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Comment by delbel | Hacker News Reader

Tried to send bitcoin yesterday ($120) to an online retailer, the fee was $31.50 which I did not have. So I went to buy more bitcoin and realized it would cost additional $31.50 to transfer the new bitcoins just to cover the other network fees. Had to do it, then for whatever reason my account was put on 72 hour hold. So I just gave up, literally out $200 with nothing to show. Bitcoin is a complete joke if you can't actually use it.

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I would've thought having to pay a $31 txn fee on a $100 purchase would've been enough to dissuade you.

If it's a product he really wants and is only available via bitcoin payment, it could well be worth it.

I've paid $30 shipping for a < $100 item before when I really needed it to be delivered on time, so I can see paying a $30 surcharge to purchase an item.

Sounds like shilling for Bitcoin. Even if we all sometimes pay exorbitant amounts for priority shipping, doesn't mean we want to do that and get _no reward_ because "Bitcoin." The fees on Bitcoin currently make it practically unusable. If you want to argue for edge cases, go ahead. But please don't try to give these edge cases any mediocrum of regularity and sensibility...

It seems like common sense, not shilling: if what you're buying is only available with Bitcoin, then you get more of a reward than when you pay for expensive shipping -- if you don't pay whatever the transaction fees end up being, then you won't get the product at all.

You don't get a reward when you buy something - you get your purchased goods. The mental yoga necessary to consider a purchased good as a reward is absolutely baffling.

there are barely products for sale with bitcoin much less bitcoin exclusive products. only things i can think of are ransoms and drugs. i'm sure there are others but this isn't super common.

Sure, it may not be common, but still, my point stands.

If you're buying some uncommon product that's only available with bitcoin, then paying a 30% transaction fee might be worth it versus not being able to purchase the product at all.

uh sure your point stands. pretty weak point? in obscure circumstances it might be worth performing the unappetizing act of paying bitcoin transaction fees to buy something.

You can set your own fees. I paid $3 for a transaction today (but it obviously still hasn't verified, and I don't know when it will). That's kind of the tradeoff, unfortunately.

These days, I find Bitcoin completely unsuitable for sending money. I use Bitcoin Cash, which verifies in ten minutes for something like one cent of fees (first block), but I guess that's because nobody uses it. Still, Bitcoin itself is out of the question for me personally, I'm not paying $30 for a transaction for anything.

Bitcoin cash doesn’t have artificially low constraints on capacity. 10 years ago, it was 1MB.

Despite all the advancements of storage and networking, it’s still essentially 1MB to a maximum of 1.8MB if everyone implements a complicated and costly to develop system called SegWit, and to fully use SegWit you have to use backwards incompatible addresses.

Bitcoin Cash has enough space in it's blocks to cover all of Bitcoin's and Bitcoin Cash' transactions.... for now.

Your $3 Bitcoin transaction might get cancelled before it gets written to the blockchain...

I had a similar fee when I tried to send a friend $30 of BTC to a paper wallet for Christmas. Ended up just walking him through setting up a Coinbase account and gave him $30 cash and he just link his own credit card (although he was never able to get past the pending account verification)

That's why you should use bitcoin cash instead. Cost me 1 penny to send any amount. I get confirmation within first block too.

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