel pegs are always, all, 100% backed by confirmed locked btc.

If I only choose to transact with people who provide me a digital signature that says they do, then yeah. I can prove that all channels are pegged with BTC. Some network, whose name's out my mind at the moment, does it using the channel_announcement message.

2. when it requires another party to sign.. are they really yours

If you can return to the chain without their permission, since you'll have had their digital signature beforehand, yeah, they're yours.

[larry_vw_1955]

So what you really doing is assuming nothing bad happens is you are betting that they will keep paying interest for 9 years.

That's a huge assumption to make, when you look at just how frequently altcoins come and go.

collateralized stablecoins don't come and go all that frequently. not things like usdc and gusd. but i know you disagree they are collateralized 1:1. i don't think the "huge assumption" has anything to do with whether those coins will be here in 9 years. the huge assumption is about the business that is paying 10% on the usdc.

Well, I am not aware of any large scale seizure of usdc or gusd. neither had i heard of any largescale hack of them.

You can find such incidents with a simple web search, but even so, the fact remains that these coins are centralized and they can be frozen at any time. Justifying it by saying "Well, it hasn't happened yet" is the same as saying that it's safe to drive without a seat belt because I've done that before and I'm still alive. By using such coins, you do not have control over your money.

well i saw some place requring kyc for trading usdc. usdc is real money i guess. different than bitcoin. your fiat can be frozen too by a bank if they suspect something. same issue. but you still use a bank for storing fiat. go into any bank and deposit more than $5000. you might get your bank account frozen while they investigate it for money laundering. if you're ok with that and have nothing to hide then you're good to go.

how is usdc or gusd going to collapse if they are backed 1:1 with us dollar?

Can you prove that?

I can prove it for GUSD.

GUSD is audited on a monthly basis by BPM, a private and independent accounting firm that ensures there is parity between the amount of USD in reserve and the amount of GUSD in circulation.

but someone has to pay the price. i wonder who that is.

Users like yourself who end up holding bags of a worthless stablecoin when it collapses to zero.

Maybe. But I think it hurts bitcoin users even more since it artificially inflates the price of bitcoin to be buying it with fake money. Then when everyone realizes it is fake money, the bitcoin price takes a tumble. Because there really wasn't that much demand to begin with. it was fake demand. And with all the fake demand gone, there's nothing left to prop up the bitcoin price.

To get back on topic, these are the reasons I would never accept such coins, regardless of the fees. If you can't pay me in Bitcoin (or Monero), then I'd much rather just have plain old fiat than a centralized fractional reserve scam built on top of fiat.

you can always convert your usdc or whatnot into fiat. immediately. transaction fees for stablecoins i think are really bad so i don't know why anyone would use them for paying anyone anyway. the only use of them is for earning interest. but there's a risk of doing that as we already mentioned.

[o_e_l_e_o]

collateralized stablecoins don't come and go all that frequently. not things like usdc and gusd. but i know you disagree they are collateralized 1:1. i don't think the "huge assumption" has anything to do with whether those coins will be here in 9 years. the huge assumption is about the business that is paying 10% on the usdc.

These coins have both existed for 3 years. Assuming that they will still exist in 9 years is a indeed a huge assumption. I would bet most people couldn't even name a single altcoin or a single exchange which was operating 9 years ago.

your fiat can be frozen too by a bank if they suspect something. same issue.

Exactly my point. If I use fiat, then the bank can freeze the fiat. If I use a centralized stablecoin, then the bank can freeze the fiat AND the stablecoin issuer can freeze the stablecoin. Additional risk. If I use fiat and my bank goes bankrupt, then my fiat is protected by the FDIC. If I use a stablecoin and my stablecoin issuer goes bankrupt, then I lose everything. It's all additional risk.

I can prove it for GUSD.

Two things. Firstly, that's not proof. That's trusting that what you are being told is true. This is fundamentally different from bitcoin. I can run a bitcoin node and absolutely verify for myself the exact number of bitcoin in circulation and where every single last satoshi is. With a centralized stablecoin, you can only choose to believe what you are being told.

Secondly, Gemini admit that this money is being held in money market funds. Money market funds invest in commercial paper. Commercial paper is an unsecured IOU. This is absolutely not the same as GUSD being backed up 1-to-1 with USD. It is a risk that every GUSD holder bears, all so Gemini can use your money to invest and make themselves more profit. You shoulder the risk, they take the profits.

And with all the fake demand gone, there's nothing left to prop up the bitcoin price.

And yet, the fundamentals of bitcoin will not change. The price may take a hit, yes, but it will recover. And bitcoin will continue to function just fine, as it did for years before stablecoins even existed.

[larry_vw_1955]

collateralized stablecoins don't come and go all that frequently. not things like usdc and gusd. but i know you disagree they are collateralized 1:1. i don't think the "huge assumption" has anything to do with whether those coins will be here in 9 years. the huge assumption is about the business that is paying 10% on the usdc.

These coins have both existed for 3 years. Assuming that they will still exist in 9 years is a indeed a huge assumption. I would bet most people couldn't even name a single altcoin or a single exchange which was operating 9 years ago.

well put it this way if you wanted to bet me at 50:50 odds i would take that bet all day long that gusd will be here in 9 years. or usdc. take your pick. in 100 years though that's different. they might be done stick a fork in it by then.

your fiat can be frozen too by a bank if they suspect something. same issue.

Exactly my point. If I use fiat, then the bank can freeze the fiat. If I use a centralized stablecoin, then the bank can freeze the fiat AND the stablecoin issuer can freeze the stablecoin. Additional risk. If I use fiat and my bank goes bankrupt, then my fiat is protected by the FDIC. If I use a stablecoin and my stablecoin issuer goes bankrupt, then I lose everything. It's all additional risk.

Well, I think eventually we will see some stablecoin being FDIC insured. For example something like USDF:https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2022/01/13/fdic-still-unclear-if-usdf-stablecoin-is-fdic-insured/

Something like that would be even better than things like usdc and gusd.

I can prove it for GUSD.

Two things. Firstly, that's not proof. That's trusting that what you are being told is true. This is fundamentally different from bitcoin. I can run a bitcoin node and absolutely verify for myself the exact number of bitcoin in circulation and where every single last satoshi is. With a centralized stablecoin, you can only choose to believe what you are being told.

You can verify alot of things about GUSD. For example: https://etherscan.io/token/0x056fd409e1d7a124bd7017459dfea2f387b6d5cd

it will show you all the transactions using gusd. you can also see the "Circulating Supply Market Cap" if you're interested in how many gusd there are in existence. the only thing you can't see is how many us dollars they have backing all of that up. for that you have to go to their bank and ask to see the bank statement showing how many us dollars they have on reserve. Compare those two things and see if they are equal. If so then that means things are running how they are supposed to. now the thing is, i don't know if you can just go to their bank but as I already mentioned, they have an accounting firm that does. so you don't have to. but if you wanted to, maybe you could.

the thing is though. even if everything checks out, you don't have any guarantee that when you go to hand in your gusd and get usd that they will agree to do that for you. you have to trust. have faith. they got you by the balls type of thing. that's how all crypto is though. wanna sell btc or monero? find an exchange you trust to give you usd when you hand them your crypto first.

Secondly, Gemini admit that this money is being held in money market funds. Money market funds invest in commercial paper. Commercial paper is an unsecured IOU. This is absolutely not the same as GUSD being backed up 1-to-1 with USD. It is a risk that every GUSD holder bears, all so Gemini can use your money to invest and make themselves more profit. You shoulder the risk, they take the profits.

Well their website makes it sound different though:

The Gemini Dollar is fully backed at a one-to-one ratio with the U.S. dollar. The number of Gemini dollar tokens in circulation is equal to the number of U.S. dollars held at a bank in the United States, and the system is insured with pass-through FDIC deposit insurance as a preventative measure against money laundering, theft, and other illicit activities.

If someone buys gusd to try and get paid 7% apy from gemini then they should realize that gemini can't just let their deposit sit there collecting dust. they have to use it to generate return. that involves taking risk. risk involves the posibility for loss. you  can't shed a tear for someone in that situation if things go sour. they gambled and lost.

if someone buys gusd just to have something tied to the usd in value without trying to earn interest with it then i would hope that gemini wouldn't be risking their money. and have it sitting nice and tidy in a bank account somewhere in greenbacks. ready to be redeemed whenever they want it.

[witcher_sense]

Bitcoin may be accepted as an alternative means of payment without any problems. Say you run an online store. If someone pays with bitcoin and you don't want to hold it, you can use services that automatically convert to your fiat of choice. You don't lose anything and get more sales. If they choose to pay with fiat that's also fine. You always win. Why not give yourself that additional 1% in sales from bitcoiners? If your revenue is 100k a year, that's 1k USD for free.

The problem with bitcoin is that it is not "a means of payment" but an independent, naturally-emerged medium of exchange with an in-built final settlement mechanism. There is a distinct difference between "means of payment" and "medium of exchange, which many people don't fully understand. A means of payment is a way to transfer the medium of exchange. For example, PayPal facilitates exchanges in dollars and other local currencies. PayPal is a means to transfer a medium of exchange - the dollar. Bitcoin and satoshi are a medium of exchange, while Lightning Network is one of the means to transfer bitcoin from one person to another. When a person runs an online store, he adds different means of payment to expand the clientele, but these means of payment may include different media of exchange. For example, PayPal offers transfers in fiat currencies as well as cryptocurrencies.

Well, I think eventually we will see some stablecoin being FDIC insured.

We already have such a stablecoin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi But it doesn't solve any problems inherent to fiat currency.

[Betwrong]

collateralized stablecoins don't come and go all that frequently. not things like usdc and gusd. but i know you disagree they are collateralized 1:1. i don't think the "huge assumption" has anything to do with whether those coins will be here in 9 years. the huge assumption is about the business that is paying 10% on the usdc.

These coins have both existed for 3 years. Assuming that they will still exist in 9 years is a indeed a huge assumption. I would bet most people couldn't even name a single altcoin or a single exchange which was operating 9 years ago.

well put it this way if you wanted to bet me at 50:50 odds i would take that bet all day long that gusd will be here in 9 years. or usdc. take your pick. in 100 years though that's different. they might be done stick a fork in it by then.
~

When saying "in 9 years" you don't mean just a time span of 9 years, right, just like any other 9 years in human history during which we more or less know what happened, right? Imo, the 9 years we have ahead of us can be so different, technologically and economically wise, from what we've seen before that we can't extrapolate our knowledge of market in the past to the future 9 years. So, no one knows for sure, but imo the probability of BTC staying here and stable coins like GUSD vanishing is high because(again, it's only my opinion) ... because Bitcoin is revolutionary money, the technology that is yet to be understood by most people, while stable coins is rather an attempt to return back to the old road.

[o_e_l_e_o]

the only thing you can't see is how many us dollars they have backing all of that up.

Which is the only thing that matters.

for that you have to go to their bank and ask to see the bank statement showing how many us dollars they have on reserve. Compare those two things and see if they are equal. If so then that means things are running how they are supposed to. now the thing is, i don't know if you can just go to their bank but as I already mentioned, they have an accounting firm that does. so you don't have to. but if you wanted to, maybe you could.

And trust what their bank say. And trust what their accounting firm say. It all comes down to trust. With bitcoin you don't have to trust - you can verify.

that's how all crypto is though. wanna sell btc or monero? find an exchange you trust to give you usd when you hand them your crypto first.

That's not accurate. I've traded both bitcoin and monero for years, hundreds of times, and never once had to have any trust in an exchange whatsoever because I trade exclusively peer to peer. And even so, the trust in such a case is trust of the centralized third party exchange you are using, and not trust in bitcoin. With a stablecoin, you must very much trust the actual coin itself in addition to whichever exchange you are using.

Well their website makes it sound different though:

It says this:

Each GUSD corresponds to a U.S. dollar held by Gemini in accounts at U.S. FDIC-insured bank accounts and money market funds holding short-term U.S. treasury bonds and maintained at a custodian. The cash portion of these GUSD reserves may be eligible for FDIC “pass through” insurance for Gemini customers, in the event of the failure of a bank holding the U.S. dollar deposit portion of the GUSD reserves.

Freely admitting that GUSD reserves are not all held in cash, some are risked on commercial paper and held with third parties.

they have to use it to generate return. that involves taking risk. risk involves the posibility for loss.

And if stablecoin issuers were open, honest, and up front about that risk, then I'd not have so many issues with them. But they aren't. They gamble your funds for their own profits.

if someone buys gusd just to have something tied to the usd in value without trying to earn interest with it then i would hope that gemini wouldn't be risking their money. and have it sitting nice and tidy in a bank account somewhere in greenbacks. ready to be redeemed whenever they want it.

There is absolutely no way that Gemini make that distinction.

[larry_vw_1955]

Well, I think eventually we will see some stablecoin being FDIC insured.

We already have such a stablecoin https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_renminbi But it doesn't solve any problems inherent to fiat currency.

Whatever that thing is, I know it has nothing to do with the united states or FDIC lol. But from the brief description on wikipedia i don't think i would trust it further than i could throw it.

When saying "in 9 years" you don't mean just a time span of 9 years, right, just like any other 9 years in human history during which we more or less know what happened, right? Imo, the 9 years we have ahead of us can be so different, technologically and economically wise, from what we've seen before that we can't extrapolate our knowledge of market in the past to the future 9 years.

yep things do change dramatically in the crypto space in just a short time period but things like usdc and gusd become part of the underlying operating infrastructure for the crypto market so i dont expect them to go anywhere in the next 25 years. especially usdc. 25 years is something i wouldn't bet on though.

So, no one knows for sure, but imo the probability of BTC staying here and stable coins like GUSD vanishing is high because(again, it's only my opinion) ... because Bitcoin is revolutionary money, the technology that is yet to be understood by most people, while stable coins is rather an attempt to return back to the old road.

bitcoin will outlast any centralized stablecoin because bitcoin doesn't rely on a single company to operate. stablecoins do. eventually usdc and gusd will lose market share to something else and after that they might go away completely. at some point. but not in the next 9 years. thats my take on it.

That's not accurate. I've traded both bitcoin and monero for years, hundreds of times, and never once had to have any trust in an exchange whatsoever because I trade exclusively peer to peer.

if that's true then that's very cool. i think that's how bitcoin was supposed to be. trading person to person. but then companies took over and created online everything and put people at their mercy.

And trust what their bank say. And trust what their accounting firm say. It all comes down to trust. With bitcoin you don't have to trust - you can verify.

Well bitcoin and centralized stablecoins are 2 different beasts. As we saw with UST, making a truly decentralized stablecoin is not so simple. Things can fail catastrophically. DAI is a decentralized stablecoin though that seems to have been around for quite some time.

Quote from: https://www.gemini.com/dollar
Each GUSD corresponds to a U.S. dollar held by Gemini in accounts at U.S. FDIC-insured bank accounts and money market funds holding short-term U.S. treasury bonds and maintained at a custodian. The cash portion of these GUSD reserves may be eligible for FDIC “pass through” insurance for Gemini customers, in the event of the failure of a bank holding the U.S. dollar deposit portion of the GUSD reserves.

Freely admitting that GUSD reserves are not all held in cash, some are risked on commercial paper and held with third parties.

It's not just any commercial paper. It's us government short term treasury bonds. big difference. I would think that short term us treasury bonds are probably pretty safe and we won't be seeing a default on them. If that happens then there are big problems with the economy and people will have bigger problems than not being able to redeem their gusd. But if gemini is not the holder of the treasury bonds and they are just trusting some 3rd party to invest into treasury bonds via some money market setup then that would introduce more points of failure.

And if stablecoin issuers were open, honest, and up front about that risk, then I'd not have so many issues with them. But they aren't. They gamble your funds for their own profits.

if you can read then gemini has the warning posted before you invest with them to get 7% that it is not an insured investment. how much clearer could they be? but i guess not everyone knows how to read or does read terms and conditions. you have to do that when its your money though. don't like the terms and conditions? then don't invest. no one is twisting anyone's arm to get them to invest either.

There is absolutely no way that Gemini make that distinction.

I'm sure they could make the distinction but whether they do or not I have no idea. that's called doing your due diligence. you do that before you give them your money. if you don't like what you hear then you saved yourself from being involved in something you wouldn't feel comfortable with. now with that said, one thing i am not impressed with gemini is you can't just pick up a phone and talk to someone. for me, that's an important thing to being able to ask anything i want and get all my questions answered. can't do that with them.

[noormcs5]

Bitcoin may be accepted as an alternative means of payment without any problems. Say you run an online store. If someone pays with bitcoin and you don't want to hold it, you can use services that automatically convert to your fiat of choice. You don't lose anything and get more sales. If they choose to pay with fiat that's also fine. You always win. Why not give yourself that additional 1% in sales from bitcoiners? If your revenue is 100k a year, that's 1k USD for free.

Yes, this model works only if crypto is legal in your country/area otherwise it may put you in more trouble. However, i also like that bitcoin is legalized everywhere and we get the option of payments in crypto along with fiat. Could we see that 100% transformation of fiat to digital currency in near future?

[franky1]

1. can you prove that all channel pegs are always, all, 100% backed by confirmed locked btc.

If I only choose to transact with people who provide me a digital signature that says they do, then yeah. I can prove that all channels are pegged with BTC. Some network, whose name's out my mind at the moment, does it using the channel_announcement message.

2. when it requires another party to sign.. are they really yours

If you can return to the chain without their permission, since you'll have had their digital signature beforehand, yeah, they're yours.

gonna laugh..

1. channel announce just tells you an ID..
     a. even bolts says that this ID can be a temp ID
     b. if using a phone* litewallets dont have the blockchain to compare it.
     c. need we forget that even turbo announces channels
     d. even the gossip protocol of building the routing map at your node side, does not include code to ensure all nodes and all channels listed on the routing map are checked against the blockchain.

oops. didnt any of your buddies that care so much about you tell you about these flaws.. aww

yes you might personally want to manually check using a different node to the phone wallet majority use*, but i dare you to try to find the page/option in most used wallets that list all the channels txids and show that they are all verified confirmed bitcoin transactions.. without having to manually check each one yourself via other means

*(no one carries their desktop to starbucks)

2. "had their digital signature before-hand"... you should have thought hard and long about how im going to debunk this
hint: how did you get their "beforehand signature".. oh yea they authorised it..
i love how you want to skip passed step 2 and only want to envision a scenario beginning at step 5 to not answer a step 2 question

so again if it requires someone elses signature it requires their authorisation..
stop using an example where after they authorised it that its (in your mind) permissionless and realise the authorisation/permission step before your dream begins

EG the initial deposit into the multisig address.. after the transfer in. but before the commitment signing.. .. yep you have risk. the funds cant go back to you unless they sign.

[BlackHatCoiner]

yep things do change dramatically in the crypto space in just a short time period but things like usdc and gusd become part of the underlying operating infrastructure for the crypto market so i dont expect them to go anywhere in the next 25 years. especially usdc. 25 years is something i wouldn't bet on though.

"Stable coins" are the scamming part of the crypto space, because there's nothing stable to begin with; let alone decentralized and censorship resistant. Hold a stable coin and you have to trust the company that's responsible for their issuance and the monetary policy of the government that issues the currency the stable coin is "pegged to". Completely opaque and pointless.

1. channel announce just tells you an ID..

The channel announcement message contains the funding transaction of the two nodes, a proof that the one node owns their key, another proof that the other node also owns their key, three of which are enough to verify they have coins in reserve.

hint: how did you get their "beforehand signature".. oh yea they authorised it..

The node, I deposit, constructed and gave me the signed closing-channel transaction that spends outputs that haven't yet been published. That's what I mean "beforehand"; before I even pay them, they've given me the right to take my money back.


If you want to continue this, use your thread and don't derail this.

[BITCOIN4X]

Yes, this model works only if crypto is legal in your country/area otherwise it may put you in more trouble. However, i also like that bitcoin is legalized everywhere and we get the option of payments in crypto along with fiat. Could we see that 100% transformation of fiat to digital currency in near future?

I have asked several people if it is possible for them to adopt bitcoin as a means of payment in their shop or service. I tried to explain how it could work so well and what scenarios would be good to make a profit with it, but none of them were interested in adopting it regardless of whether the government had not or had legalized it as a means of payment.

In addition to transaction fees and price volatility, the imposition of taxes by local governments for swap-to-fiat transactions on exchanges has discouraged them from adopting bitcoin. There is an additional fee for each item if someone wants to adopt bitcoin in their shop, because if they don't then I'm sure they will lose because of the tax obligations they have to bear.

[franky1]

In addition to transaction fees and price volatility, the imposition of taxes by local governments for swap-to-fiat transactions on exchanges has discouraged them from adopting bitcoin. There is an additional fee for each item if someone wants to adopt bitcoin in their shop, because if they don't then I'm sure they will lose because of the tax obligations they have to bear.

thats where you need to look at what services are available in your area.
if its just a exchange order market as the only converters. then yes that business would be seen as being an investor of a currency and have to declare such

however if there is a payment processor (no public market orderbook) which offers shopping cart options, where the total price of sale includes the currency conversion commission which the customer pays the extra then that is declared the same way as having a shopify or other merchant tools platform like accepting credit cards. which is not treated as an investment in alternative currency.
EG as a customer when i buy something internationally my receipt/bank statement shows 2 lines. one for the sale and one for the currency conversion. thus the business isnt paying for conversion. but they receive the native fiat they want

many businesses operating internationally that have sites that accept different countries fiat use shopping cart/card processing services. where the exchange to the end recipients native fiat is done on the customer/service side and the end business just gets their native fiat thus avoids all the taxes and duties of international tax stuff.

fiat is fiat. and what becomes important is not the receipt of fiat. but what the service does that sent you that fiat.
in short its very difficult to explain to a tax office that a receipt of fiat from a crypto service is just payment for goods if that service is not a merchant tools service and instead only offers currency swaps/investments.

for instance
many businesses in the US get fiat from coinbase and from bitpay. roughly the same volume each week.. but because it comes from different services its treated differently for tax reasons

EG you personally could get $1k from a relative, $1k from your employer, $1k from a retailer, $1k from government social security, $1k from an exchange and $1k from a merchant tools site

the $1k from relative is treated as 'gift'/personal loan (no tax)
the $1k from employer is treated as 'income' (income taxed)
the $1k from retailer is treated as 'refund' (untaxed)
the $1k from social security is treated as 'social benefits' (untaxed)
the $1k from exchange is treated as 'investment' (capital gains taxed)
the $1k from merchant tools is treated as 'business sales income' (sales/vat taxed)

where they all have totally different tax categories, even when its the same value being received