Topic: Bitcoin usage and misaligned expectations - page 5. (Read 1164 times)

You make a great point there. Right now Bitcoin is used by institutions storing or transfering huge amounts of value. Also it is used even more for speculation. Most people and institutions that own Bitcoin prefer not to spent it, but instead hold it in their hardware wallet and have it probably buried in their backyard.

We talk about pizza day and every single time we have to count the Bitcoin's spent in today's dollar value. Everyone is actually claiming that you should not use Bitcoin but store it instead. From my point of view Bitcoin is not store of value. It is not a piece of art that will be sold at an auction.

The purpose of any currency is transfer of value for exchange of goods. In the case of Bitcoin it is digital money. Bitcoin is obviously deflationary, meaning prices of goods become cheaper in time as they cost less and less Bitcoins. So people think they should store it instead of spenting it. This is not adoption though. This is just speculation. Without people using Bitcoin we cannot see a major shift in public view in favour of us. For real adoption to happen we need to be able to buy a cup of coffee with bitcoin, without paying double its price and waiting in que for the transaction to confirm.

I have high hopes that we have a few of the best developers working for this. Otherwise I would have just kept speculating about price and not even caring.

You can't judge bitcoin's success because of this zero fee thing because that is not how cryptocurrencies work. They probably find failure because they can't make something out of bitcoin because they are probably buying at a high price and complains when it is low. And I don't understand this fee thing. I mean, is the fee too high? I don't think it is too high and we are already dealing with fees even without cryptocurrency.

Apart from being positive that Bitcoin will be used for "almost-zero fee" coffee transactions at some point in the future, I want to focus on what BTC is good for right now. Think of the biggest trucks in the world, such as Caterpillar 797B, Hitachi EH5000, Liebherr T 282 B and others.



If you will try to deliver pizza on them, your business will fail obviously. But are those trucks a  failure? No.

My point is that today's Bitcoin can be compared to those powerful trucks in a sense that it is a very good tool for massive, over $1,000, transactions, especially when they are transnational ones.

wright!

Why can't you answer, and always accuse me of "meandering", or "derailing", or doing "social drama"? I want to know your opinion.


Of course there is, game-theoretically the fees do. If a miner or a pool ignores this fact, other miners and pools will take advantage of it, and kill the other miner or pool that ignores.


I believe Antpool used to do it, but why?

I am not gonna say that Bitcoin has failed to be a micro transactions currency, but i say there is a large for improvements, maybe now it is not as noticeable since the market is still stable and there is not as much transactions in the blockchain, but back in 2017 when the the price skyrocketed people went crazy and so were the fees, and you had to pay like 10$ for 1$ transaction and if you don't your transaction would take for hours and hours to be confirmed, it did die out after the price started going down again in 2018 but who says that it won't happen again, if we really want bitcoin to thrive and be considered as a payment method like in the real world at local shops and restaurants, we need to find a solution to that.

Those who truly understand the nature of Bitcoin will not question about such fee.
We are already paying all sorts of fees in every single item that we purchased, and we are not complaining about it.
Bitcoin transaction is very transparent, the reason why we can immediately see the fees unlike our everyday expenses, fees are integrated with them already that we couldn't see the real value of the item.

to address the second point.. your derailing into th social drama of altcoins.. (you keep trying to do this) stay on point please
but to quickly brush over it. if a coin has utility where people want to use it and are happy then its not a failure.
most forks are not popular because they dont have the merchant acceptance and so although theres more buffer(more technical potential) the potential does not reveal success or failure.


the bitcoin technology works fine.
a hashed block has enough strength to give people trust that it makes it hard/near impossible for another party to re-org a fresh chain quickly/easily. thus people will trust if something is confirmed, they can relax and treat it as such,

what people dont realise is there is nothing that commands, enforces that a certain transaction should get included under guarantee.
no fee, no format, no rule ensures a transaction is guaranteed to be confirmed.
mining pools make the decision of what they want to put into a block. they could leave a block empty, or fill it with zero fee's and ignore transactions with fee's.

for instance BTCC had an exchange and for the BTCC exchange withdrawals the BTCC pool would add those transactions in at zero fee and prioritise them. thus ignoring random transactions in the network even if fee's were high. that was their choice.

pools do not ned to fill blocks. they can simply have half filled blocks and set min fee at say 666sats a byte.. or fill a block with an average of 333sats a block to get the same end total value

trying to presume that blocks need to stay at 1mb legacy just to push fee's up is bad economics of HUMANS and nothing to do with bitcoin tech.
bitcoin tech can sort out fee issues without the need to stifle blocksizes.
bitcoin tech can sort out fee issues when pools decide they need income from fee's

right now at an average of 25c a tx 3000 tx=$75
pools wont waste time filling blocks with transactions of 25c if the delay of doing so risks gtting their $100,000 reward
pools would rather empty block if they could to gaina few second advantage to win the $100k rather than fill blocks.

pools only fill blocks for personal moral reasons of putting something into blocks will keep users happy to continue using bitcoin so they have users to buy their $100k reward.
they dont care about fee's as an income. and wont care for decades.
what they do care about is if users are forced into paying too much just to make a transaction that they no longer want to use bitcoin and thus no one wants to buy bitcoin from pools

Then they need to learn more about bitcoin because bitcoin needs that fee to make the network running and with the fee, it will also give support for the network to stay for a long time.
Besides that, the fee is something that is included in the transaction whether we like or not, and the fees are the part of the transaction itself.
Besides that, it doesn't make sense that you can get more bitcoin in many ways, but you don't want to pay the fee.
And I think that is a failure if they think like that.

If its a failure then we wont see on how big the community is as of this moment.It might miss some expectations in terms of payment options but it do have some revolutionary benefits that
other things cant provide.

If in spite of the great popularity of bitcoin and the great price it has reached these days, it has not yet being used massively in real life, maybe there is some truth in those who claim that the original bitcoin project has failed, especially when we observe that the bitcoin market has fallen into the hands of speculators, who seem to be the only ones who decide the course that the cryptoeconomy will take in the medium term.

Bitcoin isn’t without its fair share of problems, no rational person would deny that. But it would be parochial to conclude that bitcoin as a project has failed in its entirety. Bitcoin fails on two accounts, as both a stable store of value, and as a convenient medium of exchange. This is a far cry from the intention of its creator, who had in mind a vision of a convenient peer-to-peer electronic cash system–a stable form of payment.

Bitcoin main chain is not suitable for coffee and micro transactions. Several hundreds of thousands of such transactions perday could lead to serious congestion.
This is why we have Lightening Network , though not very usable at the moment. Hopefully when it becomes usable, it will handle the small transactions mostly while bitcoin Main chain handles mostly the large ones.

What constitutes "cheap"?

Once we establish that, I guess we can talk about the economic implications and how it affects the design. I strongly believe that the sustainability of the system has to be the top priority, much more important than cheap fees.

All manner of economic and scaling designs should be tested. If cheap fees (with regard to "the masses") are truly important, there's an abundance of Bitcoin copycats with bigger blocks and cheaper fees. I suspect that Bitcoin's value stems from elsewhere than cheap fees though, and that there will be strong demand for Bitcoin's block space even at orders of magnitude higher fees than seen today.

Then is Bitcoin truly a failure? Without meandering, and the social drama, tell us directly. Because your reply hints that it's a "failure", but the reality is going against the people, like you, that say it.

Going to the other side, without the social drama, would you say that the Bitcoin forks with bigger blocks, and almost-zero fees are truly "successful"?

That's exactly what I thought too. I guess it just boils down to compromise of cheap-enough fees and good-enough miner support. It probably won't be cheap enough for a single cup of coffee, but should be viable enough for not-so-smallish transactions.

both block rewards and fees are the compensation but now that each block is giving miners $100k+, fees aren't and should not be for compensation.

as for second layer, in order for it to work the underlying layer (meaning the on-chain transactions) need to be cheap otherwise nobody can open up a channel if it costs $50 to do so.

It is not a failure because even if it had the cheapest fee it would still not be possible to use bitcoin to pay for a worldwide coffee because of the lack of cryptos laws. We focus a lot on the issue of low rate, high adoption and high prices. but we ignore the probation of governments (laws for cryptos). We have to have influential politicians who like cryptos and who can pass good laws for cryptos.

I see. I was always under the impression that block rewards were supposed to be the compensation, and transaction fees were cherry on top. I also read somewhere some time ago that the sheer number of transactions at mass adoption would continue to make mining viable even at low fees and no block rewards, but I guess prices trending down does complicate that. It's looking like a lot of the early ideas have been short-sighted.

I guess everything does make sense though, considering the fact that we're looking into off-chain solutions for scaling. I just thought that the game plan was always to keep on-chain transactions relatively cheap (i.e. still very viable for people who prefer on-chain transactions), though that does defeat the purpose of trying to move bulk of the transactions off-chain.

Of course it's not a failure, but I like to keep in mind if the taxes were almost zero for coffee transactions it would be much more successful.
It's a mistake to fake everything is perfect just to avoid critics. It's necessary to listen what are people concerns about bitcoin to try to fix and improve these points, always aiming the excellence.