Topic: [2016-03-04] Slowing Bitcoin Down: Is It Nature Or Politics? (Read 652 times)

Is this really a problem for you?  I've never had a transaction get stuck and I deal with a great deal of transactions sent by Bitcoiners of all different skill levels.  If you want a transaction to instantly confirm, you should pay for it.  If you can wait 3-5 days, you can still process transactions with 0 fee.  Using the default fee, which is ridiculously cheaper than any alternative, you will rarely see it take more than an hour or two to confirm.



No.  I'm very familiar with the Harvard business model.  It is actually the problem with society that leads to "too big to fail" operations.  It isn't something that the Bitcoin community should strive for.  That line of thinking is what nearly killed off the entire US auto industry and is absolutely decimating the middle class along with small businesses.

It is completely natural. It happens with most currencies. It will again go up due to bitcoin halving.

I really don't think there's any significant number of people who would be looking to transfer ~10 sats. That's not the problem here. The problem is people happily paying those couple of cents (default 0.0001 for <1kb) and still get their txs stuck. The major problem is people currently in control of BTC development see this as something desirable.

To dumb it down, if you have 1 tx/sec capacity and a constant demand for 2 txs/sec, then there will be winners and losers, doesn't matter how much they're willing to pay. Sure, you can make yourself feel better thinking all the txs that didn't go through were spammers or micro-gamblers. I'd still call it a flawed, unreliable, unpredictable model.


Disagree on "cheaper, faster, safer" but let's skip this.

10x up in fees is fine? What about 20x, 50x or 100x? You gotta draw a line somewhere, so where is it? And how do you make sure fees stay on desirable level without some sort of central planning?


No idea what RCSH is, but I'm pretty sure that if they had constantly more demand they could cater for, they would be looking to expand their facilities and add more tables in, rather than try to engage customers in a bidding war in order to get seated.

ps. Ever wondered why restaurants (or other businesses) bother to accommodate more customers rather than crippling the capacity to only 1 table and simply charge more?

When the "other guy" is waiting for a $0.00004 gambling microtransaction that is going to result in them losing their money anyway, I don't see it as an issue.

If you don't think Bitcoin is worth dropping a couple cents to transfer your coins, you can always use paypal or other alternatives.  The facts are that the Bitcoin fee could go up 10x and still be significantly cheaper, safer, faster, and better than any alternative out there.

You don't see Ruth's Chris Steak House trying to beat McDonald's pricing of the McRib...

I don't see "add a penny to make some other guy wait" as a functional model. At some point those 'other guys' will lose patience and move on to other things.

Unreliable as a payment method?  You are insane.  You honestly believe the Bitcoin network is going to fail and be replaced with Ethereum because you have to include an extra penny as a transaction fee while the network is under attack?

What 'every time' do you mean? I don't see any correlation between last year stress test(s) and ETH price.

Bitcoin currently is unreliable as a payment method and there's uncertainty on whether this will get resolved. When people lose trust in something, they seek for alternatives, that's a natural free-market mechanism.

You can't expect Bitcoin to stay on the top just because of its first mover advantage. If it's flawed, or doesn't work as it should, it will get replaced eventually.

The ETH pumpers in action as always .... " It implies a greater incentive to perhaps use some of the "alternative" platforms like Expanse, or Ethereum or any other number of them. People like to use bitcoin because of all the liquidity and for good reason, if someone were to make a $100k transaction on expanse there isn’t enough liquidity to sustain that sort of value, however with ethereum or litecoin or any of the other top 10 cryptos its possible. ”

Nobody noticed that the ETH price climb every time there are a supposed "Stress test"? It makes you wonder who is benefiting most from this "congestion"

? Everybody knows exactly what is going on. Full blocks. "Common solution" sounds weird as (last time I checked) the Core team viewed full blocks (leading to "fee market") as something desirable. They got what they preached for (perhaps bit too soon).

There has been a drop in the efficiency of bitcoin transactions lately, and developers have been discussing what’s going on, with the goal of finding a common solution.

-- Some interesting thoughts included.

http://cointelegraph.com/news/slowing-bitcoin-down-is-it-nature-or-politics