Topic: What's your biggest problem with Bitcoin - page 111. (Read 135106 times)

Exactly. Confirmations need to be more faster as it takes lot of time for transaction to get confirmed. And if this is the case it would be difficult to pay at shops as you can't get the goods until the payment is confirmed and it would become time consuming and won't help at the time of emergencies.

Currently BTC transfer times  I hope with time will be better 

For me, probably the transaction confirmation times.

Acutally, No.  A very common reason (if not the most common) for refinancing a loan is so that you pay LESS overall.  Here's an example: Imagine that you have clocked up a $10,000 unsecured debt on a credit card at 15%pa.  Instead of paying this high rate, you go to a bank and take out a $10,000 loan (secured against an asset of yours) at 7% and pay off the credit card.  You have now made the interest payments smaller and thus will pay less.   Another example is when a central bank lowers its interest rate which causes the other banks to offer lower rate loans-- people often refinance their existing loans to take advantage of the new lower rates.


I've already demonstrated in my first post how it is possible to payback interest even though the total amount due is greater than 100% of the hard currency supply.  It's possible because we can arrange loans such that interest due by different parties will cancel each other.  I gave the simplest example with just two protagonists, but in the real world it involves more actors, eg: the banks.  In the real world it is the banks which handle the cancelling of interest.  This results from the fact that the banks continuously borrow off each other to balance their books and a bank only pays back what is due after the cancellation of interest owed to each other.


What does this particular example prove about anything in general?  If you're stupid enough to take out a long at 5% per month and have no hope of paying it back then you deserve to go bankrupt!   I've not said that ALL loans can be paid back,  I've only said that loans taken out wisely can be paid back.

For your general enlightenment:  If you can earn more profit than what you will pay in interest from money supplied by a loan then the loan is a wise move (of course you have to also balance it against the risk involved in deriving your profit-- equations that compute this are very well known).  If you will not earn more profit than what you will pay in interest than the loan is a very bad idea!  It's that simple!  Owing debt baring interest can make you money in the right circumstances.

But I would still have a debt, for infinity. I do not want to be cleaning windows/rely on a loan my entire life. Paying a loan with another one only makes the other loan a bigger one, original plus interest. And so the debt grows and grows, because I do not have to pay the interest immediatly, there could be more interest paid than there is BTC available.

If all BTC is given as a loan, with a 5% interest, you have to pay back 105% of the available bitcoin, how would you go about that? And interest on loans work on a per month basis, so 5% per month.. that adds up each month, let's say that 50% of all BTC is in a loan, for 5% after a whole year it will be 62% on interest alone to be paid. No matter how simple you example may be, you cannot expect this to work if the numbers do not work out.



I know that debt is the biggest business, it is the basis of the world economy to collapse,
It was the the splitting up and repackiging debts and selling them again, splitting them up, selling, splitting, selling, split sell, that boosted the bubble and made it explode with a bang.

Access to resources and hogging them for big money is what made the economy. It does take investing to get infrastructure, but it does not mean the loan system is not flawed. Privatising things like telecommunication, water and infrastructure has made it into a business, with the main goal optimising the profits, not the product quality.  Nestle is even trying to get water off of the list of primary neccesaties to boost their sales of bottled water. But that is a whole different discussion.

What you say is most likely true, ie.the bank wouldn't accept your offer to clean their windows.  However, what you can certainly do is go to another bank and tell/prove to them that you have a started a new window cleaning business that is profitable and because of this predictable income get them to pay of the existing loan by taking out a new loan.  This, by-the-way, is called refinancing a loan and is done all the time.

In case you didn't know: supplying, buying and selling debt is the biggest business on the planet!  Without debt almost none of our economy would exist.  Over history the use of debt, (ie: the ability to get something now and pay for it later with interest) is the way by which we have financed the development clean drinking water, abundant food, education, modern medicine, modern transportation, computers and telecommunication, etc, in fact just about everything that you use.   Note that the countries with the least developed banking services are the most backward, undeveloped third world countries that exist.  There is nothing wrong with debt that is used wisely.

Regardless of all this, the whole point of my original post still stands: I supplied an example which demonstrates cleanly and simply that the claim that it is impossible to ultimately pay off interest in a world with a finite money supply is NOT true.

You can borrow and bring back the BTC lended, even with interest, or in a pay-it-forward way, leaving out the BTC interest. It might work in a perfect world and a transparent one where everyone knows who lended who money and what to cross out in the end, but the world is too complex for this not to go wrong somewhere making it impossible to pay of interest, people hodling their coins till it reaches the moon, scammers, loansharks. We do not live in an ideal world.

I could go to my bank and say: "Hey, I have some debt, but I have made a nice drawing you can hang in your office, or I could wash your windows and we call it even right?" on which the bank will reply "yeah, 'right'. Someone call security!".

Getting paid for services is not the same as interest. Paying it forward might be, leaving the money where it goes and in a weird butterfly effect like manner it will somehow return to you  indirectly. You cannot rely on that. Somewhere along the line it will get stuck because of a simple thing called greed.

The reason why I had Ben buy the tree was to keep the example simple-- ie, it used only two protagonists.  Obviously in real life there are maybe many other people involved, eg: Ben would loan the money from a bank as you pointed out.  However, it is conceivable that such a situation as I outlined could occur-- eg: Ben bought the trees because Satoshi didn't need them all (all the wood was really worth 70BTC whereas Satoshi only wanted 55BTC worth), so Ben kept some himself for his own cooking, warmth, to build a hut and so that he could sell some to other people.  In fact I know of a situation where something like this happened in real life.  A while ago in my country some of the banks started selling off their physical buildings to investors with the condition that they be rented back to them, the bank even supplied a loan for you to buy them if you didn't have the cash.

Regardless of this though, the point I was trying to make is that the claim that it is impossible to pay off interest in a world that is based on a finite money supply is wrong.  This example clearly disproves this claim.  By-the-way, it is not the only way to disprove it, just one of the simplest examples.  Another example that is easy to describe is one where the person who owes the interest pays it back with labour or goods instead of money.  I didn't use this because I wanted to show that you could destroy the interest with "money" alone (where money includes debt in its definition).

Why should ben buy the trees? He could offer his service and his axe to chop the trees for Satoshi and then get a decent meal from Satoshi.  So Ben is not hungry anymore. Satoshi still has his 50 BTC and no one owes anyone anything?

And your story would be a bit different in real life, the bitcoin loansharkt who will loan you the money do not want to buy back the trees, they will not make a deal with you where you get the same debt to cancel eachother out. You will build up and build up debt upon debt and then we are back again where we started from, a banking system and virtual BTC that has no backing at all by anything but an agreement between you and the loanshark, thus creating bitcoin out of thin air made possible.

Bitcoin is not just about a currency, it is about rethinking where money comes from and how to prevent that people will find ways to make money out of thin air without anything in return but more money. That is what is wrong with fiat, the ones making the money are lending it and want it back with interest, but hey, if I make a loan of something that is limited by me and I want back more, the only way to get more is make more en lend it to get it back again.

Please rethink the way we work, get paid and rewarded for our services. The biggest problem with BTC is that people see it too much as just a coin and a nice way to make money by investing. It is a revolution and we're on the train to the big breaktrhough in history!

which exchanger charged you 5% fee? are you sure? you said it twice.

most exchangers have fees in range of 0.2% to 0.5% where some of them charge fixed fee percent and some charge you in accordance with your trading amount history. and it is not high at all IMO.

besides fees are a necessity in exchangers, because this is the legit way for them to make money for their services and also with 0 fees, it is easy to spam and make unreal volume on the exchanger. so it somehow prevents it to some extent

I'm a Newbie and I guess my biggest problem is: "Where do I find answers to questions that I have related to Bitcoin Core." Sure this forum is a good start, but I don't always have time to go through all the information on this forum in order to answer what I consider to be questions about the software and how it works. For instance:

1. Today I installed Bitcoin Core, 32bit version, on a spare computer running Windows 7, with 2GB of RAM. I plan to run this as a full node. Is running Bitcoin on 2 separate computers okay, one desktop and one laptop? Why does the new computer only have 8 outgoing connections and no incoming, yet the laptop had 17 connections at the time it was checked? Is this based on the amount of time the software has been running? Should I use a separate port forwarded instead of the 8333 used on the other computer? If so, how do I tell the program to use this new port?

2. How do you "Unlock" your wallet and/or is it necessary to do that?

Do you see what I mean? Maybe a good "Help File" would be a start. I think this is a big problem for me when I need to get additional information on how certain commands are used, etc.

What you're saying still isn't true because you are forgetting that loans can be used to cancel each other.  Here is a simple example:  image that Satoshi who is cold and has a broken arm has 50BTC, a forest of trees and food while hungry Ben has nothing but an axe.  Ben borrows 50Btc from Satoshi to be repaid at the end of the month with 10% interest.  Ben then buys the trees and some food from Satoshi for 50BTC.  Ben chops the trees into firewood which is now worth 55BTC.  Satoshi buys the wood with 50BTC cash and agreement to pay the extra 5BTC at the end of the month (effectively he is borrowing 5 virtual BTC from Ben).  At the end of the month Ben pays Satoshi 50BTC and they agree that the two debts of 5BTC cancel each other and that everything has been made good, ie: there is no debt remaining to anyone at all.  

The important thing to note is that without the use of loans Satoshi's trees would have never been chopped, Satoshi would remain cold and Ben would have starved!  There is nothing inherently wrong with interest bearing debt as long as it is used wisely.  Everyday around the world interest bearing debt facilitates trade that would not occur otherwise.

My only problem with Bitcoin is that not enough people use it yet.  That problem is being fixed every day. 

We just have to wait until Bitcoin payments become more popular and one confirmation becomes instant. It would be great if we could shorten the delay before the first confirmation because that's what matters for people who want to pay in a store or a restaurant. Maybe there would be a way to recognize small transactions, like smaller than 0.01 BTC and allow them to get the first confirmation quicker.

The time to receive some confirmations is the most frustrating fact in bitcoins.

The problem is that if there is no fee when you send transaction your transaction will not get verified.

too many unanswered questions with the whole mt gox collapse.

If they can go down, then whose next??

also the evidence of fraudulent exchange activity causing the price spike in late 2013.

For me, the biggest problem is the price at which I should buy and should sell for earning profits.

My biggest problem with BTC is that I was late!

I arrived too late. The party was over and everybody was drunk.
Now we're still cleaning that old mess.

yes for sure you can find someone who want to do exchange for you. But the fees are tipically "high" 5%, a lot of people find this like a problem because if u want to buy btc you lose 5% at the moment of the exchange, plus the value is super volatile and if u have to buy something expensive you can easily lose purchasing power, IMHO i think move fiat to bitcoin still needs to be revised to improve the situation