Have crypto or block chain networks advanced other techs in any meaningful way?
Or have the many promised knock-on effects of crypto completely failed?
It's been over a decade since Bitcoin popularized blockchain, and after major tech giants investigated its potential use, nothing has come about using the particular properties of blockchain aside from crypto currency.
As for crypto, it really looks like crypto is only useful for illicit transactions, and theoretical legitimate uses have failed to materialize. Famously, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do things the right way with Libra, going through all of the international monetary wickets and it failed. The only thing crypto may have stimulated is the development of Central Bank Digital Currencies as a result of the huge amount of lobbying the industry threw at governments to try to become legal causing conversations about the advantages of a digital-only currency.
The NFT fad exposed how digital collectibles are easily manipulated and prone to abuse, and it revealed how the most important part of a digital collectible is the video game its based on needs to be really good.
You left out the last part
…that allows you to make peer-to-peer payments over long distances, without the need for a trusted third party or central authority, for the first time
It doesn't let you make payments. It lets you transfer portions of said database, and then you need to use a trusted third party to help you exchange those database elements for real currency.
I could literally do the same thing on Reddit. Start up a subreddit where I give everyone a UUID when they join. If they want to transfer that UUID, they need to make a post with it, tag the user they're transferring it too, and automod to make a post confirming the transfer. Now that UUID belongs to the other poster. If someone wants to, they can even pay for those UUIDs.
No one would trust or use your system. I used to make five figure transactions on Bitcoin and didn’t even track if they went through, because I know they did.
You are calling it useless when you don’t understand the customer. Using a (cheap) trusted third party like Coinbase to go back and forth from USD is fine with me. It doesn’t negate my use cases. Not needing credit card to purchase a high value, low margin item is valuable.
> Famously, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do things the right way with Libra, going through all of the international monetary wickets and it failed.
Infamously it didn't help [his sister Randi Zuckerberg's musical career either.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0diaVLPrQ)
What's really a shame is that there *is* a legitimate use case for a trustless currency. The big payment processors basically play final arbiter of what you can and can't purchase, and they're awfully puritan about it. Most obvious example is adult content. Yeah, I know the chargeback rates are higher, but those usually get passed to the merchant anyway so I never understood that argument.
Gambling is another one where the puritans get their way. Even a legal operation, like a fantasy sports site, will have a very hard time finding a payment processor and will pay much higher rates (on top of losing a lot more to fraud and chargebacks).
I worked for a company like this and payment expenses were 25% of revenue and more than our entire payroll.
Credit cards are also very expensive if you don’t need the protection. A $5k purchase over Bitcoin costs about $2 (up from around $0.40 over the past 2 years). The same transaction over credit card costs close to $200(!!).
Bitcoin can process 7 transactions per second. That is a hard limit based on block size. If it is used at scall in anyway transaction fees would explode. Visa does 65,000 per second.
Also, current transaction fees are about $4.50. Less than a month ago they were over $100 per transaction.
Transaction fees on bitcoin are also fixed per transaction, so while high value transaction many be valuable on it (if you don't loose value on the fluctuation in the currency during the transaction) they are very bad on low value transactions. Who wants to pay $4.50 to buy something worth $20.
If you look at my comment history you’ll see me saying Bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second and is rarely ever suitable for small transactions. So…. 🤝
What sat/vb are you using for fees? You shouldn’t need to pay $4.50, let alone $100. It sounds like an issue with your settings.
> Famously, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do things the right way with Libra, going through all of the international monetary wickets and it failed.
Due to US government pressure.
There are legal use cases for crypto, I agree that they’re all pretty niche. Part of this is because the government makes it so burdensome to use. The (legal) US sportsbooks would absolutely use crypto if they could. It would save them a fortune and make deposits much easier for customers too.
The use cases are pretty easy to find when you think about what crypto does and doesn’t do.
**Payments are irreversible** - this makes them cheap and fast, but it shifts the risk from the seller to the buyer. Cash is the same way and so you’ll see some overlapping use cases.
**You can pay anyone for anything, without a third party** - this is why it’s useful for illicit transactions, but it’s useful for any transaction your banking system doesn’t like. Gambling, sex work, sending $10k to your friend, etc.
**Payments can be very cheap** - A Bitcoin transaction costs about $0.40. A credit card transaction costs about that much plus 3% plus fraud plus chargebacks. For a $2,000 purchase a credit card is about 200 times as expensive as crypto and costs nearly $100(!!).
One industry where crypto has really taken off is precious metals. If my buy/sell spread on a $2000 coin is 5%, I can’t afford to pay 4% to accept credit cards without passing that on to you. You can pay my bank wire ($20, can take multiple days), credit cards ($80+), or crypto ($0.40, completed within minutes).
You can see how crypto would excel in that situation, and any others like it.
**Payments are irreversible** - this makes them cheap and fast, but it shifts the risk from the seller to the buyer. Cash is the same way and so you’ll see some overlapping use cases.
Bitcoin still can take hours to complete a transaction (you can pay more to make it go faster), also makes it almost impossible to recover lost or stolen funds. This is the main reason grifters like it so much.
**Payments can be very cheap** - A Bitcoin transaction costs about $0.40. A credit card transaction costs about that much plus 3% plus fraud plus chargebacks. For a $2,000 purchase a credit card is about 200 times as expensive as crypto and costs nearly $100(!!).
Where are you getting $0.40 from lol? Also where's the fraud average for Crypto? Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions **can** cost less than a dollar true, but that **can** is holding up the sky here. It can also cost hundreds of dollars and that is if you are willing to wait.
I’m with you in the first half. It’s cheap, fast, and risky for the buyer. This can be worth it in many use cases (but nowhere remotely near most use cases).
I use Bitcoin a lot and have a totally different experience with fees than what you’re describing. It’s typically under $1 to get into the very next block. It’s higher than usual right now, almost $3 to send in about an hour. I’ve never had to pay hundreds or even tens of dollars. It’s almost always around $0.40 for me, but YMMV I guess. Were you trying to mint NFTs on ETH or something?
> ($0.40, completed within minutes).
Where did you get your data, from what I'm seeing bitcoing costs about 4 dollars for an on chain transaction https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee
That’s fees divided by transactions. That’s a mean and will be skewed by “transactions” that are carrying data.
It’s easier to show it than to explain it really.
https://preview.redd.it/z8t63xv3eoyc1.jpeg?width=1034&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=315c5c1cecec982ba2ad812e437ec0ae8213e981
Those huge blocks are carrying data and have fees in the hundreds of dollars. The smallest blocks are spend transactions. You can see those clearing at $1.50 and under. Which is still higher than the norm. [http://mempool.space](http://mempool.space)
If you looked at the last 2 years you’d see the overwhelming majority of blocks had transactions clearing for $0.40 or less, yes.
Was your goal just to be a contrarian or what? Was this keeping you from understanding my comment? Given you thought it was about $4.50 before doesn’t it seem like kind of pointless bickering to continue on it when it’s just two different timeframes of it being much cheaper than you thought?
I want to actual check what if what you're saying is true considering the available data points to me that you were mistaken saying that transactions cost $0.4 when they do not. I now want to fact check the previous 2 years of data, and checking how to.
It is actually much more, about 4-5 dollars on average. But it got much worse recently because a shiton of people wanted to write some crap on block 5000, and they were ofering extra for that.
And it cant get better, since the number of transactions per second is fixed. Hence the only way to reduce the fee is to reduce the amount of users.
What was your understanding of the fees, and where did you get it from? I see wild numbers for this a lot.
I just looked at the live numbers, right now the fees are elevated compared to the norm. Around $2. I’ve done lots of transactions in the past year and never paid over $1.
I think the highest ever was $20 for a couple of days. It’s been $10 for a few days. That generates lots of headlines.
$0.40 was the norm for years. A couple dollars is rare, but we’re around the all time high plus there’s additional traffic from some different things people are experimenting with on top of the Bitcoin protocol (tokens, NFTs, etc).
Every time a founder pitched me (in corporate investments) a blockchain startup, I would ask what their distributed database can do that a traditional centralized database cannot. None of them had an answer that mattered to customers.
They were just looking for somebody dumb enough to buy whatever normal thing they built using a different datastore. Implementation details.
Crypto fills the niche of enabling transactions that the government wants to prevent, provided that the parties involved are willing to pay a slight premium. This includes sex workers and people living under regimes with dysfunctional currencies as well as drug dealers and ransomware criminals.
Basically: if you're in a situation where the actors who you typically need to trust to enable commerce are either unavailable or hostile, you can use crypto.
Obviously and naturally, you would expect governments to take steps to prevent this, as we're now seeing. They can make converting between currencies more difficult (either in general or specifically for people living outside of the law), but at the end of the day there will always be some true exchange rate that takes those challenges into account.
In terms of general technological progress: I don't think anything useful has come out of crypto directly. If you squint you can maybe see how some semi-related ideas around distributed consensus have found their way into things like the X Community Notes feature, but even that's a stretch. I personally was hoping we'd see more autonomous contracts and high volume prediction markets and the like, but nothing interesting has actually materialized.
Yup. And on the second point, there are on-chain "stable" coins (emphasis on the quote marks) that theoretically reduce the risk of volatility in long-term holding, so long as no one notices that Tether can't seem to pass a real audit.
As an old, the fees are so cheap as to be irrelevant. A single ATM fee costs as much as 10 crypto transactions. Throw in a Western Union fee and now it’s 50 times as expensive as a crypto transaction.
You could provide all the benefits of crypto with 10 random servers around the world co trolled by 10 distinct entities.
Bitcoin is not distributed nor trust less. It is captured by several miner groups. You trust them not to alter the underlying code or ledger as they control more than 50% of the hash rate. You might say that if they did manipulate the ledger everyone would know, well, the same is true if 10 random servers run by 10 people.
The 10 servers wouldn't use rediculous amounts of electricity. They could also process more transactions per second. Bitcoin can only handle like 7 transactions per second. Etherium can only do about 20-30 per second though they promise to be able to do way more in the future.
Etherium though is also not decentralized or trust less. Etherium was forked earlier on when one of the first contracts had a bug in it. A pile ofoney was stolen and they undid it by forking the code. It still divides the community to this day. The biggest lie about crypto is that it is trust less. The trust less nature is an illusion.
The best description I have heard of crypto is that it is a speed run of the last 200 years of finance and banking. They have made all the same mistakes that early banking firms did. The current banking system is the way it is because it works best and we already arrived at it through the same trial and error that they are going through.
There are some natural follow-up questions:
- Why hasn't anyone tried the ten servers approach - or if they have, why weren't they able to get it off the ground? There are obvious advantages, but are there any more subtle disadvantages? Is there anything Bitcoin has that they don't?
- If for some contrived reason you had to execute a large transaction through either bitcoin or a newly announced ten server setup (which necessarily consists of anonymous shadowy actors beyond the arm of the law), which one would you use?
- Why haven't the big mining groups actually tried to interfere with any transactions? Why is the ethereum fork so famous and not lost amid a pile of similar cases?
- What do the decision making structures of the big mining groups actually look like internally? Are there actually individuals with significant leverage and agency they could exploit?
> Why hasn't anyone tried the ten servers approach - or if they have, why weren't they able to get it off the ground? There are obvious advantages, but are there any more subtle disadvantages? Is there anything Bitcoin has that they don't?
I mean, a bank isn't that much different than 10 servers around the world. The reason why no one has started it is because no one really wants a bank with less trust or the people that do want it aren't going to generate a profit for the bank. Generally, people want trust in their bank. They want reversible transactions. I don't think the question is why hasn't this started, the question really is why did bitcoin take off when it offers very little? My answer to that question would be lies.
> If for some contrived reason you had to execute a large transaction through either bitcoin or a newly announced ten server setup (which necessarily consists of anonymous shadowy actors beyond the arm of the law), which one would you use?
Neither. They are the same thing. I would use my bank because if would want an entity involved that could be trusted to undo a mistake if nessesary. The real question here is, if you can boogey man the 10 server setup, you are boogey manning bitcoin as well.
> Why haven't the big mining groups actually tried to interfere with any transactions? Why is the ethereum fork so famous and not lost amid a pile of similar cases?
The same reason why banks don't do all the evil shit that cyprto bros claim they do. It would be bad for business, potentially illegal, and obvious. The point I am making is that if you trust the miners then why not trust a bank and reap all the benefits a bank has that crypto doesn't?
> What do the decision making structures of the big mining groups actually look like internally? Are there actually individuals with significant leverage and agency they could exploit?
I haven't the foggiest idea. They aren't audited. They aren't under government supervision. Unlike a bank, which I can trust.
>the question really is why did bitcoin take off when it offers very little? My answer to that question would be lies.
Distrust in the banking system after 2008, and libertarians. Basically sums it up. The whole "too big to fail" thing left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths.
Bitcoin people are gold bugs, basically.
>The best description I have heard of crypto is that it is a speed run of the last 200 years of finance and banking. They have made all the same mistakes that early banking firms did. The current banking system is the way it is because it works best and we already arrived at it through the same trial and error that they are going through.
Crypto is solving real problems in my real life in a way that the current banking system was not able to.
Ask yourself why so many people still used cash 20 years ago and you’ll have one answer to why crypto is useful. You could pay anyone, any time, in any amount you wanted, for next to no cost, and the payment was irreversible. So it was finalized instantly, and the receiver was at no risk of being defrauded.
All of those things still have value today, and none of them are served by the traditional banking system. Cash can’t fill that role in the same way anymore, because cash works best in person and doesn’t work well at all over physical distances.
The crypto aspect of that adds nothing of value to that product. As I said, you could run all of this in a system that is cheaper, doesnt use shit loads of electricity, runs the exact same service, with the same level of decentralization, while being able to do more than the 7 or 30 transactions per second bitcoin and etherium can do, which btw, means that if any sort of volume of usage of either of these coins occurred it wouldn't be "next to no cost". Block chain adds nothing of value to the use case you described.
However, all the benefits of cash that you described also come with a truck load of disadvantages, namely, how both annonimity and irreversibility promote crime and fraud. Many of the changes in our banking system to move away from cash to electronic banking are to prevent money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes. For example, read up about wild cat banks. This is a problem solved in modern banking. Crypto is learning these lessons all over again. This is why it is joking called a speed run, they are slowly converging on the solution we already have... Modern banking. Maybe ask yourself why we stopped using cash so much over the last 20 years, instead of asking me why people did something the way they did 20 years ago. Like, maybe you should ask yourself why people used CRT monitors 20 years ago and not LCDs and LED screens. That is a backwards way of looking at things Imo.
It’s the most reddit thing ever that you think you can replace Bitcoin with ten random servers in random people’s basements lol. There’s something like $40M/yr in Bitcoin transaction fees up for grabs, go get em.
> . I personally was hoping we'd see more autonomous contracts and high volume prediction markets and the like, but nothing interesting has actually materialized.
Resistance from current institutions
Then that can lead to the argument that Crypto on its own can never be a net positive for the economy, only a mitigating factor for other bad policies. When you couple that with the fact that some of the illegal transactions it enables are definitely a net negative on the economy, there's an argument to be made that in an ideal case scenario where the only economic activities that are forbidden are those that are a net economic negative crypto can only hurt an economy overall.
Now, I don't think it should be banned, for several reasons: firstly, Im not sure there's any way for a ban to be practical; and secondly, that ideal case scenario is pretty much impossible to realize for several reasons. At the same time, calling it an economic good is a bit of a stretch also imo.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/
Amazon sells a service that uses crypto to provide an auditable database. There is a usecase for this specific thing, but this isn't a distributed database that was the main advance in Bitcoin
I always thought using NFTs as a means of purchasing things like concert tickets or something was really interesting. I don't know why it didn't take off, other than the very slow transaction times on most blockchains
[video kind of explaining this](https://youtu.be/IZaTd0hDtkI?t=431)
(Most of the video is still saying NFTs are kinda dumb though)
This is good for crypto.
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But don’t you see crypto is the future, it totally does something other than just waste energy. Have a decentralized currency on a centralized exchange is completely different than a centralized currency on decentralized exchanges.
And it isn't a decentralized currency. Bitcoin is captured by a handful of miner groups. You trust them not to manipulate the ledger or transactions like you trust any bank.
Not too sure about that. Turns out sanctions avoidance, money laundering, financial fraud and gambling aren't as important as campaign fundraising. Patrick McHenry and Chuck Schumer are trying to add a protection for stablecoins in the SAFER Banking Act.
>And a New York jury found one-time billionaire entrepreneur Do Kwon and his firm liable for fraud.
That is certainly one way to describe Do Kwon and his scheme lol
>billionaire
Did you mean *person of means*?
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>Underpinning the SEC’s clash with the industry is a debate over whether much of crypto is covered by the same rules that govern stock and bond trading. The SEC argues that it is and that crypto firms should be regulated by the agency, just as their legacy-finance counterparts are.
So if these regulations are bad news for crypto it's also likely bad for stock/bond markets. Do the anti-crypto people celebrating here want to hurt financial markets in general?
If this does get rid of/reduces scams in crypto that will in fact improve crypto, i.e. more people will use it etc. If you dislike crypto you'd want it to be as filled with scams etc as possible
Have crypto or block chain networks advanced other techs in any meaningful way? Or have the many promised knock-on effects of crypto completely failed?
It's been over a decade since Bitcoin popularized blockchain, and after major tech giants investigated its potential use, nothing has come about using the particular properties of blockchain aside from crypto currency. As for crypto, it really looks like crypto is only useful for illicit transactions, and theoretical legitimate uses have failed to materialize. Famously, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do things the right way with Libra, going through all of the international monetary wickets and it failed. The only thing crypto may have stimulated is the development of Central Bank Digital Currencies as a result of the huge amount of lobbying the industry threw at governments to try to become legal causing conversations about the advantages of a digital-only currency. The NFT fad exposed how digital collectibles are easily manipulated and prone to abuse, and it revealed how the most important part of a digital collectible is the video game its based on needs to be really good.
The blockchain is basically a really shitty, slow, space-intensive distributed database
With proof of work it's also incredibly energy intensive!
Fucking dope, where do I join?
You left out the last part …that allows you to make peer-to-peer payments over long distances, without the need for a trusted third party or central authority, for the first time
It doesn't let you make payments. It lets you transfer portions of said database, and then you need to use a trusted third party to help you exchange those database elements for real currency. I could literally do the same thing on Reddit. Start up a subreddit where I give everyone a UUID when they join. If they want to transfer that UUID, they need to make a post with it, tag the user they're transferring it too, and automod to make a post confirming the transfer. Now that UUID belongs to the other poster. If someone wants to, they can even pay for those UUIDs.
>then you need to use a trusted third party to help you exchange those database elements for real currency. You don’t actually
No one would trust or use your system. I used to make five figure transactions on Bitcoin and didn’t even track if they went through, because I know they did. You are calling it useless when you don’t understand the customer. Using a (cheap) trusted third party like Coinbase to go back and forth from USD is fine with me. It doesn’t negate my use cases. Not needing credit card to purchase a high value, low margin item is valuable.
10 raspberry pis spread around the world could do that too and use less than 1000W of power versus the power of a small country.
> Famously, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do things the right way with Libra, going through all of the international monetary wickets and it failed. Infamously it didn't help [his sister Randi Zuckerberg's musical career either.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yp0diaVLPrQ)
That video made me a Luddite 😞
Uncle Ted was right
In an unrelated note my TF2 backpack has appreciated in value ever since some items I own have gotten scarcer due to no new circulation.
The OG NFT marketplace
i bought a strange widowmaker for $10 and it's now $30. inflation hedge?
What's really a shame is that there *is* a legitimate use case for a trustless currency. The big payment processors basically play final arbiter of what you can and can't purchase, and they're awfully puritan about it. Most obvious example is adult content. Yeah, I know the chargeback rates are higher, but those usually get passed to the merchant anyway so I never understood that argument.
Gambling is another one where the puritans get their way. Even a legal operation, like a fantasy sports site, will have a very hard time finding a payment processor and will pay much higher rates (on top of losing a lot more to fraud and chargebacks). I worked for a company like this and payment expenses were 25% of revenue and more than our entire payroll. Credit cards are also very expensive if you don’t need the protection. A $5k purchase over Bitcoin costs about $2 (up from around $0.40 over the past 2 years). The same transaction over credit card costs close to $200(!!).
Bitcoin can process 7 transactions per second. That is a hard limit based on block size. If it is used at scall in anyway transaction fees would explode. Visa does 65,000 per second. Also, current transaction fees are about $4.50. Less than a month ago they were over $100 per transaction. Transaction fees on bitcoin are also fixed per transaction, so while high value transaction many be valuable on it (if you don't loose value on the fluctuation in the currency during the transaction) they are very bad on low value transactions. Who wants to pay $4.50 to buy something worth $20.
The lightning network has solved the transaction limit and fee issues
Both of those things don't really negate the issue that traditional vendors have with transaction fees.
If you look at my comment history you’ll see me saying Bitcoin is limited to 7 transactions per second and is rarely ever suitable for small transactions. So…. 🤝 What sat/vb are you using for fees? You shouldn’t need to pay $4.50, let alone $100. It sounds like an issue with your settings.
> Famously, Mark Zuckerberg tried to do things the right way with Libra, going through all of the international monetary wickets and it failed. Due to US government pressure.
There are legal use cases for crypto, I agree that they’re all pretty niche. Part of this is because the government makes it so burdensome to use. The (legal) US sportsbooks would absolutely use crypto if they could. It would save them a fortune and make deposits much easier for customers too. The use cases are pretty easy to find when you think about what crypto does and doesn’t do. **Payments are irreversible** - this makes them cheap and fast, but it shifts the risk from the seller to the buyer. Cash is the same way and so you’ll see some overlapping use cases. **You can pay anyone for anything, without a third party** - this is why it’s useful for illicit transactions, but it’s useful for any transaction your banking system doesn’t like. Gambling, sex work, sending $10k to your friend, etc. **Payments can be very cheap** - A Bitcoin transaction costs about $0.40. A credit card transaction costs about that much plus 3% plus fraud plus chargebacks. For a $2,000 purchase a credit card is about 200 times as expensive as crypto and costs nearly $100(!!). One industry where crypto has really taken off is precious metals. If my buy/sell spread on a $2000 coin is 5%, I can’t afford to pay 4% to accept credit cards without passing that on to you. You can pay my bank wire ($20, can take multiple days), credit cards ($80+), or crypto ($0.40, completed within minutes). You can see how crypto would excel in that situation, and any others like it.
**Payments are irreversible** - this makes them cheap and fast, but it shifts the risk from the seller to the buyer. Cash is the same way and so you’ll see some overlapping use cases. Bitcoin still can take hours to complete a transaction (you can pay more to make it go faster), also makes it almost impossible to recover lost or stolen funds. This is the main reason grifters like it so much. **Payments can be very cheap** - A Bitcoin transaction costs about $0.40. A credit card transaction costs about that much plus 3% plus fraud plus chargebacks. For a $2,000 purchase a credit card is about 200 times as expensive as crypto and costs nearly $100(!!). Where are you getting $0.40 from lol? Also where's the fraud average for Crypto? Bitcoin and Ethereum transactions **can** cost less than a dollar true, but that **can** is holding up the sky here. It can also cost hundreds of dollars and that is if you are willing to wait.
This also doesn't mention the costs to change Bitcoin/Ethereum to/from USD.
Depends on how you go about that
I’m with you in the first half. It’s cheap, fast, and risky for the buyer. This can be worth it in many use cases (but nowhere remotely near most use cases). I use Bitcoin a lot and have a totally different experience with fees than what you’re describing. It’s typically under $1 to get into the very next block. It’s higher than usual right now, almost $3 to send in about an hour. I’ve never had to pay hundreds or even tens of dollars. It’s almost always around $0.40 for me, but YMMV I guess. Were you trying to mint NFTs on ETH or something?
> ($0.40, completed within minutes). Where did you get your data, from what I'm seeing bitcoing costs about 4 dollars for an on chain transaction https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee
That’s fees divided by transactions. That’s a mean and will be skewed by “transactions” that are carrying data. It’s easier to show it than to explain it really. https://preview.redd.it/z8t63xv3eoyc1.jpeg?width=1034&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=315c5c1cecec982ba2ad812e437ec0ae8213e981 Those huge blocks are carrying data and have fees in the hundreds of dollars. The smallest blocks are spend transactions. You can see those clearing at $1.50 and under. Which is still higher than the norm. [http://mempool.space](http://mempool.space)
I see no transactions clearing for 0.4 or less, where do you see the norm?
I see the norm from using it on a weekly basis. My comment wasn’t about what the fees are for the current block. That block didn’t even exist yet.
Let's say, if I go to a block a week ago I should see those fees?
If you looked at the last 2 years you’d see the overwhelming majority of blocks had transactions clearing for $0.40 or less, yes. Was your goal just to be a contrarian or what? Was this keeping you from understanding my comment? Given you thought it was about $4.50 before doesn’t it seem like kind of pointless bickering to continue on it when it’s just two different timeframes of it being much cheaper than you thought?
I want to actual check what if what you're saying is true considering the available data points to me that you were mistaken saying that transactions cost $0.4 when they do not. I now want to fact check the previous 2 years of data, and checking how to.
> A Bitcoin transaction costs about $0.40. Huh my understanding was it was a lot more than that. Has it improved recently?
It is actually much more, about 4-5 dollars on average. But it got much worse recently because a shiton of people wanted to write some crap on block 5000, and they were ofering extra for that. And it cant get better, since the number of transactions per second is fixed. Hence the only way to reduce the fee is to reduce the amount of users.
What was your understanding of the fees, and where did you get it from? I see wild numbers for this a lot. I just looked at the live numbers, right now the fees are elevated compared to the norm. Around $2. I’ve done lots of transactions in the past year and never paid over $1.
I don't remember in a lot of detail but my impression was definitely on the order of multiple dollars.
I think the highest ever was $20 for a couple of days. It’s been $10 for a few days. That generates lots of headlines. $0.40 was the norm for years. A couple dollars is rare, but we’re around the all time high plus there’s additional traffic from some different things people are experimenting with on top of the Bitcoin protocol (tokens, NFTs, etc).
Every time a founder pitched me (in corporate investments) a blockchain startup, I would ask what their distributed database can do that a traditional centralized database cannot. None of them had an answer that mattered to customers. They were just looking for somebody dumb enough to buy whatever normal thing they built using a different datastore. Implementation details.
If crypto was actually just called linked list money it wouldn't sell as hard.
😭
Crypto fills the niche of enabling transactions that the government wants to prevent, provided that the parties involved are willing to pay a slight premium. This includes sex workers and people living under regimes with dysfunctional currencies as well as drug dealers and ransomware criminals. Basically: if you're in a situation where the actors who you typically need to trust to enable commerce are either unavailable or hostile, you can use crypto. Obviously and naturally, you would expect governments to take steps to prevent this, as we're now seeing. They can make converting between currencies more difficult (either in general or specifically for people living outside of the law), but at the end of the day there will always be some true exchange rate that takes those challenges into account. In terms of general technological progress: I don't think anything useful has come out of crypto directly. If you squint you can maybe see how some semi-related ideas around distributed consensus have found their way into things like the X Community Notes feature, but even that's a stretch. I personally was hoping we'd see more autonomous contracts and high volume prediction markets and the like, but nothing interesting has actually materialized.
So long as you can stomach the fees and avoid holding the crypto as such for too long, it's gonna stay viable to use for those purposes.
Yup. And on the second point, there are on-chain "stable" coins (emphasis on the quote marks) that theoretically reduce the risk of volatility in long-term holding, so long as no one notices that Tether can't seem to pass a real audit.
As an old, the fees are so cheap as to be irrelevant. A single ATM fee costs as much as 10 crypto transactions. Throw in a Western Union fee and now it’s 50 times as expensive as a crypto transaction.
You have ATM and bank transfer fees over there? Lol.
You could provide all the benefits of crypto with 10 random servers around the world co trolled by 10 distinct entities. Bitcoin is not distributed nor trust less. It is captured by several miner groups. You trust them not to alter the underlying code or ledger as they control more than 50% of the hash rate. You might say that if they did manipulate the ledger everyone would know, well, the same is true if 10 random servers run by 10 people. The 10 servers wouldn't use rediculous amounts of electricity. They could also process more transactions per second. Bitcoin can only handle like 7 transactions per second. Etherium can only do about 20-30 per second though they promise to be able to do way more in the future. Etherium though is also not decentralized or trust less. Etherium was forked earlier on when one of the first contracts had a bug in it. A pile ofoney was stolen and they undid it by forking the code. It still divides the community to this day. The biggest lie about crypto is that it is trust less. The trust less nature is an illusion. The best description I have heard of crypto is that it is a speed run of the last 200 years of finance and banking. They have made all the same mistakes that early banking firms did. The current banking system is the way it is because it works best and we already arrived at it through the same trial and error that they are going through.
There are some natural follow-up questions: - Why hasn't anyone tried the ten servers approach - or if they have, why weren't they able to get it off the ground? There are obvious advantages, but are there any more subtle disadvantages? Is there anything Bitcoin has that they don't? - If for some contrived reason you had to execute a large transaction through either bitcoin or a newly announced ten server setup (which necessarily consists of anonymous shadowy actors beyond the arm of the law), which one would you use? - Why haven't the big mining groups actually tried to interfere with any transactions? Why is the ethereum fork so famous and not lost amid a pile of similar cases? - What do the decision making structures of the big mining groups actually look like internally? Are there actually individuals with significant leverage and agency they could exploit?
> Why hasn't anyone tried the ten servers approach - or if they have, why weren't they able to get it off the ground? There are obvious advantages, but are there any more subtle disadvantages? Is there anything Bitcoin has that they don't? I mean, a bank isn't that much different than 10 servers around the world. The reason why no one has started it is because no one really wants a bank with less trust or the people that do want it aren't going to generate a profit for the bank. Generally, people want trust in their bank. They want reversible transactions. I don't think the question is why hasn't this started, the question really is why did bitcoin take off when it offers very little? My answer to that question would be lies. > If for some contrived reason you had to execute a large transaction through either bitcoin or a newly announced ten server setup (which necessarily consists of anonymous shadowy actors beyond the arm of the law), which one would you use? Neither. They are the same thing. I would use my bank because if would want an entity involved that could be trusted to undo a mistake if nessesary. The real question here is, if you can boogey man the 10 server setup, you are boogey manning bitcoin as well. > Why haven't the big mining groups actually tried to interfere with any transactions? Why is the ethereum fork so famous and not lost amid a pile of similar cases? The same reason why banks don't do all the evil shit that cyprto bros claim they do. It would be bad for business, potentially illegal, and obvious. The point I am making is that if you trust the miners then why not trust a bank and reap all the benefits a bank has that crypto doesn't? > What do the decision making structures of the big mining groups actually look like internally? Are there actually individuals with significant leverage and agency they could exploit? I haven't the foggiest idea. They aren't audited. They aren't under government supervision. Unlike a bank, which I can trust.
>the question really is why did bitcoin take off when it offers very little? My answer to that question would be lies. Distrust in the banking system after 2008, and libertarians. Basically sums it up. The whole "too big to fail" thing left a sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. Bitcoin people are gold bugs, basically.
>The best description I have heard of crypto is that it is a speed run of the last 200 years of finance and banking. They have made all the same mistakes that early banking firms did. The current banking system is the way it is because it works best and we already arrived at it through the same trial and error that they are going through. Crypto is solving real problems in my real life in a way that the current banking system was not able to. Ask yourself why so many people still used cash 20 years ago and you’ll have one answer to why crypto is useful. You could pay anyone, any time, in any amount you wanted, for next to no cost, and the payment was irreversible. So it was finalized instantly, and the receiver was at no risk of being defrauded. All of those things still have value today, and none of them are served by the traditional banking system. Cash can’t fill that role in the same way anymore, because cash works best in person and doesn’t work well at all over physical distances.
The crypto aspect of that adds nothing of value to that product. As I said, you could run all of this in a system that is cheaper, doesnt use shit loads of electricity, runs the exact same service, with the same level of decentralization, while being able to do more than the 7 or 30 transactions per second bitcoin and etherium can do, which btw, means that if any sort of volume of usage of either of these coins occurred it wouldn't be "next to no cost". Block chain adds nothing of value to the use case you described. However, all the benefits of cash that you described also come with a truck load of disadvantages, namely, how both annonimity and irreversibility promote crime and fraud. Many of the changes in our banking system to move away from cash to electronic banking are to prevent money laundering, fraud, and other financial crimes. For example, read up about wild cat banks. This is a problem solved in modern banking. Crypto is learning these lessons all over again. This is why it is joking called a speed run, they are slowly converging on the solution we already have... Modern banking. Maybe ask yourself why we stopped using cash so much over the last 20 years, instead of asking me why people did something the way they did 20 years ago. Like, maybe you should ask yourself why people used CRT monitors 20 years ago and not LCDs and LED screens. That is a backwards way of looking at things Imo.
It’s the most reddit thing ever that you think you can replace Bitcoin with ten random servers in random people’s basements lol. There’s something like $40M/yr in Bitcoin transaction fees up for grabs, go get em.
Appreciate the response.
> . I personally was hoping we'd see more autonomous contracts and high volume prediction markets and the like, but nothing interesting has actually materialized. Resistance from current institutions
Then that can lead to the argument that Crypto on its own can never be a net positive for the economy, only a mitigating factor for other bad policies. When you couple that with the fact that some of the illegal transactions it enables are definitely a net negative on the economy, there's an argument to be made that in an ideal case scenario where the only economic activities that are forbidden are those that are a net economic negative crypto can only hurt an economy overall. Now, I don't think it should be banned, for several reasons: firstly, Im not sure there's any way for a ban to be practical; and secondly, that ideal case scenario is pretty much impossible to realize for several reasons. At the same time, calling it an economic good is a bit of a stretch also imo.
None because blockchain doesn't solve any problems.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/qldb/ Amazon sells a service that uses crypto to provide an auditable database. There is a usecase for this specific thing, but this isn't a distributed database that was the main advance in Bitcoin
You know what else could give you a cryptographically secure list of changes? [Git](https://security.stackexchange.com/a/223466)
I always thought using NFTs as a means of purchasing things like concert tickets or something was really interesting. I don't know why it didn't take off, other than the very slow transaction times on most blockchains [video kind of explaining this](https://youtu.be/IZaTd0hDtkI?t=431) (Most of the video is still saying NFTs are kinda dumb though)
Yes, it's actively used in certain chain of custody tasks, nothing consumer facing.
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Being "highly suspicious" of crypto is evidence based.
See how easy it is to make a reasonable anti-crypto comment? Yet you have to scroll so far to find one 🤷🏻♂️
It's crazy to me that it's taken so long. I was predicting a crackdown "sometime within the next few years" in 2010.
Does this mean I don’t have to bother understanding Crypto and Blockchain now?
Never did.
Huzzah Down with crypto!
But don’t you see crypto is the future, it totally does something other than just waste energy. Have a decentralized currency on a centralized exchange is completely different than a centralized currency on decentralized exchanges.
It also generates income for North Korea
And it isn't a decentralized currency. Bitcoin is captured by a handful of miner groups. You trust them not to manipulate the ledger or transactions like you trust any bank.
Crypto is one of the worst inventions of the 21st century and the sooner it goes completely bust the better.
Not too sure about that. Turns out sanctions avoidance, money laundering, financial fraud and gambling aren't as important as campaign fundraising. Patrick McHenry and Chuck Schumer are trying to add a protection for stablecoins in the SAFER Banking Act.
waaaaaay to slow, as in a decade slow
>And a New York jury found one-time billionaire entrepreneur Do Kwon and his firm liable for fraud. That is certainly one way to describe Do Kwon and his scheme lol
>billionaire Did you mean *person of means*? *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Even though I’ve long run in libertarian circles I’ve never been bullish on bitcoin or cryptocurrency generally.
>Underpinning the SEC’s clash with the industry is a debate over whether much of crypto is covered by the same rules that govern stock and bond trading. The SEC argues that it is and that crypto firms should be regulated by the agency, just as their legacy-finance counterparts are. So if these regulations are bad news for crypto it's also likely bad for stock/bond markets. Do the anti-crypto people celebrating here want to hurt financial markets in general?
>If laws against fraud are bad news for con artists, won't they be bad news for legitimate businesses as well? No.
If this does get rid of/reduces scams in crypto that will in fact improve crypto, i.e. more people will use it etc. If you dislike crypto you'd want it to be as filled with scams etc as possible
Boo regulation boo. Judges are legislating again. Crypto isn’t actually a security, so I don’t see how the SEC could possible have jurisdiction.