Who here uses Bitcoin for regular transactions (not trading)?

davebrewer (59) · 7 years ago

No one uses BTC to make regular day to day purchases. Your Visa card is much more functional than BTC for those daily purchases.

People either buy BTC with fiat and hold long term, as a hedge against fiat risk.

Or they buy BTC with fiat, so they can flip that over into alt coin market and slowly piss away their money with day trading

But maybe I'm too negative on day trading, LOL

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago

I hate the narrative "visa is just perfect for daily purchases". It is far from perfect, and Bitcoin used to work much better than visa.

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vimukthi (72) · 7 years ago

We already have Dash and then there is TenX, Monaco etc. No need to use Visa or that garbage BTC. Dash solved all the problems. That's why it's my #1 long term HODL currency.

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago

Never underestimate the network effect. The one and only reason why Bitcoin is still king of the cryptos.

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vimukthi (72) · 7 years ago

Amen.
But that network effect isn't going to last too long. Look at Yahoo! Nokia, GM, Motorola...etc. Anybody who freshly get into BTC will soon leave for Alt coins or at least BCH.

BTC is going the way of British Empire.

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago

Or, think about IRC.

In the 90s, IRC was the standard for online chat. Everyone that had an internet connection and wanted to do real-time chatting or "instant messaging" would do it through the IRC network. IRC still exists, and would probably still have been the standard chat protocol if one would have agreed on how to develop the protocol and the reference server software.

Instead the IRC network fragmented into lots of different networks. One of the biggest splits ended up more or less as a geographic divide between Europe (IRCnet) and the US (EFnet), due to some few IRCops arguing over some esoteric protocol details.

IRC has mostly been replaced by commercial "silos", ICQ being the first one, the user count of ICQ was around ten times the user count of IRC around year 2000.

I'm quite concerned that we'll get the same situation in the crypto currency scene ... lots of different crypto currencies competing with each other and attracting only the particularly interested users, and lots of different bank-fiat-solutions for transfering wealth used by the laymen. All siloizated, i.e. Facebook users can instantly and cheaply transfer money between themselves, etc. And I think Facebook will be one of the biggest banks in some few years.

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vimukthi (72) · 7 years ago

Perfect example. I was practically a history lesson as I wasn't even alive throughout most of the above incidents. Thanks for the info.

Currency competition is a wonderful thing. There will be a dot-com bubble like event(/s). But through all that, we'd achieve a much better future. BTC was a prototype. It did its work. It's time we build on top of that and create better products.

About the Facebook idea: check out WeChat (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wechat) and https://ico.nexus.social

Your future has been around for a while already.

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urbansteemers (42) · 7 years ago

What do u mean by that. Is btc the wave or nah?

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whitesj40 (44) · 7 years ago

Actually I agree with Dave. I like Bitcoin but we should not kid ourselves it is not yet ready for day to day use to pay for things. I can give a simple example. I am currently on long term assignment in India where they recently pulled a lot of the circulating currency effectively forcing people to cashless payments. People pay with various mobile phone apps which usually take a few minutes to clear. The problem is the lines at the grocery store check outs stretch for miles. The customer cannot leave until the transaction clears. Each one takes a few minutes and everyone waits. Imagine waiting 10 minutes for each one. Cash is by far the faster option at the moment. It will change. It must change. But dont kid yourselves that it is better yet. The one huge caveat to that is sending money overseas there is simply no comparison there . Cyrpto wins and wins vs the long winded and costly badgering by the banks on every personal detail about the transaction.

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago

You're saying that cash is still much more faster to process in a brick-and-mortar shop than bitcoin transactions, and you're right. It's needed with a very good PoS-system for any electronic payment means to be as fast as cash (except when the customer is an old lady counting hundreds of coins very slowly, or the clerk is inexperienced and don't know how to count the change). (I think that in the future, there won't be any cash register, the Point-of-Sale will be in the shop itself, instant micro transaction whenever you take something from the shelves in the supermarket and move it to the shopping cart - but I digress).

Anyway, I wasn't talking about cash - I was talking about Visa - or credit cards in general - there isn't a lot of competition in that market segment. I'm a late adopter to Bitcoin, I joined in March 2015. Back then Bitcoin was working pretty much optimal as a payment method. Anything Visa could do, Bitcoin could do better.

I could rant tens of kilobytes of text on how bad credit cards are. It was an eye-opener for me in 2010 when Wikileaks got boycotted by the credit cards - back then I understood the importance of Bitcoins, but unfortunately I was too busy with other projects to get properly involved. I wrote a long post about a particularly bad payment experience I had back at ebay.in, trying for more than a week to buy a cellphone there using my credit cards. I've also suddenly found myself stranded while being in-transit, unable to buy a bottle of water for my thirsty kids - surprisingly all my credit cards came up with "declined" in that kiosk.

Really. Everything Visa can do, bitcoin could do better - but that was two years ago. And yes, scaling is obviously an issue.

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urbansteemers (42) · 7 years ago

Wrd. But thise is facts!

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago (edited)

I was using Bitcoins (through mycelium, and some extent Core) to pay my son for doing house-work, sending and receiving money from my friends, spent some on charity, donating to mediawiki, I was buying stuff online, etc. Not anymore - and so far I haven't started promoting any alt-coin to replace bitcoin. Nowadays I'm only "trading" with bitcoins. (My strategy is to be a market maker in the domestic market and take a bit of commission on both sides - it has worked out great compared to holding fiat, but terrible compared to hodling bitcoins, and sometimes I've also been borrowing bitcoins and going in minus due to that).

I'm really quite worried, I believe the value of bitcoin is based on its promise as a viable means of payment. Once it cannot be used as payment, the only value left is speculation. An asset having no value except people buying it speculating that the value will grow even further ... well, I'm a bit concerned Bitcoin is heading for a role as"digital tulips".

As compared with alt-coins, Bitcoin gets it's value from the network effect, the brand name and arguably the strong security offered by miners. Bitcoin Cash doesn't have that. Most supporters of Bitcoin Cash hopes that Bitcoin Cash will overtake the role of Bitcoin. I think that if Bitcoin will experience a tulip-style market crash, it will be terrible news for all crypto, money will leave the cryptos in general.

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ancap47 (52) · 7 years ago

yep, and Peter Schiff will be gloating that he was right.

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andersrh (41) · 7 years ago

I use Bitcoin to transact to people I know. Because we know each other I set a low fee because it doesn't need to be included in the next block.

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago

Still there is a significant risk it won't be confirmed at all, if the fee is too low. Transactions usually time out after three days.

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andersrh (41) · 7 years ago

I have had one which was waiting for 4 days. It confirmed 2 days ago.

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago

"Transactions usually time out after three days" - 72 hours used to be the default in Core, it has been lifted to two weeks by now. Further, transactions can be purged from the local mempool dependent on memory constraint set, etc.

Transactions have no timestamps included, so a transaction can be rebroadcast by anyone - the sender, the receiver, any third party - either manually or automatically by the wallet software used.

Details aside, there is no guarantee that a low-fee transaction will confirm. I have experienced twice that a transaction did disappear and the original inputs got double-spent.

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andersrh (41) · 7 years ago

There is a risk of course and what I do won't be acceptible with people you do not know personally. I only accept low fee transactions from people I know very well. Looking forward to the Lightning protocol becomes useful.

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tobixen (62) · 7 years ago (edited)

It's not about trust, but about the potential mess caused by lost transactions.

In the good old days one of us could buy a round of beers in the bar, and everyone in the crowd could pay for the beer through their phones - it was easy and it was fire and forget.

Not anymore, nowadays the sender and recipient have to baby-sit the low-fee-transactions, and one almost needs to be a bitcoin expert to be able to send and receive payments with a proper but not too big fee paid, choosing weather to use or not to use RBF, eventually try to get the transaction "unstuck" through CPFP and other means, rebroadcast a timed-out transaction, etc.

Yes, lightning will eventually be good - but I am quite concerned that it's overhyped, hailed as a silver bullet while it's not.

For one thing I expect it will probably be at least a year until a majority of wallets supports lightning.

Further, the two parties needs to be connected via a payment route. I can easily see that it will be easy since "everyone" would like to connect with the biggest hubs, but then again, there is the centralization risk.

Also, it's needed to make one or two on-chain transactions to move funds into the lightning network, this may eventually become very expensive if we'll stick to the 1 MB block limit.

Finally, one has to decide weather to store the bitcoins in a payment channel or on a private key; every movement in or out of the lightning network (as far as I understand it) involves on-chain transactions (and it may be easier to move funds into the lightning network than out from it, I believe?).

I think Lightning is not so different from any alt-coin. It's fully possible to move value measured in bitcoins cheaply through ethereum, bitshares, ripple and probably several other alts.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read the whitepaper.

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andersrh (41) · 7 years ago

You are completely right. I'm a bit of a tech guy so I know how to fine tune the fee. But it's not user friendly. I am a bit concerned about Lightning too. I wait and see before I judge - because I don't know what to believe right now. I hope it is a move in the right direction - because I doubt any blockchain would ever be able to handle a Visa-like throughput.

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urbansteemers (42) · 7 years ago

Is lightning a good buy this week.

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https://blockchain.info/tx/3891bdc8d4d049c7cf08ee3f66a036e9190aea574a3e6819d9b9ee2ad8516d65

andersrh (41) · 7 years ago

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whitesj40 (44) · 7 years ago

I use Bitcoin every time i move Fiat money to the Alts.

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ancap47 (52) · 7 years ago

that's trading. So not for regular purchases?

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spiftheninja (54) · 7 years ago

If you manage your own privkeys and don't worry about the amount of blocks before your coins are confirmed, you can send for very cheap rates.. especially in the middle of the night.

Odd, but you just have to watch the fees. You can see the current fee stack and mempool load by checking this website

It all depends how many inputs you are consuming which therefore is in direct control of your transfer size in KB which is what determines your fee.

So if you use coin control features, and select only 1 input for your send.. then set a manual fee of 0.0001124 BTC/KB (which are currently confirming no problem), your send will be less than .00002 for ANY amount of coins sent.

Keep in mind, the ONLY thing that matter is the amount of inputs you are consuming. More inputs = larger size in block = higher fee

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spiftheninja (54) · 7 years ago (edited)

EDIT: The fee I calculated there is $0.08. 8 cents. I think most people can afford 8 cents to send any amount of money.

With that being said, I send BTC a lot with very little fees. You just need to know what you're doing.

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drewkin (41) · 7 years ago

Meaningless post. Clearly just trying to promote bitcoin cash. Do you have anything meaningful to post?

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afukichi (59) · 7 years ago

I am the same opinion, too.
I think the current situation of BTC is quite expensive.

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daudimitch (65) · 7 years ago

Could I buy some BCH off of you, are you on PAL chat or anywhere of chatting

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ancap47 (52) · 7 years ago

How did you want to pay?

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daudimitch (65) · 7 years ago

what's most convenient for you?

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ancap47 (52) · 7 years ago

Any kind of crypto is probably best. Why don't you just use shapeshift?

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daudimitch (65) · 7 years ago

I am a collector of crypto for now, not really spending anything, I want to see if I can do a Bitconnect loan using BCH, I see it as an option that is available, my crypto holding are low and I see much more returns holding them, even if I convert them to BTC, the high priority fees of Shapeshift would eat into whatever BTC I end up with, I think we would have a pull back in BTC and we would see a run in BCH, that's the trend I am seeing...are you in the discord

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urbansteemers (42) · 7 years ago

@ancap47 Awesome info as i am new. I have coinbase how do i het my bitcoin cash out to use that?

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jlcrypto (57) · 7 years ago

100% with you my friend
Bitcoin technology is far far from many altcoins
And the fees in Bitcoin blockchain is ridiculous. It doesn't do better than centralised lobbies

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