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Comment by mitchdoogle | Hacker News Reader

I know I'm just a single point of data, but I routinely buy things on the Internet with Bitcoin that cost $200-300 USD. I always set the fee to just under a dollar and have never had any issues with the transaction being confirmed within 20-30 minutes, including in the last few weeks.

Of course, paying with Bitcoin saves the seller about 3% of the final cost, and they need not worry about chargebacks, which saves them more money in the long run, so they offer a discount when crypto is used. It's a win-win for me and the seller.

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It's only a win for you if they weren't a scammer, or they didnt send you a broken item. Otherwise you've lost the chargeback feature

> Of course, paying with Bitcoin saves the seller about 3% of the final cost, and they need not worry about chargebacks, which saves them more money in the long run, so they offer a discount when crypto is used. It's a win-win for me and the seller.

But where are the benefits for the buyer? I have to go out of my way to buy BTC, when I’m paid in USD, and the value changes so quick that if I don’t want to hold BTC the buying the exact amount will be difficult, get to deal with fun taxes at the end of the year, and all of this because “fiat is bad” and to give up my rights to a chargeback. And then one day SHA256 will be broken, as all hashing functions eventually are, and then what?

Interesting, I was several years ago seeing the transaction delays climb into the hours, but not the fees (ya, maybe I should have set my fees higher, just went for average). I wonder how much variance there is in the network and if you are just lucky, or somehow frequently get picked up in maybe a less busy part of the network, or if there's some attribute you unconsciously use that gives your transactions so much better than average performance? Either way, enjoy your advantage while it lasts!

I've done multiple txs in the last few weeks - all with "normal fees," 2 took 3 days to get a single confirmation. 1 took ~24 hours, although these were the outliers, several other txs happened in normal time frames.

It's possible the app I use is just bad at calculating fees, but I'm thinking yeah that guy got lucky.

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