Hacker News Reader

Comment by etrabroline | Hacker News Reader

Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bought out to bring it down.

EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here

View on HN

Or:

Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees.

That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero.

As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin.

For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction.

As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.

Unused blockchains have no / low transaction fees.

>When people started using Bitcoin, fees went up!

That's how it is supposed to work.

“The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.” -Satoshi Nakamoto

The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?!

“I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”

This is a hateful lie.

Not it isn't, it's just information you don't want people to see.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com