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Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

The forefront of the Bitcoin frenzy isn't even on the blockchain, it's at the exchanges.

Hardcore tech people and those who don't (or can't) trust institutions with their Bitcoin will pay the transaction fees to get their money out of exchanges and into their own wallet. The average retail investor, however, doesn't want to be their own bank. They just want in on the price action, while letting the exchange manage their money. Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet? Of course not, which is one reason why Robinhood doesn't even have an option to withdraw Bitcoin.

As with any frenzy, the misinformation being circulated by people who want everyone to buy Bitcoin is getting out of control. How many average people buy Bitcoin because they think Bitcoin is the only way to avoid losing purchasing power? Meanwhile, everyone else has been protecting against inflation by purchasing stocks, real estate, or virtually any other investment long before Bitcoin was even invented. (Yes, I'm aware of the 21 million maximum BTC cap). The current Bitcoin narratives are more like a religion than reality.

That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense. Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy.

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> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense ... They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment.

Tesla is a car manufacturer! It doesn't make any sense at all! At any company that made sense, a CEO would lose his job for gambling $1B of company money in a casino totally unrelated to the company's business interests.

It makes sense in a solidly virtualized casino economy

Tesla is a hype company with a small side gig in mfg

Tesla is a company that posts to reddit screenshots of tweets about subjects scraped from reddit. With a small side gig collecting government energy subsidies.

Well, it’s not completely unrelated: bitcoin drives energy consumption, which in turn drives demand for batteries of all shapes, which are a massive part of Tesla’s business plan.

How's that energy consumption drives demand for batteries? Does gas consumption drives demand for spare gas canisters?

IMHO rising energy price is totally not good for Tesla's and other electric car manufacturers. It increases TCO of electric vehicles and companies' cost of support for premium models with free charging access.

Higher energy consumption -> higher demand for effective generation from all sources, including renewables -> higher demand for batteries to manage non-continuous supply, which is fairly typical of many renewables (wind, solar, etc).

Energy-prices fluctuations are relatively irrelevant in the long run. Oil will run out, and renewables are the only hope to address energy needs without killing the planet. This message is well-understood by now, the transition has started, it’s just a matter of how fast (or slow) we get to the new normal.

Again with the energy point. The energy is insignificant compared with almost anything else. Wasn't some article that the sum of all standby electronics uses more energy than bitcoin and that's only in US?

What are you, Apple? That gives no charger for "environmental reasons" while packaging its wireless headphones in a crapload of unnecessary plastics.

If you are so energy consciousness then go bark at US military, those are the biggest polluters and energy hungry of the world.

Bitcoin consumes more electricity than entire countries - more than the Czech Republic for example. It consumes a third (or was it a fifth?) of all the electricity of all data centers in the world. It is by no means insignificant.

That's not a counterpoint if those countries also consume an insignificant amount of energy.

Isn't a rebuttal different than a deflection?

Anyway half - 3/4ths of bitcoin mining is using clean energy that wasn't going to be used for anything else, or a sustainability solution for energy that was going to be used as pollution.

> Anyway half - 3/4ths of bitcoin mining is using clean energy that wasn't going to be used for anything else

While the clean energy claim may be true, why do you claim it wouldn't have been used for anything else?

because a lot of energy is not utilized if it will be lost in transit. they don't send it and there is extra capacity on site and from the specific source of energy. there are gigawatts of energy that can only be used at the source, which has never had a use until the mining machines showed up.

Then why not stop producing it, instead of using it on Bitcoin? Even 'clean' energy production has environmental costs, from environment destruction for hydro to maintenance/production costs for solar and wind.

Now that we've moved the goal posts, is it still more of an environmental cost than just imagining it was fossil fuels or energy that being pulled away from other use cases?

The answer to your question depends on which power source we are referring to. Where Bitcoin is a sustainability solution, it is reducing waste by products which were already being produced and now are not being produced because they are used for energy.

Bitcoin is a multi-billion industry whether you respect its existence or not, your arguments will simply have to get more nuanced to have a real conversation about what's happening.

Organizations that know better are intentionally omitting the source of energy, in their discussion about the amount of energy. Don't fall for it.

Excess electricity can be a real problem, and is getting worse with renewables. But surplus energy would be better used to desalinate seawater, or produce hydrogen through electrolysis, or storage.

Except the plants are not built at the sea and desalination is not a clean process.

Or with electrolysis or storage you need to generate it and transport it to where it can be used, getting you back to square one because nobody is doing that because it is uneconomical. Whereas mining is not because it can be all done on site in remote locations and doesn't even need great internet. High latency, spotty internet is good enough for crypto mining.

We know what the ideals are: no pollution and infinite energy, or no pollution and less energy use. Thats not going to happen, and crypto wasn’t part of those 50 year old models, yet it is accomplishing a lot of those ideals and people choose not to respect its existence as it alters their worldview.

If bitcoins price continues to rise, miners will be greatly incentivized to further decrease power costs. I hope this leads to innovation in clean power tech, especially in developing nations.

Right. 60% of the hashrate in China, where 60% of the power comes from coal, to mine a useless coin.

If miners could burn cyanide to mine, they would. They don't give a single shit about clean energy, just cheap energy

so upwards of ~36% of Bitcoin mining is coal powered. yes, that fits all the estimates that Bitcoin mining is almost a supermajority using renewable energy at some plants and and curbing pollution as a sustainability solution at other plants.

1/ Bitcoin itself might be 100% on renewables. But it's still causing a need for non renewables to be used, to compensate for the fact that you're mining a useless coin. I'd rather have us use this energy in a useful way.

2/ Bitcoin is causing _more_ energy consumption. It's not curbing pollution, in any way. It's just grafting itself where the energy is cheap. Noone's building wind farms for bitcoin.

3/ If I cut off 36% (which is a low bound, other countries are not clean either) of your salary, go ahead and tell me it's okay because you still have the supermajority of it.

2/ at flare gas plants bitcoin is curbing pollution, and this helps the plants and the state meet their climate goals. yes their pursuit of cheap power is what takes them where they are, an economic incentive for sustainability solutions that 50 years of idealists never were able to consider and are now fighting to ignore because this solution doesnt decrease energy use.

3/ I’m not sure what you are saying here? Is this supposed to be an analogy to something? What happens if you get rid of that energy use? The bitcoin network will adapt to a lower difficulty rate... not sure what you think you’re saying here.

>If bitcoins price continues to rise, miners will be greatly incentivized to further decrease power costs.

That's not how bitcoin works. The price of bitcoin is the budget you can spend on mining a single coin. If the price is higher, you can afford to run more miners. If the cost of electricity goes down, you can afford to run more miners. If the efficiency goes up, you can afford to run more miners. Running more miners increases the mining difficulty and you are back where you started.

If Bitcoin is worth $50k people will destroy $50k of energy to acquire Bitcoin.

If bitcoin is worth $50k, people will destroy MORE than $50k of energy to acquire bitcoin, using resources that are subsidized either intentionally or unintentionally.

Miners are motivated by profit, if your cost of electricity is lower, your profit is higher. I’m not sure why you are trying to obfuscate that simple fact.

Miners are motivated by simple profit calculation, not R&D into energy generation. R&D has an unbounded capital risk, while bitcoin is a (relatively simple) statistical calculation of energy-cost which is a bounded cost (at any given time, within a range). Not a single bitcoin MINER is "greatly incentivized to further decrease power cost".

There are industries in much better positions to revolutionize energy production than bitcoin miners. In fact, there basically a single industry that doesn't have this incentive.

If bitcoin price continues to rise, wouldn't the power cost become relatively smaller? Wouldn't miners care less?

The amount of money for a given amount of energy spent mining you get is effectively Bitcoin price / difficulty.

If Bitcoin price goes up, then the return on energy gets greater. Therefore, it's worth it to spend more energy mining. Then difficulty rises and takes this incentive away, reaching a new equilibrium with more energy spent.

The energy required to provide standby power for every electronic device in the United States is a tremendous amount of electricity.

I'm afraid it makes sense if they are hedging bets against a major global economy...

Hedging against what? There are plenty of ways to hedge against inflation risk or currency risk without buying into an asset that can lose 50% or more of its value very quickly (and has, a number of times).

How would you suggest hedging against the death of fiat currency without buying a non fiat currency?

Maybe it's just me, but if we truly see the (global) death of fiat currency, the inability of Elon Musk to sell a Tesla is gonna be among the very least of anyone's problems.

In general yes, but I think Musk's inability to sell Teslas is going to be a major problem for the particular person deciding whether Tesla buys BTC or not.

> How would you suggest hedging against the death of fiat currency without buying a non fiat currency?

We’re aware there are non-U.S. dollar currencies out there? And non-currency assets one can buy?

Nigera is suffering from high inflation and their problem is that they aren't mechanizing their agriculture sector. The end result is that they import a lot of food and fail to export their cash crops. If the government borrowed/printed money and used it to grow the agriculture sector they could actually stave off inflation despite increasing the money supply.

As per usual, the major issue with fiat currency is how poorly the government is managing the country.

Bitcoin is not a viable hedge against a global economic downturn. Just because people push these narratives doesn’t make them true. There is absolutely no evidence that Bitcoin would not crash just as fast or faster than the economy. There are other viable assets that have well studied and well documented track histories.

Crypto currencies are best compared to pink sheets prior to increased regulation, and no one in their right mind would tell you to buy pink sheets to hedge against economic downturn even if their favorite did show a 10000% increase in value.

>There are other viable assets that have well studied and well documented track histories.

can you expand on that?

God this point doesnt make sense. Bitcoin exists in lands that are governed by men. The governments could make it valueless at the first sign of threat to political currency. BTC is not a hedge, it's just an asset class that is growing fast and gaining attention faster than adoption.

If they were properly hedged then there would be no profit from Bitcoin going up. Global companies should be hedged so that currencies going up or down do not affect performance. Unless you’re betting on a particular currency.

Tesla's stock has never been a car manufacturer stock. That's why it has so much short-selling against it. If you value it as a car manufacturer and compare it's (underlying business numbers):(stock price) to anything else, it's insane.

"at any company that made sense" is true, to a point. But the point of tesla has been, for a not-insignificant number of people, not meant to make sense. It's faith based. It's cult based.

Elon Musk has strong parallels to Trump's appeal. It might not make sense. That's not the point.

I don’t view it as faith at all. I view Tesla as a software and technology company that incidentally makes cars. At least, this perspective can start to explain their valuation and the hype. I think Tesla is doing things no else is (was) doing and they have a massive first mover advantage and mind share. The other manufacturers are struggling to keep up, despite the persistent quality issues with Tesla. Tesla is giving people a product they want as early as possible. It comes with some warts, but Tesla figured out early on what people will accept and what people won’t in terms of quality.

Despite seeming like polar opposites they have a lot of similarities. A great knack for “triggering” their detractors, and a hyperdefensiveness in the face of criticism.

i think it is called "cult of personality", "great man theory" or "hero worship"

and it is probably related to medieval kings and queens, religious prophets and why some monkeys are more equal than others.

The challenge for Tesla and Elon is that I don't see the exit strategy? If Elon sells off his Tesla shares in any sizable quantity, it seems the stock would drop massively. If Elon steps down his involvement or passed away, same thing. So it seems it needs to keep on the show until Tesla can actually sustain its value somehow through normal business operations.

Knowing Elon he probably already planned on a way to exit the stock in a way that lets him reenter at the correct market valuation.

Execs in any public company routinely sell shares at a pre-determined rate every quarter. Execs besides Elon have been selling as part of the plan, and company employees are free to sell as well.

According to SEC filings, Elon himself hasn't sold any recently, but he owns 20% of Tesla, worth about $10B today. Even if Tesla drops 10x, he would have $100M worth of shares. Not to mention all his other assets, shares in SpaceX etc. He has more money than he will ever need.

> but he owns 20% of Tesla, worth about $10B today.

Tesla's market cap is $764.255B. 20% of that is $152.851B.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TSLA/

Thanks, that number did seem a little off to me :)

> He has more money than he will ever need

Sure, he also probably takes a salary for his role at the companies as well. Still, there's a reason he continues to work I'd assume? It might be he truly wants to get electric car on the road, or it could be he wants more money. In both cases you could ask: "Can Tesla survive his inevitable exit?"

So ignoring Elon's motivations here, as maybe he just has fun running Tesla, who knows, still the question is relevant to other investors into the Tesla stock, and for Tesla's employees.

Fake it till you make it.

>Elon Musk has strong parallels to Trump's appeal.

Isn't that the strangest thing? If you watch videos of Elon he is no where near as charismatic as trump.

I think it mostly stems from his success with SpaceX and earning accolades for being, "The Guy who does Impossible things". His having a car manufacturing company with an impossible share price just make sense.

I think the similarity is less their personalities, and more in their use social media for shock value and attention, and the quasi-religious devotion of many of their supporters.

What Elon understands is that if you are interesting you don't have to pay for advertising. Tesla got hundreds of millions in advertising for this and it cost them nothing but a bit of risk on some of their cash position.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4Fg88vG4E8

> Tesla is a car manufacturer!

That's what you think.

Tesla is a stock sales company that has a side business in manufacturing new toys & breakthroughs

yes .. but elon (handwaving wooo)

You didn't hear about SolarCity?

I'm just guessing here but they might be hedging against future trade restrictions set by China against US companies like Tesla. If another trade war was to happen, people in China might be able to buy a Tesla using Bitcoin vs having to buy a NIO.

I think there are a couple issues with this idea: firstly, they'd be accepting the Bitcoin, so they wouldn't need any on hand to process the purchases. Secondly, if China wants to prevent or restrict the sale of a physical good, especially one as large as a car, it's far easier to stop it from being imported (or manufactured) than to stop people from paying for it.

Cars are regulated beyond just the point of sale. I believe it would be rather difficult to get said car registered (presuming there's a Chinese equivalent to vehicle registration), if you could even arrange receipt in the first place ;)

How do you imagine that pans out for the Chinese buyer?

> That said, Tesla's Bitcoin purchase does make a lot of sense. Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy.

Is that even legal? It sounds like pumping and dumping.

It's technically not pumping and dumping because Elon posts memes that shill his investments but he rarely gives a call to action and if possible avoids naming the cryptocurrency in question.

He's definitively manipulating the market in the sense of the colloquial meaning of the word.

If there are public signals that predict the performance of a stock then those who benefit the most are those who execute their trades as quickly as possible and since Elon knows what he is going to "announce" on his Twitter account he is going to benefit massively.

he rarely gives a call to action and if possible avoids naming the cryptocurrency in question

He has put the term "bitcoin" in his twitter bio.

Its bitcoin, there is no legal framework.

“I'm aware of the 21 million maximum BTC cap”

Better thought of as a configuration value set by people with most of the mining power, which last time I checked was PRC

The 51% attack you are thinking of applies only to transaction ordering and inclusion in blocks and does not apply to consensus rules (like the 21M limit). Anyone (one miner, 5%, 51%, 80%, ...) who decides to change these rules is free to do so and will split off in a new coin.

These splits have already happened multiple times (Bitcoin Gold, SV, ABC, Cash) and most claim to be "the real Bitcoin". They are all either dead or valued <1/100 of BTC.

yup yup yup. we're back in the era where large, hand-wavy criticisms get sent up w/o any understanding of the previous proof of concepts btc has gone through that quite exactly address the claims. it's getting to a similar point as if "the internet, won't work, too slow" criticisms were just thrown around and given credence after ebay was in operations for a few years.

Tinker with that by force of mining power and you will destabilize the currency. Maybe they want that, but it would probably end the currency if it was done by force.

> it would probably end the currency if it was done by force

Sounds like you’re saying Bitcoin only has value because the PRC allows it to?

I think it’s more they changes are generally done with some form of consensus. Trying to make a change by flexing your muscle as the biggest holder of mining power could have unpredictable and counterproductive results. I think mostly it would just cause more miners to be brought online though. I basically don’t think you can change Bitcoin this way, and if you could it would more or less change it a lot. I think invested institutions would not let that happen.

Two can play that game.

The owners of Bitcoin would just fork and switch to a different algorithm, ruining the value of existing mining hardware.

> Sounds like you’re saying Bitcoin only has value because the PRC allows it to?

Please learn how the Nakamoto Consensus works and how nodes protect the Bitcoin network while miners are slaves to the network. There's a rich history of this being tested by adversaries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26089898

I once had the idea to run a decentralized (technically federated) crud app. It's just a regular database with a central authority but users can access the database and its indices with IPFS. In theory nothing could take it down.

The practical problem is that users have to download the entire dataset. There are a lot of queries that cannot be done exclusively through an index and require downloading a substantial amount of data. Bitcoin (and any decentralized app) is exactly the same. It's just that they replaced the central server with a proof of work consensus mechanism that makes it truly decentralized.

It's not a practical user experience. Lightning is just a fancy federated paypal. The average user won't care once Paypal and Mastercard support Bitcoin. The inability to scale causes Bitcoin to give more power to established financial institutions. It's ironic. Bitcoin will just be relegated to a settlement layer.

You can still own your value as long as you have private keys. There's layers of abstractions built on top of it to make it comfortable for every day use and these may be owned by local institutions, but you retain the possibility to own your value no matter where you are located or where you move to without having to depend on some single entity.

> It's ironic. Bitcoin will just be relegated to a settlement layer.

Not ironic at all. Bitcoin is supposed to be a robust, decentralised, censorship resistant settlement layer. That's literally the point. It's the base protocol.

We don't, after all, expect users to care about TCP/IP whenever they post to TikTok.

But it's reasonable, based on current trends, to predict that the number of full nodes will continue to increase all over the world.

I'd not call it stable as it is now.

It’s stable in the technology sense. The price... who knows :)

no, the miners are simply said just timestamping machines (once they got lucky to find a fitting nonce).

If they don't follow the rules as set by the users of the system, their blocks will be automatically ignored by the users software [1] (while users receive blocks from miners following their rules).

[1]: there is one CONDITION to that, and that is that an economic majority of users either do run real bitcoin nodes (can also be light clients on smartphones that connect to own node at home or to external servers that do not belong to miners) or that the services they use do run real bitcoin nodes (and do not collude with miners).

It is about an economic majority of users, and not about a simple majority. There are higher chances that users with more value invested, will run their own nodes, and therefore will not be tricked by malicious miners, and therefore increase the value of the blockchain where the rules are followed (if the forked blockchain with infinite or increase supply were to have some traction by an economic minority, the economic majority could run a second node with these changed rules and sell their coins on that chain, that would make the chain the loosing chain, like what happened with "Bitcoin-cash").

Obviously everyone running their own node would be best, so that those nodes are not run by a small amount of entities who could decide to run software/nodes that do follow their own rules. That is *WHY* bitcoiners are sooo much against raising the blocksize limit, so that running a node is not too resource intensive, so that the number of people running their own nodes (knowingly or even better unknowingly) is as big as possible. Many do think that bitcoin is slow for technical reasons. That is not the case (and lightning could increase the throughput a lot if it achieves it's goal one day). Bitcoin wants to be "slow" to make it easy for as much users as possible to run a node (read: having a maximum amount of users (knowingly and unknowingly) run real nodes, instead of SPV-wallets that do NOT validates the rules and therefore can be tricked by miners!)

By running your own node, you mainly protect yourself, but a tiny bit also the rest of the users (long term aligned incentives, once running a node is computational irrelevant, or one node per family runing on the home router or similar).

That being said, miners, developers, exchanges, ... all can influence what happens, but the biggest power lies in users hands... if the economical majority run (archival or pruned) fully validating nodes.

just a little bit more detail:

miners are timestamping machines, which main function is to order (!) the transactions. That's it!

The is the whole point, everyone/every node verifies the rules, but the network has to agree on some ordering, as they could be many possibilities to order the transaction, and the network wouldn't know who to listen (everyone has his own opinion about the best ordering). So the "lucky miner" extends the blockchain effectively ordering the new transactions.

If the miner increases the supply or doesn't follow any other consensus rule, other nodes won't accept it. So the miner has not much power. He orders transactions

Nopes. Full nodes.

https://news.bitcoin.com/reddit-post-reporting-teslas-bitcoi...

Title: Reddit Post Reporting Tesla's Bitcoin Purchase From a Month Ago Was a Hoax

Reportedly, the person claiming to be a Tesla insider with intel on the bitcoin purchase was actually some political science major college student tripping on acid. Crazy how so many people ate this story up.

The post itself was a prank but the purchase is very real. It was self-reported by Tesla I believe.

It was reported, yes. See page 23 here. [1]

[1] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459021...

Tesla's SEC filing (https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/0001...):

> Thereafter, we invested an aggregate $1.50 billion in bitcoin under this policy and may acquire and hold digital assets from time to time or long-term. Moreover, we expect to begin accepting bitcoin as a form of payment for our products in the near future, subject to applicable laws and initially on a limited basis, which we may or may not liquidate upon receipt.

>"Does anyone really think the person buying crypto $100 at a time in their Robinhood account wants to pay $18 (current average transaction fee) every time they want to move that BTC into their wallet?"

I'm curious is this the transaction per $100 or is $18 a flat fee regardless of transfer amount?

Transfer amount does not matter.

In general a Bitcoin transfaction fee is a market price to get your transaction included in a block. There is one block mined every 10 minutes and each block has enough capacity for a few thousand transactions. You put your transaction out on the network with a fee specified, and miners trying to create blocks can choose whether to include it in the block they attempt to mine. Naturally, miners trying to maximize profit will choose to include the transactions with the highest fees, occupying the least space in the block.

The size of the transaction (in bytes) is not related to the amount being transferred. It is tied to the number of inputs and outputs. Bitcoin doesn't directly track the "balance" of each address. Instead of a transaction saying "deduct 1000 satoshis from my account and give it to Charlie", it says, "take the 800 satoshis received from Alice in this old transaction, and the 500 satoshis received from Bob in that old transaction, and with that 1300 total give 1000 to Charlie and 300 back to me". 2 inputs and 2 outputs in that example, but you can imagine how both the # of inputs and the # of outputs can vary in practical usage. Therefore, a transaction that moves Bitcoins accumulated from many small transactions will be somewhat larger and have a more expensive fee than one that moves Bitcoins that were acquired all at once.

However, don't take this to mean that has an impact on the cost of withdrawing from an exchange: since the exchange doesn't make on-chain transactions for each buy/sell, it doesn't matter whether you bought your Bitcoins a little at a time or all at once for calculating your withdrawal fee. It'll pretty much be a flat fee.

The average transaction fee is a bit disingenuous. Many people are not even using segwit and thats on them. You can also use lightning at this point in time but people dont know how to do it and wallets have not implemented yet. High fees usually prod people and services to adapt to the current tech to get costs down. I expect this to happen soon as high fees are somewhat recent. Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest.

One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

> You can also use lightning at this point in time

It has a big warning saying to not use it with cash you aren't willing to lose.

Neither Visa nor MasterCard have ever told me something like that.

> Also you can send a 50 cent tx fee and it will make it through but not be the fastest.

This has tended to be true (that it’d go through within a few days), but right now it’s probably largely false.

Assume a small 226 byte transaction (one input and two outputs); at $50,000 per bitcoin, 50¢ is 1000 satoshi, which is about 4.4 satoshi per byte.

Per https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d, transactions with fees under 5 satoshi per byte were last cleared on February 8 (~8 days ago), and before that last on January 28 (~11 days). (Before that, such transactions stalled for about 12 days in October/November; other than that, it looks like such transactions never stalled for even a week back to the January 2018 craze, to say nothing of 50¢ being more satoshi per byte back then anyway.)

And if your transaction expires after a week——

Transaction fees are high regardless of using Segwit or not and the Lightning Network is not widely adopted or user friendly at all.

At present time, $5 for a fast transaction with segwit.

This response is just insignificant and ignores everything I said. Segwit adoption is at 50% and again, as I said in my comment, Lightning will be further adopted over time for people who want lower fees. The options are here its up to people and services to use them. And they will as their customers get angry.

It's been over 2 years since segwit was released.

It turns out that people were right when they said that it would take a long while for it to be adopted.

I use it and I pay lower fees. You pay the price you deserve.

People with whole Bitcoin don't necessarily care about a $50 transaction fee. They still drive the transaction fees up by wasting space and thus cause people who decide to use segwit to pay more.

I though you paid the price dictated by the market/bidding system... How does bitcoin figure out what is deserved?

You (or your wallet, or both... depending of your wallet and your settings) choose the fees you like (the wallet could guesstimate based on the current congestion and your time preference).

The miners then choose the transactions they want to include in a way, as to maximize their gains. As a block can only hold a certain amount of transactions and the limit being set by the weight-units [1], miners will want to prioritize the transactions that offer them bigger fees per weight unit, or usually expressed as sats/vbyte (satoshis per virtual bytes).

So if you don't need a transaction to arrive in the next 1-2 hours, you can lower your fees, and the transaction might pass in the night (although BTC is international, congestion is less on US night time and especially week-ends) or if not, probably in the week-end. If it doesn't clear fast enough, or as fast as hoped, then RBF (replace-by-fee) or CPFP (child-pays-for-parent) might help (manually or an increase of the fee could be automated by the wallet every set amount of time).

TL;DR: there is a free market for transactions, but the price is not dictated by the market (and there is no real bidding system), instead you suggest a fee, and see if any miner around the world wants to include it in a block (and you can adjust if the outcome isn't achieved, which has similar results to a bidding system... but is more like natural supply/demand mechanism, as miner do not guarantee to include a transaction).

Helpful to see current unconfirmed transactions (and sats/vbyte): https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,30d [info: the legend is clickable, and makes it easier to view how many higher paying transactions there are]

[1]: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weight_units

> One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

If you buy an option for a barrel of oil, Robinhood doesn't even deliver it to you. Same for wheat and gold. What a scam!

In all seriousness, if you want to speculate on the price of Bitcoin, Robinhood may be better than using some of these more sketchy exchanges that offer decent amounts of leverage.

If you want to actually purchase Bitcoin, there's regulated exchanges where you can do so, though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list.

"though that'll probably land you on some FBI watch list." I have no idea why you would think this.

In a way, putting your transactions on a public ledger is like voluntarily adding yourself to a watch list. The government (and everyone else) can then come and inspect your financial history at their leisure in the future.

Its a settlement layer. Who cares. And you think they already cant access your transactions through the traditional system? Thats how they catch criminals every year.

Accessing transactions in the traditional system ostensibly requires a subpoena, and is limited by jurisdiction.

You would need the same to identify a fiat gateway with btc. You cant link a person to an account without that.

I'm skeptical that you couldn't. Anonymous data is often not quite as anonymous as we think, and identities can be deanonymized by cross-referencing with other public info. If even one of your on-chain transactions leaks identity, your entire history with that wallet is compromised.

It's just a public/private key generated. How would they ever find out who you are?

Many/most people go through online exchanges to buy their bitcoin instead of meeting with people locally. These online exchanges perform KYC and will readily provide the government with which addresses you sent your bitcoin to.

Even if the government didn't have that, they might still be able to deanonymize you via your transactions. Pseudonymity is not anonymity. If a single merchant identifies you as the buyer in a transaction, the government might be able to figure out the rest of your transactions in that chain.

It's amusing to see people on "Hacker" News afraid of the spooky tech that is Bitcoin :)

You are confusing skepticism with fear.

Thinking that merely using BTC is "like voluntarily adding yourself to a watch list" sounds more like fear than reasonable skepticism to me.

Why Lightning isn't adopted well? Is it unreliable or can be frauded due to it's not blockchain? What's the point to use non-blockchain tech?

Tech rollout takes time. Because paying for your coffee is insignificant and you dont need nuclear level security to protect it. But nevertheless it should be very secure.

>One other thing - you cant even move BTC in or out of Robinhood. Robinhood for crypto is a complete scam right now.

I definitely would not call that a scam. I have no reason to move my BTC.

It's only a scam if you're trying to own actual bitcoin instead of simply using it as an investment vehicle.

Besides, if you really want to own a given amount of bitcoins that you have in your robinhood account, you just liquidate your position in RH and use those funds to purchase bitcoins directly.

"my"

It's per transaction regardless of amount. So a $20 transaction also has a $18 transaction fee.

It's a flat fee. The $18 may be the average currently, but it's on the high end. You'll probably be fine with $5. It all depends on how much you want the transaction to be in the next block. If you're sending $50,000 in BTC then you don't care about $18.

If you're transferring smaller amounts, why are you using Bitcoin? Use Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin or one of these newfangled proof-of-stake currencies. Then it'll be a couple of cents flat.

In my entire life, the largest transfer of cash I have ever done between institutions was I think $30,000 and it was between a bank account I owned and my brokerage. I'd wager that the majority of people have never transmitted more than $5,000 in their life.

Power to the people?

The majority of people will also never own a Berkshire A share. It doesn't really matter.

BTC's price story is based on the idea that a huge portion of people will use it. Berksire A is expensive for an entirely different reason.

The story seems to rapidly shift between "BTC will save Venezuelans from an oppressive government" and "we never said it mattered if people could use BTC for transfers of non-huge amounts of money".

There's many stories on why Bitcoin should have value. Most of them don't make sense. Nevertheless, Bitcoin clearly is valuable, despite being used by few.

Of course people have trouble pricing Bitcoin, but the same is true for many other assets. If literally the only use for Bitcoin would be to speculate on all the cryptocurrencies, that would be enough to make it valuable.

Yes, the role of bitcoin has been gradually changing from "revolutionary" to mundane financial asset class with a novel method of purchasing it.

It's actually moving away from that. It will be just be a settlement layer in 10 years.

Isn't the downpayment on the median us house much larger than 30k?

Have most individuals in the US bought a house? Have most individuals in the world bought a house in the US?

For reference, a wire transfer at a major bank like Wells Fargo is $34.

This is stunning to me. Wire transfers are free and fast in my country. I mean maybe some banks charge some people like 10c per transfer but they are mostly free. They are also very common way to transfer money to friends, paying someone, moving money around accounts etc.

A wire transfer is not the same as an ACH transfer. I can send you money for free via ACH, but it takes a few days to clear.

A wire transfer is a realtime transfer between banks. The only time I've used it was while buying a house. I've never done a wire transfer under $20k.

Well in the EU we have SEPA transfwr which are ussually free and close to instant between an increaskng number of banks.

The standard in the UK is "Faster Payments" for domestic transfers and are near instant up to £10K ($14K). For higher amounts you can use BACs (the automatic fallback for FP) which is typically next day.

All free

The fee depends on demand, and is per transaction. So the same for $1 and for $1m

I am pretty sure you don't own Bitcoin if it is not in your own wallet regardless of what T&C may be saying. They can always find a way to snatch your coins under any made up reason. They cannot do that if you have all the keys.

> Elon Musk went on Twitter and called Bitcoin "BS" to drive the price down so they could buy at a discount. They then announced their Bitcoin purchase with fanfare that drove the price up, marking a quick return on their investment. They used Elon's influence to make a quick profit on the frenzy.

I don't see an inherent problem with this. People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's price to go down by panic selling are now gone from the market, and the believers stayed in and made money. That's a good thing, and weeds out gullible people from the system. This isn't the stock market where fundamentals matter.

> I don't see an inherent problem with this. People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's price to go down by panic selling are now gone from the market, and the believers stayed in and made money. That's a good thing, and weeds out gullible people from the system.

So when the price goes down due to influencers, people are dumb for selling.

But when the price goes up due to the very same influencers, people are smart for buying?

> This isn't the stock market where fundamentals matter.

Amen to that.

> But when the price goes up due to the very same influencers, people are smart for buying?

The way I see it, Bitcoin is all about hype and modelling hype, so if you can correctly model a particular influencer's effect on a bunch of sheep, I think it's fine to reward that modelling prowess.

As for the sheep themselves, they might win or lose, it's a coin toss, but at the end of the day, they're just sheep.

> People who were too gullible to believe influencer crap and caused bitcoin's price to go down are now gone from the market

That's a part of the crowd. Another part is in for speculation and sold on negative message then bought in the dip. We don't know the proportions. The first part could be close to 0.

Did people really disappear from the market, or did they temporarily refuse to buy above a certain price?

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