It's been 45 minutes and I'm still waiting for my Bitcoin transaction to go through.
BTC and Crypto at large don't seem like a viable alternative solution, or even a solution to any real problem at all.
BTC and Crypto at large don't seem like a viable alternative solution, or even a solution to any real problem at all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bOo3zLFhEk
For small payments, lightning is instant and extremely low fee. For larger payments that you want certainty of settlement, even a few hours confirmation time is drastically superior to traditional settlement networks that take days if not weeks internationally. FYI, your credit card payments are instant, but not finally settled. That happens in periodic bulk batches between banks.
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/a-look-at-the-lightning-network/
Even the Fed is on top of trying to understand this, https://www.clevelandfed.org/~/media/content/newsroom%20and%...
Money arrives instantly, and as far as a retail customer is concerned, it settles instantly. Under the hood their regular batch settlement between banks, but that doesn’t matter to a retail customer, because the money is instantly withdraw-able, and covered by government deposit protection the moment the faster payment appears on your bank statement (which is milliseconds after the payment is initiated by the sender).
Why would I want to mess around with Bitcoins, when I already have access to fast, secure, cheap, money transfers to any UK bank account?
With the exception of stores that are cash only, 100% of my money movements in the past 10 years have been digital, from my perspective. The actual money movement technology doesn't really matter to me, as long as I can do it online. Excluding settlement times (which I don't notice, unless I'm doing a wire transfer), as a consumer there's no difference.
> without fees
With bitcoin, you're paying fees per-transaction for bitcoin itself, and both parties are paying fees to move money to/from fiat. Wire transfers for large transfers may be slower, but they're absolutely cheaper than bitcoin. Bitcoin is considerably more expensive for small payments.
> with a fair exchange rate
With the fluctuations in price in bitcoin, the exchange rate is rarely fair and almost always worse than fiat. Note that there's lots of cards that don't charge foreign transaction fees, and have quite competitive exchange rates.
To point it out again, using bitcoin requires two fiat exchanges, each of which charge fees and each of which has an exchange rate that the exchange is profiting from. If you're transferring fiat of the same currency, there's no fees and no exchange rate. Even if your transaction is between two fiat currencies, bitcoin is worse, because there's one extra layer of fees and exchange.
> With no limits on transaction sizes
I can't think of a time in which I've hit a transaction size limit. Who is this feature for? Transaction size limits exist primarily to protect people. If my card is compromised, it won't result in 100% of my money immediately (and irreversibly) being transferred away.
> with complete finality
This is an anti-selling point. If my money is stolen, I want to be able to get it back. If I typo an account number when I send a payment, I want to be able to reverse that payment.
Or else what? They'll deposit some money into your account? The biggest reason bank accounts are semi-secret in the US is free-for-all ACH pulls; a minimal threat in other countries due to the fundamental differences on who is liable for unauthorized withdrawals (not the depositor!)
What’s wrong with share bank details? You can’t do anything with them, except send me money.
Most countries have similarly capable local payment systems. The US is the only developed nation I’m aware of that’s missing such basic financial infrastructure.
but the point remains that just because the legacy system exists doesn’t mean no alternative should ever exist.
If bitcoin needs a similarly hierarchical trust-based settlement systems as banks, how is that different from traditional banking?
The second link follows the Wadsworth Constant in fabulous fashion.
https://www.swanbitcoin.com/a-look-at-the-lightning-network/... is almost exactly 30% of the way down the page.
> 1 hour 31 minutes read
In rhetoric we call this 'assigning homework' and it's considered deflecting, aka, trying to get out of jail free, aka, poor form, aka, you lost the argument.
I'm sure we can do better than either of these for educational material. If that's the best that exists, which I hope is far from the case, then this is essentially a "git gud scrub" situation and you have yourselves to blame for the unwashed masses still not understanding things.
At this point, and given HN's POV on BTC, I can't take these statements serious unless you are willing to post the tx hash?
Most of these criticisms seem to be unfounded and only speculative, or you deliberately put a low priority mining fee and feel the need to blame the protocol for that.
The truth is a 30 cent mining fee was clearing all day in the next block, so I struggle to see how this is the fault of Bitcoin mainchain. With that said, as someone already mentioned, LN txs are instant and near free.
The solution was in the message you replied to.