Hacker News Reader

Comment by crispytx | Hacker News Reader

I bought some Bitcoin for a family member as a gag gift recently thinking we could have some fun paying each other with Bitcoin for little things like household chores and whatnot. This was my first time using Bitcoin, and I was shocked to learn that it costs roughly $5 worth of Bitcoin to make a single transaction using Bitcoin! The fee is known as a "Bitcoin mining fee." I'm an open minded person and honestly believe d that Bitcoin might work prior to actually using it. However, after discovering the actual cost of using Bitcoin, it is clearly inferior to US Dollars in every way. Bitcoin is a scam, block chain is all hype, and everyone involved with Cryptomania is going to look silly when the music stops and someone has to eat the soggy biscuit.

View on HN

I feel it's necessary to point out some problems with your argument here. "I'm an open minded person and honestly believe d that Bitcoin might work prior to actually using it." First of all, it seems kinda strange to me that you say you believed Bitcoin would work, without even using it. So you made an approximation of the technologies value before using it. Then, after using it once, you then totally changed positions. This hardly seems like a decent analysis of the situation, and I think you should probably do some more reading and learning.

Number 2, writing off an asset, and furthermore, an entire asset class based on one instance of a transaction fee (a problem that is being actively worked on, might I add) is lazy and dangerous, to conflate this to "it is clearly inferior to US Dollars in every way. Bitcoin is a scam, block chain is all hype, and everyone involved with Cryptomania is going to look silly when the music stops and someone has to eat the soggy biscuit" is ridiculous and you haven't made any decent points. Your entire argument is based on conjecture and no technical information.

Do yourself a favour next time you decide to shoot Bitcoin and Crytpocurrency down, ask yourself if you've actually done due diligence on your opinion, or if you've settled for the lazy option.

PS: If you are that disgruntled, you're welcome to submit PRs.

I'm not sure your comment comes off in the way you think it does. While the parent didn't do much research you have to understand that if bitcoin is going to become bigger you're going to get an overwhelming amount of people using it without understanding it at all (in fact it's probably at about that level now; anecdotally I don't know a single person who both owns bitcoin and understands why / how it works and what's up with the transaction fee).

Instead of coming off as condescending with a simple beratement of their first impression of using a cryptocurrency, why not try to use this as a teaching moment and say "hey, that sucks and I know it's confusing. The mining fee is actually because of X but we're working to make that not necessary / lower through Y".

If those of us in the tech industry want bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to grow and prosper we can't just tell people they're dumb and to submit PRs if they don't like anything. This only reinforces their poor first impression and lacks empathy.

Cheers for the comment. And I appreciate the points you made, in all fairness I did mean to reply back and try and actually provide some level of explanation.

And you know man, I do understand that first problem, I actually went around my local city talking to business owners about their lack of understanding/knowledge of Bitcoin a while ago and tbh it struck me entirely as a communication/uptake problem. You are right though, I did come off obnoxious and you're also right in saying that it's not the right way to go about it.

Cheers for the reality check.

Sounds good, mate :)

Maybe if the community can fix the Bitcoin mining fee problem it will work. But if they can't get the mining fee down to like 30 cents per transaction like with square or stripe, the overwhelming majority of people aren't going to want to use it.

And to be specific, I used Coinbase to purchase my Bitcoin and then transferred it to an Electrum wallet and then to another wallet.

People have told me that you don't have to pay the $5 mining fee, but I did not see an option anywhere with those two wallets to avoid or substantially reduce the mining fee.

Eyo, sorry for the delay on this reply. I agree wholeheartedly with everything you said, and didn't mean to come off too aggressive with my first comment, even though I probably did. There is a lot of bullshit going around these days around Bitcoin and Crypto, and sometimes it can be pretty grinding to see "big media" out-and-out gunning it down without exposing their true intentions and who it is that they're backing with their comments. Either way, this isn't your fault. So I apologise for coming off aggro.

The transaction fee thing is a problem many people, in particular new users notice, and it's on the forefront of issues being solved by the community right now. In regards to your comments on 30 cent transaction costs, from what I understand, they are indeed on the path to this. If you are interested in seeing what this will look/feel like, buy a small amount of LTC, and send it to another wallet. I had many of the same issues you had with Bitcoin a few months ago, but as soon as I gave LTC a go I was blown away. This, for all intents and purposes, is what the BTC Core team intends to bring to Bitcoin. To give you an idea, transactions cost 2c on the LTC network, with a max time to completion of 2.5 minutes. When you first experience this, it's a great feeling.

Coinbase is always gonna be tricky, their transaction costs for buying BTC are, to put it bluntly, fucking horrendous.

In regards to your comments on not having to pay the fee, there are some wallets that allow you to pick the priority of your transaction, one that springs to mind is IndieSquare Wallet. Bear in mind this will affect the way your transaction goes through, speed wise.

Hope I actually answered your questions on this, sorry for my intial comment. If you have any more q's, just holla. I can either answer them, or get someone with more knowledge than I to answer them.

However, in the interest of getting you to fall in love with Crypto, please, buy a small amount of LTC, transfer it, pay the fractional charges and be blown away. If you aren't impressed by it, I will be surprised.

The community is working hard to fix these problems. You should realize however that alternative currencies charge far less, and a large reason for Bitcoins relative adoption is first movers advantage. With, say, Ethereum you'd be paying far less tx fees.

Also, how long would it take you to send money between the EU and USA? With Bitcoin it's pretty much instantly with only a flat $5-ish fee. Centralized options such as Paypal or Western Union are far inferior in this use case.

It's sad you're being downvoted. You're totally right. The issue is that the main Bitcoin community is insisting on keeping the blocks to 1MB every 10 minutes. They are doing this with the promise that one day, they'll have whizbang technology to do a million transactions a second for cheap. They're even calling Bitcoin a "settlement layer" or "layer 1" or just "store of value". Instead of a peer to peer cash system. Some such supporters have expressed interest in seeing the fees hit $100 or $1000, saying such fees would "indicate success".

I didn't particularly care before, but the more and more I've read, the less sense it makes. At this point, almost all miners (people running the equipment that keeps the network safe and operational) have decided to switch to larger blocks, "hard forking". This will be fun to watch. The "core" people are insisting the miners rebrand and break backwards compatibility so it doesn't hurt their main, small block chain.

That's not to say these other solutions are terrible, when they end up existing. But artificially restricting Bitcoin and driving up fees while slowing transactions down seems basically petty at this point.

That's not true, it doesn't cost $5 to make a single transaction (unless your chores are really, really expensive). Mining fees are optional, although if you don't pay it, miners don't need to accept your transaction. Basically, you're paying for miners to do the work necessary as an incentive (much like you'd pay Visa or Mastercard).

It is essentially true though because your transaction almost definitely won't make it into the next block unless you offer around $5 worth of Bitcoin... This means you may have to wait a very long time for the transaction to go through.

Bitcoin transfers are slow and expensive so it only makes sense for large transactions. For small transfers you should use a different altcoins.

You can make Ethereum transactions for a few cents that take only about a minute or less to complete. There's also a lot more you can do with them than just transfer them around.

    $5 worth of Bitcoin to make a single transaction using Bitcoin!

Fees will come down with Bitcoin based LN or another network like Ethereum. Give it time this is still early days.

    it is clearly inferior to US Dollars in every way.

This is categorically false. For some tasks US dollars are great but a lot of people are into BTC for the whole decentralized store of value thing. And honestly it does "decentralized trust" pretty well.

    Bitcoin is a scam, block chain is all hype, and everyone involved
    with Cryptomania is going to look silly when the music stops and
    someone has to eat the soggy biscuit.

This is a bit of a leap isn't it?

Here is an idea for your chores, make your own family coin on Ethereum, make an exchange rate that the family pays to the kids, etc.. (1 family coin for $1) then you now have a decentralized home currency that will cost a few cents to move.

Or if you're not interested in a funky project like that, just use Ethereum for now instead of BTC for micro transactions. I regularly pay 5 cents to move money around in Ethereum.

I do believe both BTC and ETH have bright futures.

Bitcoin has been around for years. When does LN launch? The block size has been kept small for years past reasonability. Now we have segwit, so where's LN?

The Macbook costs $2500. Oh, it is a Scam.

Just because something is expensive, doesn't make it a scam. It is also important to note that Bitcoin is a free market. Unlike Apple which sets the prices of a Macbook, demand set the price for the bitcoin blockchain space.

Why did you assume that bitcoin transactions are free? or should be free?

Don't blame him for Bitcoins ridiculous fees. Hard to pitch a peer to peer electronic cash system that costs $5. And don't blame him for buying into the online hype. Reading around, if you're not careful, one might even think LN is usable.

> Hard to pitch a peer to peer electronic cash system that costs $5.

Eh, maybe it means the p2p electronic cash doesn't need pitching. It is already there and successful.

People talk about bitcoin like it needs to be cheap, solve a problem, be non-volatile. The truth is, the crypto market is $100bn+ big and doesn't seem to care much.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com