Topic: [Aug 2022] Mempool empty! Use this opportunity to Consolidate your small inputs! - page 6. (Read 88487 times)

It depends: with Monero, you could do this 200 times cheaper, and more anonymous.
By bank, I can do it without cost, as long as it's SEPA and in euro. It'll be more anonymous to random people, but not anonymous to my bank and government.

Of course! They can get away with it, so why wouldn't they? Consumers can still deposit a few times per year without fees, but businesses can't.

Bitcoin addresses on the other hand (2^160 times 4 for the different address formats) are more than enough to serve all of humanity

Good point. Miners could indeed add full movies to blocks. But that can be fixed in a consensus rule: the moment we increase the block size, we set a minimum fee of 1 sat/byte for all transactions. If it's less, other miners will reject the block.

Gold isn't scarce, it's just hard to get. There's enough gold in the earth's core to cover the entire planet with half a meter of gold. That's about the total amount of gold ever mined per person.

Actually.... Everyone mentions that. What truely amazes me is that people just accept it. Barely anyone points at central banks for causing infinite inflation. This quote comes to mind:

Mining pools reduce decentralization, but think of them as the equivalent of states/armies in the BTC ecosystem.

When did states/armies appear and why?

They started with the dawn of civilization 10000 years ago when small tribes/bands of people started forming bigger groups to defend themselves better and to even attack other, weaker tribes.

Mining pools have the exact same philosophy: small miners banded together to form bigger entities to make solving blocks easier and far more predictable than solo mining.

What I'm trying to say is that it's a natural occurring pattern. Everything starts decentralized and slowly leans into centralization. Same thing happened to food production with agriculture (hunter gatherers got their food in a decentralized manner, unlike farmers).

It is what it is. I'm not saying it's pleasant.

I completely agree with you, you are right! With or without the presence of Ordinals, Bitcoin isn't practical for those who want to use it regularly.

I have a problem with the fact that they found a loophole in code and use it to embed the data, create the false sense of non-fungibility and scam thousands or probably millions of people. I do not wish to censor transactions, I wish to censor abuse.

By the way, there is an evil part of me in my mind that thinks that Ordinals are a mechanism of evolution in crypto space. I hope you understand what I mean

He was the guy that, you know, would have the correct answer to any question. I sometimes check his profile and read his posts because the knowledge that he had was very valuable.

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What I wrote below, is completely my honest opinion.

Bitcoin was created for pure p2p transactions without the involvement of 3rd party, Satoshi's vision was great! But the problem is that Satoshi's Bitcoin become popular and everything that he ever wanted for Bitcoin, went wrong. People with lots of money decided to buy Bitcoins and created Centralized Exchanges. CEXs hold a significant amount of Bitcoins. Besides CEXs, there are crypto wallet providers like Blockchain.com and Nexo (that lets you have a visa card and buy things with automatically converting Bitcoins into USD). On top of that, two countries, The USA and China are the biggest miners and pool owners. 56.1% of hashrate goes to Chinese pools, 33.6% to the United States and the rest of them - other countries.
Bitcoin failed in decentralization and in the avoidance of 3rd party financial systems. Pseudo-anonymity? It's only getting easier and easier to deanonymize Bitcoin users. On top of that, Bitcoin ETFs got approved, which basically means if you can't beat them, join them strategy and financial institutes got closer again. Mark my words, soon miners will be forced to filter transactions, i.e. disapprove transactions that government doesn't want to be approved.

Satoshi's vision was great but I think that conservative politics of developers killed this project. Bitcoin needs many updates, to fill loopholes and fix what's wrong. 2024 and 1 MB (4 MB) block size? At least if we don't change much of the code, okay, but 1 MB block size really sucks. But I think it's politics too. There are part of influential people who make money from current mess because they make tons of money. Bitcoin lost it's function as a P2P currency and instead become a store of a value.
But there is a hope, always!

Back in 2009, certain banks were charging fixed transaction fees. It was a common practice for ATM withdrawals, wire transfers, and foreign transactions. This is probably what Satoshi was talking about. I can't tell the same is true today. I can neither tell that Bitcoin is in the exact same form as it was in 2009.

Here we go again.

Just because a fool thinks his satoshi is more valuable, it doesn't make the currency non-fungible.

Bitcoin block space is auctioned every 10 minutes, based on the law of demand and supply. And Ordinal users are very demanding. I see no problem with that.

Bitcoin Layer 1 is far from a perfect payment method, regardless of the presence of Ordinals. Transactions can take hours to settle and incur variable fees depending on the current demand and supply for block space. These factors alone make it an unattractive medium of exchange for point-of-sale transactions.

This is why I prefer calling it an asset layer. You don't move assets every day.

Pretty much.

Exactly. Minimum relay fee. That's the default local policy. You can change it to 0.5, or 0.001, or even 0. This is done for DDoS protection I think, but it's totally possible to adjust it if there's demand for it. In the worst case, they can send their movies directly to the mining pools.

(I missed him too  )

Yes, I experienced that moment years ago when I was travelling but I don't remember the country. By the way, I don't understand what's an issue for them. Don't they get charged the same percentage for $1 and $10?

Ordinal transactions aren't normal transactions. Money and Bitcoin too, are fungible. Ordinals try to make each Satoshi non-fungible and on top of that, they also try to value blocks (halving block) and the place of ordinals transaction in each block (someone paid 6.73 Bitcoin on transaction to make his/her transaction appear number one in particular, 840000th block).

Sending dust from one address to another will be perfectly legal if JPEGs aren't embedded. If someone is willing to create dust transactions and pay for it from their own pocket, then they can do it, no one can stop but I'm glad you mentioned this. This only proves that Bitcoin is far from perfect payment method. Today, it's very easy to abuse Bitcoin. Miners, if they collab, can easily increase transaction fees cause every money they spend on fees, will end up in their pocket but it will make transaction expensive for everyone else and that's where they steal money from other people. Like I said above, I also think that there might be some deal between ordinals and mining pools.

Netherlands is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. By the way, check Call Of Duty - Modern Warfare 2 Amsterdam Mission. You'll feel at home

So, when you buy something and pay with cash, Greek merchants hide the fact that they sold something and evade taxes this way?

1 sat/vByte is the minimum relay fee setting that nodes use, oeleo told me if I am not wrong, when I asked a question about fees and empty mempool.

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.11405

Things were very different back in 2009:

1) Revolut/FinTech didn't exist.

You got charged for exchange rate fees.

2) SEPA cost €1 and took 2-3 days.

These days SEPA instant costs €0 and offers instant settlement.

Fees are not an issue, not only because they're low enough, but also CBDC will offer zero fees via ECB, so that excuse won't hold any water.

Hell, if you visit some FB groups you'll see an image of a €50 banknote where it tells you that it "vanishes" after a few transactions due to card fees.

Nobody will mention the fact that the exact same €50 banknote buys less and less stuff over time (covert robbery by ECB's inflation). €100 today has the same purchasing power of €50 back in 2020.

People are OK with inflation stealing their purchasing power (they cry all day about it, but they do nothing to save themselves) and very few of them are aware of CBDC's real dangers (carbon credits, social credit score).

Bitcoin (and physical gold for less tech-savvy people) is the only way they have to preserve their wealth.

Interesting.  Do you have references for this? Never saw this post of him

I was having this impression that in 2009, banks did charge a lot more than today, and the whitepaper made a lot more sense back then. You'll remember better. Did they?

The reason Greek merchants don't want to accept debit cards is to evade taxes, not transaction fees. Truth be told.

The minimum fee is not 1 sat/vb. It is 0 sat/vb. And the minimum after that is 1 sat per transaction. Then 2 sats per transaction, and it goes on and on.

Property sent through cyberspace within minutes. Overseas. Pseudonymously. Unstoppably. It was, still is and will always be magic Internet money. 

You mean they also charge you for depositing banknotes in Netherlands?

Charging ATM withdrawals would make far more sense... banks want the cash back into the system, not the other way around.

It's never going to happen, only L2 solutions are going to save the day.

Just like IPv4 (2 ^ 32 addresses) was never designed to serve 8 billion people with multiple devices (PCs, mobile, consoles etc.)

Nobody has tried to abandon the tried and trusted IPv4, they just created a new fork with zero backwards compatibility (IPv6) that will never reach 100% adoption for obvious reasons.

It depends on where exactly you're located and how much banks charge you there.

Compared to SWIFT, it's cheap and fast, yeah, but some people want to use BTC for daily payments.

IMHO, BTC follows the exact same trajectory as gold... people used to use gold coins for daily payments hundreds of years ago, but not anymore.

Yes, Satoshi wanted to create p2p cash, but at the same time, he also said that BTC is a "boring grey metal" (yes, Satoshi started the "digital gold narrative", not BTC maxis as BSV folks would like you to believe ).

Chances are he knew that BTC cannot fulfill both objectives simultaneously, at least not in L1.

If he wanted BTC to be more attractive as p2p cash, he would have made it inflationary (no halvings), not deflationary. More like DOGE, more like iron than gold.

Asking to keep halvings and low mainnet fees at the same time is like asking to keep your cake and eat it too. Would be nice if possible, but the math just doesn't add up.

Is it just me that thinks 1-3 usd is extremely cheap for an international transfer, pseudo anonymous,  confirmed within 30 minutes.

You can transfer 100 or 10,000 usd, same fee.

Not all daily transactions are 50 cents coffees.

I love getting paid in bitcoin here!

Netherlands.

Lol. That's cute
The first bank I checked with rates for merchants: €7.96 + 0.26%. They made cash very expensive, so they can claim card payments are cheaper. Card payment rates go from €0.05 to €0.40 per transaction. To get back on-topic again: I'd argue Bitcoin fees should be lower than card fees to be competitive for adoption. LN should be able to do that, on-chain it's not going to happen anymore.

Which country is that?

I know it's not free to deposit coins in many countries, but banknotes are still accepted for free via ATMs.

It's not possible to avoid issuing a receipt with a POS, because they're interconnected with the tax registry.

With cash payments it's always possible to not issue a receipt and thus not pay VAT (13-24%).

It's kinda risky if they catch you though, because it's compulsory to issue receipts for every type of payment (including BTC).

With the minimum of 1 sat/byte, storing movies would still cost $650,000 per GB at current Bitcoin price.

Could it be the €2 is off the books and won't get taxed, while the €1.99 is handled officially?

There is a legislation that says card payments up to €10 should only charge 0,5% fees. Some banks have already implemented it.

For example, one coffee that costs €2,00 is only going to pay €0,01 fee. Is that a lot?

As a merchant in a competitive economy (tons of take-away cafeterias) is it worth losing a potential income of €1,99, just because you're greedy and you want €2,00?

Many tourists prefer using cards (especially Revolut for zero exchange rate fees), so you're going to lose lots of money if you don't accept POS payments.

So even if the government hadn't imposed POS payments, it makes sense to accept them voluntarily.

0,5% loss is nothing if you take into account that BTC can easily go +5% in a single day. Of course it can also go -5%, but long-term wise we all know it can go a lot higher than that.

So if you're smart enough (spoiler alert: most people/merchants aren't), it totally makes sense to convert your fiat income into BTC on a daily basis.

Cards aren't the real danger, CBDC is for reasons I have explained many times before, so I won't repeat myself.

Try this experiment next time after wanting to buy something:


There is a small chance (1-2%) that they may ask you what Bitcoin is and how they could potentially accept it in their shop...

You may even attract their interest even more if you tell them that Bitcoin charges zero fees for the recipient (merchant), only the client pays fees (could be zero with LN).

That's just a simple way to spread the orange pill with minimal effort. (bonus: small talk hones your social skills)

Or a few spammers who want to store 4k movies on-chain. With 700 MB block clearing up the mempool every 10 minutes, you could store gigabytes of movies for a nickle.

In my place, they do hate it when you're asking to pay with card for anything lower than 5€. They'll find an excuse that their POS is broken, and accept only cash for the moment.

Edit: 12 sat/vb high priority, consolidate!

I assumed that 100 GB per day was meant to be further in the future. But just imagine that: that's about 500 million Bitcoin transactions per day, which would mean mass adoption has been reached.

It's funny you mention that: here, it's the opposite. More and more merchants including government institutions refuse cash, and only accept card payments. We're a debit card country though, so fees are a lot less than with creditcards.

From these quotes I understand that Satoshi wanted to convey that the costs of mediation and the oligopoly of financial institutions is what makes micro-transactions impractical. You must have noticed as well that some merchants will hesitate to accept card payments for a soda drink or cigarettes. The cost of the transaction fees may significantly cut into or even exceed the profit margin on such low-cost items.

However, if we take into consideration the fact that Satoshi was thinking of the blockchain growing by 100 GB every day, then it's probably plausible to assume he'd envision cheap on-chain transactions. As I have mentioned before, Satoshi is not the ideal figure to be regarded as the unquestionable authority or ultimate arbiter of truth for Bitcoin.

And Ordinals send dust from one address to another, which is perfectly legal from the protocol's perspective. They don't abuse anything.

You can neither prohibit someone from using the blockchain as a storage.

I assume, these quotes basically mean that Satoshi wanted Bitcoin transactions to cost low.
o_e_l_e_o asked me this question and it really lingered in the back of my mind. Centralized exchanges don't abuse Bitcoin on a protocol level. You send Bitcoin from your address to another address, this is perfectly legit and doesn't abuse anything while ordinals send images. You can't ban centralized exchanges, that's impossible, you can't prohibit someone from getting coins from multiple people. I, as an individual, can basically ask you to send me coins to my address, send me KYC documents and then I'll offer you to exchange crypto with me. If I do it with thousands of people, I'm basically becoming a centralized exchange. It's impossible to block centralization but on the other hand, do you notice how centralized exchanges remove Monero from listings? That's why I am saying that Monero is everything that people want Bitcoin to be.

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Mempool is probably cursed If there is not a spam of ordinals, there is a spam of UTXO consolidations. Blocks are full of huge transactions. Basically each transaction comes with more than 1000 inputs

What would the fees have been if you didn't get this wrong? Were it tons of outputs?

But $760 sounds nasty, life goes on though!

Good! Unfortunately, you had to suffer a financial loss to do it, but it's good that you decided to abandon it. There have been several issues with Trust Wallet recently, and anyone serious about bitcoin should really stay away from it. I have read stories about coins disappearing, people not being able to send them despite setting appropriate fees, random error messages here and there. It's a bad wallet.