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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

And yet usage stats point the other way. The number of daily transactions, and the lightning network capacity are steadily increasing year after year.

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/n-transactions

https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity

Edit: another very concrete metric showing Bitcoin adoption is the daily global transactions fees paid to miners (in USD). This isn't the block reward, it is just the real costs (fees) that users are willing to pay to transact on the blockchain. The fact they are increasing implies increasing adoption/utility of Bitcoin: https://ibb.co/PgBm0t8 (note the log scale!) I like this metric as it's a 100% market-based valuation of Bitcoin's utility that is independent of the value of 1 BTC.

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But your graph is showing a collapse of transactions in 2024.

A fluctuation in the last 80 days means nothing. Zoom out to 15 years.

Ah sorry I see I should have disregarded all data that doesn't align with the into space narrative. I did zoom out. Transactions are on 2019 levels, so no year for year increase.

I honestly think you don't know how to read the chart. Click on 30-day average. Then observe how the transactions volume in the last 12 months is clearly higher than any preceding 12-month period.

I just verified the data: 2019 averaged 331k transactions/day, while 2023 averaged 418k transactions/day, a +26% increase. Like I said, you made a mistake reading the chart!

Usage says really nothing about how bitcoin is used, whether it's to buy/sell on exchanges or to actually make real transactions for goods and services.

You can love it or hate it, doesn't really matter.

That's the thing about a powerful idea, implemented in code, supported by a large global community, connected by the network -- nobody can kill it.

It's like arguing about whether the world would be a better place without strong cryptography. There are many arguments for and against, people will never agree, and it's a waste of time arguing about it.

It exists, whether you approve of how it's used or not.

And a thing that is unkillable, that will exist in some form for our lifetimes, that a large global community finds useful for whatever reason, will always be valuable.

You repeat another popular misconception. Buys/sells on exchanges do NOT show up as on-chain transactions. The data I'm showing is real on-chain transactions. It's pretty exhausting to have to re-explain this ad-nauseam. But I suppose it is not your fault. There is a lot of misinformation out there.

You explained nothing and introduced an entirely novel term “real on chain transactions” which means essentially nothing. How do you define this term? How does it disinclude all transactions of people buying or selling bitcoin speculatively and only include transactions where bitcoin are traded for goods?

Then to complain about how exhausting it is to explain nothing and make random claims genuinely sums up most people’s experience with the bitcoin crowd (and their praying on its downfall)

By "real" on-chain transaction I mean "actual" on-chain transaction, ie. a transaction recorded on the blockchain. When people buy or sell bitcoins on exchanges, nothing is recorded on the blockchain. Instead, an exchange records a trade on their internal infrastructure (however it's implemented: a database, a log file, whatever). It's not done on the blockchain.

And eth went through a recent update, dropping gas fees through the floor for some things.

Not sure how long until this effects what users pay.

That would be necessary to make crypto "useful".

The "gas fee" for handing a banknote to a vendor is ... nil.

The "gas fee" for tapping a card/phone on an NFC payment pad is ... nil (you're probably tracked, ho-hum).

Crypto won't unseat classical until its "gas fees" go zero. At the very least to the payer.

Nano has been around for years now, instant, feeless transfers. Its useful, but nobody is using it. It gets spam attacked every bull run as well which suggests certain influences dont want it to ever take off.

https://nano.org/en

>The "gas fee" for handing a banknote to a vendor is ... nil.

Ask the vendors what their bank fees for handling cash deposits are and revise that statement.

> The "gas fee" for handing a banknote to a vendor is ... nil.

There's no sales tax where you live? (which is entirely possible)

> The "gas fee" for tapping a card/phone on an NFC payment pad is ... nil

Merchants pay a credit card processing fee (2.9% + 30c per transaction) for each transaction. Looks and smells like a "gas fee" to me. It's much less than the ridiculous ETH gas fees, but credit cards cost money to operate. The fee is hidden so the naive consumer thinks they're not paying anything to use the credit card, but that's very much due to the actions of the credit card cartel, Visa/Mastercard.

The data is easily accessible, no need to guess. The fees have been pretty stable for ~3 year now.

https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_transaction_... https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_average_gas_price

Lightning is not a Bitcoin. Its a shitty copy of unregulated bank system. At least Bitcoins were mostly decentralized, which was a fun technical and social experiment. Lightning trades off that last unique benefit for nothing, making a system worse in every aspect than tradfi. And even then it is shitty implemented and can't scale. Pathetic really.

Usage is just wash trading.

No. Wash trading on exchanges does not translate to on-chain or lighting transactions.

The pump'n'dump scheme is still not over.

There is still too much money to pull from fresh people.

It's probably still companies which stole money from early adopters and still reinvest.

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