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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I am really sad that Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that ever managed to touch "mainstream" (it's on Steam, it has Stripe support, etc) and we fucked it up so hard that you need a $4 fee just to pay for one thing with it. I was really hoping it would catch on as a medium of exchange, because there's value in being able to pay for things quickly, cheaply and without giving people a bunch of info, but nope. Digital tulips.

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Going mainstream isn't a problem in itself. The problem is that most "mainstream" usages of bitcoin are just using it as a way to get fiat money. For example, the price is currently shooting up because people think it's going to give them a lot of fiat money when they sell it later. If everyone used bitcoin to directly buy and sell things, it would be fine for it to be mainstream. The transaction fees would also be much lower, because there wouldn't be the fee to convert it to fiat money.

I'm not saying going mainstream is the problem, I'm saying it didn't go mainstream enough. I agree with you, it would have been great if we could use BTC to buy and sell stuff instead of just speculate.

It blows my mind that a forum with mostly technically people (hacker news) is constantly awash with blockchain fanatics. Have you people never had a scaling problem? Understanding how well different systems can scale is one of the core competencies required by developers and blockchains are fundamentally designed not to scale because increasing the number of nodes just increases your "trust" in the system.

Right, so what's your alternative? Trust the government to print money at sustainable rates, and trust banks not to steal your money or censor your transactions?

You have to try, even if you know you can't solve all of the problems yet.

people...people can turn any decent technology to crap..Facebook wanted to connect the world, but ended up as the tool to fuck up the democracy..bitcoin pioneers wanted to get rid of banks, but the cryptocurrency ended up as the fucking trading tool used to earn more fucking money and put them in the fucking bank where they are safe..hopefully the AI will end this insanity soon.

How much time and money would it cost you to send a gold bar to the other side of the world? Many people misunderstand the true value proposition of Bitcoin, which is to replace something like ACH (and use second layer payment processors for day to day purchases which are aggregated before reaching the blockchain, just like we do with dollars...)

I didn't say Bitcoin isn't good for anything. I said it isn't good for the thing I wish it would be good for.

Wow, that's a huge transaction cost!

I really don't get the $4-$10 fee that everyone keeps talking about. The exchange I trade on charges me a minimum fee of 0.0001btc (which I keep cribbing about) to withdraw btc. I know from experience many of the times even fee below that gets happily accepted. 0.0001 translates to $1.2 fee.

The 4$-10$ fee being mentioned is a flat flee when transferring between wallets.

When you are trading on an exchange, there could very well be nothing happening in the background. It's instead a process that's just flipping some bits for who owns what in their own database.

I meant between exchange wallet and mine. Don't have to trust me. Look it up: https://blockchain.info/tx/21c79cdba9c5a61d4e342ed946de4c47d...

That is $6.5 fee for 12 different outputs. So around $0.5 per transaction.

I'd argue that certain other cryptocurrencies have "touched" the mainstream - however briefly. Not detracting from your point, though. Bitcoin is definitely the most "mainstream" cryptocurrency.

Hmm, I haven't heard of any cryptocurrencies accepted for payment on standard, automated checkout flows. Stripe accepts BTC, though.

So... I totally agree that the transaction fees are much too high. But it doesn't bother me as much as it bothers many people because every time I start getting upset, I remember that VISA's fees are 1.5%, PayPal's fees are 3%; basically everything has transaction fees and the world has not come crashing down on them.

And then I remember that 1.5% on a $20 purchase is 30 cents and am sad again. I'm not going to pay for my $10 game on Steam with BTC, as much as I'd like to, because I don't need a 30% fee.

But why would anyone spend days downloading the blockchain, significantly increase their data management and opsec responsibilities and cede their usual consumer rights in order to have the same transaction fees as Paypal?

The only reason I can think of is in order to evade various kinds of regulation, but presumably that won't last forever.

Yeah nobody downloads the whole blockchain lmao, 2012 called and wants its argument back

Well I tend to assume people are using bitcoin in a decentralized fashion because that was its entire raison d'etre, but it's true that at this point that seems to have fallen by the wayside.

Depending on what you mean by "in a decentralized fashion" the two aren't mutually exclusive. Many bitcoin clients, like Electrum, are distributed, non-centralized, but rely on the existence of SOME copies of the entire blockchain somewhere, but only verify back a fixed configurable number of blocks themselves when sending and receiving money. I suppose there's a minor degree of "trust" involved there, but I think the number of full nodes talked to is probably also configurable, so it would be pretty hard to fool the client, I think equally hard or harder than other kinds of double spend attacks.

Like many, you’re not aware that the Lightning Network is on its way and will solve most of these issues.

Moreover, transactions between Segwit-compatible wallets is pretty fast and cheap.

I’m kind of tired to hear people complain about the fees while all they have to do is use a different wallet that supports Segwit.

Edit: Ah, the downvotes. I was expecting them.

My wallet does support Segwit. The recommended fee was $3 and it took ~15 minutes to confirm.

Segwit to Segwit? Because it’s less than a buck for me since beginning of november.

Hmm, good point, the recipient may not have been Segwit, I didn't notice. Hopefully Segwit transactions are cheaper, as you say, that would be very good news to me.

They are and they will be even more. The bigger the Segwit adoption rate is, the lower the fees. The adoption still is under 50%, it was around 15-20% in October but it's getting there.

It's irrelevant[1] what the receiver is using (for fees), segwit just makes it cheaper when sending a transaction. This is because it applies a discount to the signature data.

[1] There's a few byte different depending on the output type (p2sh/p2wpkh/p2pkh) but it's pretty much negligible.

Lightning network has been "around the corner" for as long as I remember...

And even if it reduced people's needs to one bitcoin transaction per month (say, to deposit their paycheck), it would still reach full capacity with just 8 million users.

The alpha has been published in January. You can use it if you want, at your own risk.

The devs are working hard and the beta is likely to come in 2018. People think naively than increasing the block size will change something. It will in the short or mid term, but not in the long term and you can't keep increasing the blocksize. There needs to be a permanent, well implemented solution and that's what's coming and why it's taking so long.

Blocksize increase alone is not sustainable.

So the proposed solution for scaling bitcoin is to avoid use of the blockchain whenever possible.

Sure, why not? The objective is "trustless, scalable, secure", not "using the blockchain at all costs".

Maybe I don't fully understand it but from what I've gathered, the Lightning Network is a plan to enable people to do transactions outside of the main blockchain and eventually sync them back. It seems to get touted as a magical plan to solve Bitcoin's scaling problems, but unless I'm missing something (which tbf is very possible) it seems more like a plan for bitcoin to abrogate its primary original purpose of handling end-user transactions.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/7h1v54/comment/dqn...

This sums it up pretty well.

Lightning Network seems to me to be a hybrid solution that uses the best of both worlds: the security and stability of the main block chain for the overall holding and occasional transfer of large amounts of wealth between large organizations, while having offchain networks to experiment with different solutions for handling lots of small transactions quickly, while address still bring compatible with the main block chain.

The thing you're missing is that in order to achieve scaling, Lightning Network sacrifices one of Bitcoin's main advantages, decentralization: https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

Heard revolut is going to accept it as well.

Revolut will not accept. But you will be able to exchange USD, EUR and other currencies to Bitcoin (and vice versa). But you will not be able to transfer Bitcoin to Revolut or transfer Bitcoin out of Revolut. At least not at the first iteration of crypto currency support.

Wait, they'll add it as a currency but not let you withdraw, deposit or pay with it? So it's basically purely for speculation?

What you're saying doesn't make any sense. There is no point doing this.

Who fucked it up so hard?

All of us, I guess, by not using it enough for everyday transactions. Although it's a chicken and egg problem, and the fact that it's so different from traditional banking that it's hard to explain to people how it works doesn't help.

The Core developers who refuse to raise the blocksize despite the completely lack of evidence against the smallest increase (1MB -> 2MB).

Some even celebrated when the blocks became full and the fees started to increase...

The bitcoin development team is * rightfully* extremely cautious and correctly moves extremely slowly.

That's a GOOD thing. I don't want "move fast and break things" with bitcoin.

No it's not a good thing. When it takes too long you stop being cautious and start being incompetent.

The "1MB block issue" has been going on for years yet they haven't even come up with good (or any) research for an optimal block size.

For multiple years people tried to make research for "online money" and couldn't.

Anyone that says digital tulips at this point sounds hurt that they didn't invest, do some research on Bitcoin Cash, so this time next year you don't look as foolish

> Anyone that says digital tulips at this point sounds hurt that they didn't invest

I did, several years ago when it looked like a genuinely interesting up-and-coming technology.

At this point though, digital tulips.

at this point you lost a lot of money not investing and it still look like an up-and-coming technology, in the future Solidity developers will be in demand like React developers.

bcash users have active propaganda campaigns to try and confuse people into thinking that it is bitcoin. That should be about all anybody needs to know about it.

Other cryptocurrencies, which are meant for payment (like Dash) will eventually make it into the mainstream. It's a matter of 1 or 2 years in my opinion. Bitcoin is digital gold, that is also a valid use case IMHO, and a good first step for cryptocurrencies. (Real gold has a 7 trillion market cap.)

(Warning: this will be downvoted because of mentioning Dash. Edit after multiple downvotes: Naive people think that they will be able to stop the (by far) best payment focused cryptocurrency by silencing others. The growth of Dash shows its dominance is inevitable.)

I hope so, I did send ETH yesterday with minimal fees and instant confirmation, but no stores accept ETH as payment.

Yes, funny that ETH, which is meant to execute on-chain turing complete code, is much better for simple payment than Bitcoin. On the other hand I think a solution directly designed for payment only is a better fit for this purpose, as it has a bit smaller attack surface than ETH or other dapp platforms. (Admittedly a sophisticated payment system like Dash with the Evolution update has still a higher attack surface than Bitcoin. That is why Bitcoin is perfect as digital gold.)

Why mention Dash when you could have made your point without mentioning it? Dash is well known for its aggressive astroturfing. Mentioning it directly plays into that reputation, which you obviously know about since you acknowledge that your direct mention of Dash will be unwelcome.

I just noticed that when I mention it on HN or /r/cryptocurrency I am downvoted to hell. First I did not know what it is. We have discussed it on the dash subreddit, and seemingly fans of other coins hate and FUD Dash with passion. I am trying to evaluate cryptocurrencies objectively, and try to give few emotion into it. I have found that no other currency provides the combination Dash does, which are: private send, instasend, low fees, high tx/sec and working on even more, user.friendlyness with the evolution update, DAO with treasury budget for development and markteing.

A question to you: Do you accept the behaviour to downvote a normal on topic comment just for mentioning an on-topic cryptocurrency? I find this downvoting behaviour anti-intellectual.

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