Hacker News Reader

Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

I think there are three elements contributing to the negativity:

(1) People may get hurt. I was in an Uber two weeks ago where my driver talked about taking out a second line on his home to buy Bitcoin. By today's mark, he's lost money. That people who clearly have no idea what they're doing are being preyed on is disturbing to many, myself included.

(2) ICOs are a cesspool of frauds. They allow promoters to make money without putting anything up. That's different from early Bitcoin adopters, who actually put time or money or computing power at risk.

(3) Bitcoin is an article of faith. Discussions around its value often devolve into "does god exist" arguments.

View on HN

And transaction fees. I saw someone reporting over $30 fee to get processed within 20 minutes. That's why Steam dropped Bitcoin.

As a skeptic, people thinking this is a good currency are hilarious. Day trading and making money off them is simple sport.

You are missing the reason the fees are high: it's because Bitcoins it the most widely used cryptocurrency today. Scaling something like Bcash, which doesn't have that many transactions - is easy. The fees can be low because nobody wants to use it. Because there is no real demand for those transcations, and so the price can be low. For a crypto like Bitcoin, which does have high demand for transactions, some of the fees have to be high right now. (Does not mean they will be high in the future.)

Are there scalability problems? Yes they are, it's very evident in the transaction fees. But are technical solutions being developed to mitigate this? Yes they are - that's the real work that actually goes on in the background, by the people who actually work, instead of spending their time on internet posting about the price. It's not an easy task, but it is being done.

When people bring up the transaction fees, sometimes it sounds like they think that real Bitcoin developer's don't know that this is a problem. They do, and they work on it! It's just that regular person doesn't want to hear developers, he wants to hear someone that tells them they can make 3x their money over a weekend.

What if Bcoin increased the block size?

Increasing the blocksize will never realistically bring a Bitcoin-like network to the truly global scale of say Visa or MasterCard. Many people think that other technical solutions are needed, and that only they can work. These people are broadcasting their choice through the markets and the price of each coin.

Bcash has increased the blocksize (and forked), which is a perfectly valid solution for such a task, in terms of how a cryptocurrency should be governed: no wars, no lawsuits, if some users don't think a certain decision is valid, they are free to fork off their own chain. No one stopped them, no one tried to shut them down. But the market will ultimately show what is a good solution and what is a bad solution. And you can already see what the market decided in terms of the decision of increasing the block size - by comparing Bitcoin market cap to Bcash market cap.

I wanted to make a small Bcoin transaction a couple weeks ago to test a wallet and the fee was over $20. That doesn't seem like a good fee compared to Visa. Is this something that could be fixed now with a block size increase?

Hoping the introduction of the Lightning Network (or really any tech that can batch transactions together) will help here.

This is total bs. Segwit transactions are under a dollar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com