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Comment by Tyrannosaur | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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