I'm glad to see the adoption of such changes. The 'hodl' crowd have changed their talking points to 'Bitcoin is an asset, not a currency' but as far as I'm concerned, if that's how it ends up--if you can't pragmatically buy a $2 cup of coffee with BTC--it would really puncture the immense promise of decentralized financial tech.
Yeah and that's the problem. Gold bars haven't solved the problem of e.g. banks taking multiple days to clear deposits (not counting holidays and weekends!), or credit card processing fees, and I'm hoping Bitcoin provides competition... but for that, BTC transfers need to be quick and cheap.
With all the crypto hacks which can cause you to lose everything, cryptocurrencies are the last place I would want to redistribute any of my current assets.
If you protect your private keys properly (and therefore actually own your bitcoin) it is not feasible for someone to steal it. At least it through a hack. The hacks you hear about are about stealing an exchange’s private keys which are are not adequately protected and are holding BTC on the users behalf.
One benefit of gold is that you can make more of it every day by placing your coins in a bag and shaking. The energy you put into the bag causes more gold to be produced in the form of dust within the bag. Helps work against inflation!
> A common piece of feedback from customers is transaction fees for sending Bitcoin on Coinbase are too high.
For example, around $2.50 for a 1:1 send last week or so. This is on top of the cut they take for purchases.
Clients that implemented SegWit were able to charge much lower transaction fees (~$0.15 for confirmation in 20 minutes -- less for longer waits) for the same kind of transaction.
> Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods
Where are you getting that from? People noted as early as 2009/2010(Hal Finney particularly) that it was inherently inefficient for that purpose. And that perhaps people would build addition layers on top of it, but it was always clear that it wasn't some magic solution to payments at any reasonable scale.
Not to mention the value proposition of credit cards for consumers(cash back, fraud protection, various perks like travel insurance ect) has always been obviously superior.
Bitcoin is cool/interesting/potentially part of a well balanced portfolio as an investment with unique properties. But I feel anyone who jumped into Bitcoin because they thought it was going to be great at payments was badly mislead.
Sadly still nowhere close to the free transactions from 0.00001 to whatever amount, within 3 seconds, that's already possible today with Nano, worldwide. No need for a bank account.
Bitcoin is old technology. Let's see how banks will compete with next gen coins.
>> Bitcoin was supposed to be an improvement upon existing payment methods, so far, it’s not quite there yet.
Your proposed "better" transaction method is worse in many ways that are important to people on the Internet, namely tracking, non-psuedonoymous, not the physical representation of the money, and many other related issues.
It isn't all about speed and cost for people who transact in cryptocurrency.
How important they are to people on the Internet remains to be seen. Until now, privacy and decentralization have not been successful selling points for any technology looking for wide acceptance (diaspora, mastodon, ...)
That's a good point, but won't do anything for adoption.
Bitcoin will be supported by stores and websites only if enough people use it, and people will use what is most convenient, not what is most secure or most private.
As long as people don't care about privacy, Bitcoin won't succeed. And if people ever care about it, half the users of HN will be without a job, considering they're almost all working at Google/Facebook/Amazon/startups selling private data
That sounds good until fraud/hacks/mistakes happen and your are the customer that needs them to modify the account.
Example: I got my bank routing/account numbers from a bank in a state in which I had not set up my checking account in but the bank teller put the routing number as if I had creating the account in that state. Thus, my first paycheck went to an empty account and I went to the bank that day and they fixed it for me.
Putting any of my money in a place that is irreversibly is the last place I would put it.
It was so nice of them to, out of the goodness of their hearts, provide such a competitively priced service. It sure seems unlikely that it was at all motivated by competition with alternative financial systems.
SEPA has provided free transfers years before Satoshi even posted his first post, and SEPA ICT's first draft was at a time when Bitcoin was published, but no one had used it yet.
The reason isn't the goodness of their hearts, it's simply a government mandated program to improve the payment infrastructure.
This seems like a particularly uncharitable take, can’t businesses ever do both what they want to make happen as individuals and what makes good business sense?
The Eurozone has had for many years a free transfer system between bank accounts, nowadays thanks to recent upgrades it's not only free, but also instant.
And banks now have to provide an open API to all functionality as well, so that it's very easy to build technology on top to allow people to just quickly transfer money to someone, or pay online with it.
But technically, it's just international wire transfers, for free, instantly, with an open API. Like most banks already provided.
USAA is a participant in that network. Transfers are (EDIT: mostly immediate below a certain dollar amount, next day above) between participant bank users.
Immediate isn’t always so true, it depends on the transaction amount with my bank (Wells Fargo). Something like $200 a day can be sent instantly, everything else is next day which still isn’t terrible.
I actually pay my landlady with Zelle (have since it was clearxchange with every bank using different branding), it’s not half bad - the biggest downside really is that your bank has to participate unlike SEPA where it’s expected to be there.
Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated my comment.
Zelle will improve as more banks participate and the ACH network is modernized; I expect them to compliment each other until the US reaches their version of SEPA. A shim's a shim.
Nice to see them being more resourceful. Coinbase was wasting thousands each day for a while by overpaying in bitcoin transaction fees - effectively donating customers funds to miners.
Bitcoin Cash has a separate blockchain (and peer-to-peer swarm, etc) but uses the same address format and checksum as Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash did that on purpose so people's addresses from before the fork would continue to work if they moved to BCH at the fork. Personally I think they (BCH) like the confusion because it keeps people talking about them where Bitcoin is talked about (never mind the confusingly-similar name).
Coinbase technically could make the addresses they show be able to receive both BTC and BCH funds, but it would be more complexity on their end as their BTC and BCH support would no longer be separate systems.
There is a plan for Bitcoin to get a new type of address format eventually (BIP 173, "Bech32"), built specifically for Segwit addresses, so this problem will eventually be addressed. Well, it will be fixed until the next Bitcoin Cash Gold Deluxe Whatever fork shows up...
Not with SegWit addresses they couldn't, because the entire point of carrying out the Bitcoin Cash fork was to create something Bitcoin-like that didn't have Segwit and that its well-funded proponents could insist was the real Bitcoin. (They like to call Bitcoin "SegwitCoin".)
Not parent but AFAIK Lightning Network requires transactions to be non malleable, i.e. the txid needs be signed together with the rest of the transaction.
Without a solution like segwit, miners can change the transaction ID and undermine layer 2 like the Lightning Network.
My limited knowledge tells me that BTC will lose its main reason for existence - solution of Byzantine generals problem, allowing trustless store of value. With what I've read about SegWit, it's a practical solution to improve transaction throughput by moving transactions off blockchain, which in turn removes trustlessness from the equation. I'd like to know if my conclusion is correct.
1) Segwit does improve transaction throughput, but it does so by improving the efficiency of transaction storage on the blockchain.
2) The Lightning Network improves transaction throughput by moving transactions off the blockchain, and requires segwit to be active for reasons apart from its transaction efficiency, specifically that it fixes the transaction malleability problem.
