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Comment by lopatin | Hacker News Reader

Largely agree. It's what makes Bitcoin different. Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do IS the value of Bitcoin and why it's not some purely speculative ponzhi scheme. As far as I understand, you can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees.

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That's one of the point that makes little sense to me. The government/bank regulation kicks in when you try to convert to your local currency. They now have your full history of transactions and can decide to refuse your bitcoins or find you guilty of fraud or whatever illegal thing you tried to hide. Regulations will always be present at the edge.

I didn't say that it has to be for illegal things or avoiding regulation. I said it's a trust-less global payment infrastructure. Say I need to send $500k to a relative in a third world country at 12AM on a Sunday. A completely legal transfer of money that I plan to disclose to the government. 100% regulated. But I need the transaction to go through very quickly. What are my options? Chase? Paypal? Western Union? What if Paypal decides this transaction is fraudulent and says "no". What if Western Union decides to limit my account? What if Chase wire transfer to third world bank takes 5 days? With Bitcoin, you can just send the money, legally, but without a private third party as a middleman. There is value in that.

I agree. The "without a bank to tell you what you can and can't do" made me believe that you were hinting to non-regulated transactions, my bad then.

Gotcha, yep I could have phrased that better.

You can use Ethereum for the same purpose. The transaction fees for sending Ether in a reasonable amount of time stands at sub $5. To send the same amount in the same time on Bitcoin's network is higher. Ethereum's high fees mainly hinder smart contract usage, which, depending on the complexity of the contract, may incur up to hundreds if not thousands of dollars at current gas prices.

Transaction fees appear to be significantly higher than $5 at the moment (see e.g. https://www.coindesk.com/ethereum-transaction-fees-hit-recor...).

>Bitcoin's killer app is the network itself. The fact that you can send money/transfer wealth instantly

Instantly?

>can't reaaally use Ethereum for the same purpose because of high fees

BTC fees are also high?

Yes, that assertion sound like it's coming from someone who has never actually used Bitcoin.

There are cryptos which are instant and without transaction fees (e.g. Nano for payments and maybe in the future IOTA as an alternative to Ethereum). So there is some hope for the technology, but it remains to be seen if any of this actually takes off.

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