Which is funny because you always hear how fast crypto transactions are. What everybody seems to leave out is that fully settling on the blockchain is slow and costly.
Where do you hear that? One of the big criticisms of the biggest cryptocurrencies as currencies is that transactions are glacially slow for most practical uses (small transactions). Improving on that seems to be the main selling point of Solana.
What do you mean?
At the moment the transfer fee for Bitcoin/Eth is about $1.80/$4, so if you are buying a $5 coffee it’s not really cost effective to do that on chain.
The main issue that drives up cost is that Bitcoin has a scalability problem for transactions, particularly as the market cap/difficulty has gone up.
This is why the lightning network was introduced - although that comes with its own drawbacks compared to “pure” crypto.
What’s the ideal scenario here? Transactions on chain eventually become free and then we truly have a useful distributed currency?
But frankly that’s besides the point. There are very few physical transactions in the “cash” world. Crypto can become very successful and never touch those transactions if it can work to standardize & disintermediate the electronic movement of money it could be a massive change.
I don’t know if that will happen and it’s not a goal of the crypto diehards I’ve met, but that’s a path to success that allows for fees along the way.
Fair point. But there are still many more informal cash transactions that don't have that issue, but maybe that's not what cryptocurrency will solve. That's fair.
> But frankly that’s besides the point. There are very few physical transactions in the “cash” world. Crypto can become very successful and never touch those transactions if it can work to standardize & disintermediate the electronic movement of money it could be a massive change.
Definitely agree traditional electronic money transfer today has many issues. But I don't yet understand why cryptocurrency is the necessary solution. Sure it's a solution, but surely it's possible to fix the issues without cryptocurrency.
I think I understand the core principle and appeal of crytpocurrency as a decentralized currency, underground currency among those wishing to avoid traditional financial institutions. But everywhere I look I see cryptocurrency turning into traditional banking and I don't really understand the overall benefit. It seems the few benefits it does have over traditional banking (speed, ease of transfer, univeral currency) are outweighed by the drawbacks (power hungry, surprisingly insecure, easy to simply lose everything you have with no recourse).
That depends on which blockchain you're fully settling on. There's more than one, Ethereum != "the blockchain".
Have I missed some Turing Award discoveries while I was away?
That's not necessarily a problem. Slow is ok if it's highly secure, reliable, and inexpensive relative to the amounts being moved or compared to other alternatives.
Yes. ZK Rollups - https://polynya.medium.com/conjecture-how-far-can-rollups-da...
If you don't understand this post he has many more explaining the technologies behind it.