Due to Bitcoin network fees, customer loses $10 trying to buy $25 game on Steam
reddit.com
reddit.com
Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1 minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.
You mean... like this? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident
> The bad transaction no longer exists for people using the longest chain. Therefore, the bitcoins created by it do not exist either. While the transaction does not exist anymore, the 0.5 BTC that was consumed by it does. It appears to have come from a faucet and has not been used since.[7]
Wait... so if you wait long enough then old transactions disappear ? I thought the whole blockchain could allow anyone to track every transactions ?
This is not true at all. On the last 10 blocks (495808-495817, ~6000 seconds) there were 22,277 txns and 49,746 txn inputs. That means a full node needs to look up on average only 8.3 inputs per second in the UTXO database. Assuming 1 I/O per lookup, that's 8 IOPS, which is a trivial workload, even on a non-SSD setup.
I am the author of this blog.zorinaq.com post and I can assure you the real-world I/O workload I see on this $5/month node is negligible.
Is anyone even actually doing that? Even several years ago when I last did it, the blockchain was 60+GB (now it's more than twice that) and you were never, ever going to get anything out of it other than heating the room up.
The way I thought most people were going was using something like Electrum, where you still have your own private wallet that nobody else controls, but you're not yourself a full node.
You don't even do anything with most of the DB once you have it.
That is false. There were even rollbacks in the early days. Don’t talk about a subject you haven’t personally experienced or taken the time to research.
> increase the block size, but unfortunately Bitcoin Core developers refuse to do it
This is simply untrue.
The core developers (employed by Blockstream) have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB in order to support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers) which lets them facilitate federated payment processors siphoning fees out.
It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage. Drives are cheap. Centralization already happened once sha256 ASIC hardware was produced enmasse, preventing normal users from earning block rewards. The Bitcoin devs are lost in political dogmas, rather than improving the software for users.
Thankfully there's alternative iterations.
There are hundreds of Core developers; only about 6 of them are related to Blockstream. Your conspiracy theory does not hold up to reality.
> have intentionally kept the block size at 1MB
The block size has already been lifted to 2MB-4MB with SegWit.
> Blockstream ... support the product they're attempting to develop (lightening network layers)
Lightning Network was invented by people that have nothing to do with Blockstream, who founded their own company for that: https://lightning.engineering/team.html
There are 5 different teams developing Lightning Network implementations. Blockstream is merely responsible for the C implementation, they have no special control over Lightning.
> It's a red herring to claim larger blocks increase centralization when it's just data storage.
It's not just storage; the main issues are bandwidth, latency and IBD time. There are very real engineering limitations and trade-offs that have been discussed in depth over the years that you're just brushing off here. It's not as simple as you make it appear.
There is not a 1MB limit, the limit was lifted with the implementation of segwit, as it changed the counting mechanism to weight instead of size, as a result, you can now push upto 3.7MB worth of tx into a block.
Your proposition is wrong and people like you who constantly spout it should be called out and shamed like the fucking charlatans that you are. Blockstream has no financial interest in having Segwit, LN or anything else implemented. They have DEFENSIVE patents against the technology to stop trolls from holding up the development process. Please, locate yourself to Google Patents and search for Blockstream, then consult their Open Patents disclosure for further confirmation that you are wrong and have taken the bait of companies who have an interest in deriding the current decisions of Core.
Core is implementing a variety of changes in the future that will put many businesses against Core out of business.
Cross chain atomic swaps = exchanges More private transactions = anyone doing blockchain analysis (lolgarzik) Lightning Network = miners and anyone who processes transactions.
The most painful part of your opinion is that you can't extrapolate network rules and see that in the next 2 years, rewards are going to half, meaning that if we drop TX fees now, it will make it even harder to pull miners back. By implementing a simple situation for on-chain settlement, miners still make decent returns down the line.
Please, if you have any interest in Bitcoin, and have any decent brain about you, call people like this out for being the corporate sockpuppets they really are.
As far as I'm concerned, I did give facts, the segwit facts are correct. The loss of business is fact. The comment about chain rewards decreasing is fact.
Can you explain why chain rewards decreasing are problematic. Asic hardware is already bought, so mining still makes sense even if the rewards drop as the cost is sunk.
git shortlog -sn 4982 Wladimir J. van der Laan = Non-Blockstream 1446 Pieter Wuille = Blockstream 1101 Gavin Andresen = Non-Blockstream 639 Philip Kaufmann - Unsure 633 MarcoFalke - Non-Blockstream 559 Matt Corallo - Non-Blockstream 551 Cory Fields - Unsure 533 Jeff Garzik - Non-Blockstream 520 Jonas Schnelli - Non-Blockstream 330 Luke Dashjr - Blockstream 261 Gregory Maxwell - Blockstream 245 s_nakamoto - lol 208 Alex Morcos - Non-Blockstream 208 John Newbery - Non-Blockstream 197 Suhas Daftuar 131 practicalswift 113 Russell Yanofsky 113 fanquake 102 Peter Todd 95 Pavel Janík 86 Jorge Timón 74 Michael Ford 74 jtimon 70 Cozz Lovan 50 Patrick Strateman 40 Andrew Chow 36 João Barbosa 35 R E Broadley 34 Giel van Schijndel 32 BtcDrak 32 Eric Lombrozo 31 Daniel Kraft 30 Jeremy Rubin 29 Karl-Johan Alm 29 Nils Schneider 28 Gregory Sanders 27 Chris Moore 26 Satoshi Nakamoto 26 sirius-m 23 Johnson Lau 23 MeshCollider 23 instagibbs 21 Micha 20 dexX7 19 Warren Togami 19 gavinandresen 19 tcatm
Sorry if I didn't do them all, you're getting the idea, as you go further down the list the impact of the organisation backing them inevitably goes down.
Bitcoin maximalists try to rationalize their design flaws, but ultimately it's simply software running a service. There are new teams working on improving designs and useful features meanwhile core has stagnated and stalled for years.
You're clearly emotionally and financially invested in advocating for a single cryptocurrency. Fortunately there are now many to choose from. :)
Which tells me people don't actually care enough, or they'd be doing that.
Which makes me wonder about the validity of the majority of the complaints.
Currencies actually get used for transactions...
EDIT: it's Friday, be nicer me
Note that upgrading your own wallet to SegWit immediately saves you about 50% on mining fees, regardless of whether other network participants upgraded or not.
It's not due to Bitcoin fees. It's due to BitPay's ridiculous fee mechanics.
Bitcoin works perfectly well when the mempool isn't being logjammed by 1-satoshi transaction spammers, in a misguided attempt to make bcash overtake Bitcoin.
Sometimes, the obvious solution isn't the right one.
Bigger blocks means more bandwidth is needed for blocks found by miners, which are transmitted across the whole network.
Our infrastructure isn't growing as fast as Bitcoin is.
Ergo, on-chain scaling doesn't work. Scaling can only realistically be done off-chain.
When in doubt, consult our boy Andreas:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw
There is no block size big enough that it will prevent transaction spammers from logjamming the mempool.
Big blocks are not in any way, shape or form a solution to any problem.
Sorry, bcash supporters...
Big blocks don't scale.
Full stop.
I mean, obviously Bitcoin is a pretty silly way to buy a game on Steam, but this seems to be 100% user error.
...well, probably. There's some key info missing here, but this seems highly suggestive:
"BitPay emailed me saying I underpaid by 3 cents at the time, and said to refund me. I checked the price of bitcoin 0.003853 btc in usd is around $31 which was a lie on their part."
No, they said he underpaid by 0.000004 BTC. And the number he was googling is, coincidentally, 0.000004 BTC lower than the transaction value in his screenshot, so...
I don't think that's true. To the best of my knowledge, they lock-in the rate if the transaction appears on the network within the 15 minutes window, regardless of when its confirmed.
Although in an environment where the main national currency experiences deflation like bitcoin, you do actually see people responding to the incentive by reducing current purchases, which is bad for economic growth.
The $25 game cost me 0.00424232 BTC (around $32.96 USD at that time). I transferred that much to them, but the network fees for some reason raised within that 2.5 hours. 3 cents. And they cancelled it. The fees were 0.00038932 BTC
It is messed up. Sending money from Coinbase to BitPay, for $29 resulted in $32 dollar in fees.
Nevertheless, this experiment showing a bunch of friends (~10) why Bitcoin is the worst payment provider. Network fees are not calculated correctly, transaction fees too. And at the end, this 3 cents difference from the transaction fees made a big deal.
And worse of all, customer support doesn't exist for the consumer at all when they pay for Bitcoin.
1. The merchant tells Bitpay the USD value of the transactions
2. Bitpay calculates a BTC value based on current exchange rates
3. Bitpay sends an invoice to the customer valid for 15 minutes
4. If the transaction to transfer BTC is broadcast on the network prior to the invoice expiring, Bitpay will honour their initial quote.
5. Once 6 blocks have confirmed the transaction, Bitpay transfers the original USD amount to the merchant
So in this case, Steam doesn't do the price conversion at all, only Bitpay does. And Bitpay only does it once, when the invoice is issued. It appears that the user either transferred an incorrect amount, OR he waited more than 15 minutes to start the transaction, OR (as some are suggesting) Bitpay is being nefarious and not honouring their quote.
That's usually used as justification for the customer blaming the company they were doing business with. (Which makes a lot of sense; it's that company's job to insulate the customer.) Weird to see you using it the opposite way.
I decided to see how easy it was to use for transactions, so I bought $2 of credit with an online service. But the payment service this other company used charged a $6 fee of some kind, and there was also a $8 'transaction fee' for the Bitcoin itself, meaning it cost around $16 to get my $2 of credit :-D I decided I'd probably stick with it as an investment instead of a currency..
16 dollars is a crazy amount in some cases and peanuts in others.
https://www.coindesk.com/eroding-net-neutrality-hurt-bitcoin...