
Due to Bitcoin network fees, customer loses $10 trying to buy $25 game on Steam - mbgaxyz
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7e7wsq/shady_business_of_bitpay_buy_29_game_on_steam/
======
mrb
A trivial solution would be to increase the block size, but unfortunately
Bitcoin Core developers refuse to do it, under the pretext that it will
"increase centralization". In reality, a _reasonable_ (2-4×) increase
wouldn't. The amortized cost of running a full node able to support 2-4 times
larger blocks is only $5 per month ([http://blog.zorinaq.com/full-node-
on-5-dollars/](http://blog.zorinaq.com/full-node-on-5-dollars/)). The block
propagation delay has also largely been solved with Compact Blocks which
transmit a nominal 1MB block in ~20kB. Also, at least 2 on-chain scaling
technologies are being developed that would easily let us increase block
sizes: UTXO commitment sets can reduce long-term blockchain storage by 50×,
and Graphene reduces the size of a 1MB broadcasted block by another order of
magnitude, down to ~2kB.

~~~
makomk
There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules,
especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at
once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been done
before in the entire history of Bitcoin.

Also, running a full Bitcoin node on a machine with a spinning rust disk and a
relatively small amount of RAM is going to be hell - especially if that disk
is heavily shared - because it has to do a lot of random reads from the chain
state DB in order to retrieve outputs referenced by the transactions, with the
number of reads scaling linearly with the block size. I think some of this may
be skipped during the initial block download these days, but you can hit 1
minute plus per block easily just with the existing block size limit. It looks
like the hosting provider he chose has some kind of SSD cache of unspecified
size which might have helped, if everything fitted in it.

~~~
hendzen
> There's no such thing as a trivial change to the bitcoin consensus rules,
> especially when that change requires everyone to upgrade their software at
> once on pain of financial loss. We're talking something that's never been
> done before in the entire history of Bitcoin.

You mean... like this?
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Value_overflow_incident)

~~~
makomk
No, not like that. Technically that only required a supermajority of miners to
install the fixed version (and everyone to stop trading temporarily, but there
wasn't much of that going on back then anyway). This would be harder because
it really would require everyone to upgrade. BIP50 is probably closer; that
did require everyone to upgrade over a relatively short timespan or work
around the issue by changing a setting, ironically enough due to a latent bug
triggered by increasing block size closer to the maximum 1MB.

------
Lazare
From the second screenshot, the transaction value was 0.003857 BTC. From the
guy's post, he transferred 0.003853 BTC. From the first screenshot, BitPay is
saying he underpaid by 0.000004 BTC which would seem to be...100% correct?

I mean, obviously Bitcoin is a pretty silly way to buy a game on Steam, but
this seems to be 100% user error.

...well, probably. There's some key info missing here, but this seems highly
suggestive:

"BitPay emailed me saying I underpaid by 3 cents at the time, and said to
refund me. I checked the price of bitcoin 0.003853 btc in usd is around $31
which was a lie on their part."

No, they said he underpaid by 0.000004 BTC. And the number he was googling is,
coincidentally, 0.000004 BTC lower than the transaction value in his
screenshot, so...

~~~
makomk
Unless BitPay have changed their policies, the exchange rate is only locked in
for 15 minutes. If the transaction doesn't get its first confirmation before
then, it expires and if the exchange rate goes up even slightly they consider
the transaction underpaid. That's almost certainly what happened here. They
used to be more sensible and only require the transaction to be broadcast to
them within the 15 minute window, but they quietly changed it a few years
back.

~~~
nadaviv
> If the transaction doesn't get its first confirmation before then, it
> expires

I don't think that's true. To the best of my knowledge, they lock-in the rate
if the transaction appears on the network within the 15 minutes window,
regardless of when its confirmed.

~~~
makomk
It's certainly possible they fixed this at some point, I gave up on using them
after a bad experience with this a few years back. It just wasn't worth the
hassle of trying to use Bitcoin for payments, especially after the Humble
Bundle stopped accepting it for most things because they wanted to track
purchasers' IDs.

------
makomk
Editorialized title that omits the key role BitPay's policies played and
blames this on Bitcoin's network fees. BitPay's policy of failing transactions
if they don't confirm within 15 minutes has always been broken, because even
if the transaction gets into the next block there's a reasonable chance (about
25%, I think) that no block will be mined within the next 15 minutes.

~~~
sillysaurus3
The customer doesn't care whose fault it is. All they know is they lost $10
when trying to use BTC as cash.

~~~
makomk
Maybe not to the customer, but it matters in general because Bitpay and others
are pushing Bitcoin Cash as a solution to this on the basis that it has lower
fees because of its bigger block size (also because no-one is using it, so the
blocks are almost always far below the Bitcoin block size). They likely
stiffed him on the transaction fees for the return transaction too; the
Bitcoin client's recommended fees are already on the conservative side, and
they charged more.

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petercooper
I'm admittedly green when it comes to the day-to-day workings of Bitcoin but
put some money into it on Coinbase a few weeks ago.

I decided to see how easy it was to use for transactions, so I bought $2 of
credit with an online service. But the payment service this other company used
charged a $6 fee of some kind, and there was also a $8 'transaction fee' for
the Bitcoin itself, meaning it cost around $16 to get my $2 of credit :-D I
decided I'd probably stick with it as an investment instead of a currency..

~~~
Amezarak
I really don't see the value of using Bitcoin as a currency either. The
transaction fees are absolutely ridiculous and confirmations take hours,
sometimes days. I bought some a long time ago and was trying to move them
around a couple weeks ago and it was an absolute nightmare.

~~~
wolco
If you want a transaction that makes it possible to be untrackable back to
yourself then bitcoin is the new cash.

16 dollars is a crazy amount in some cases and peanuts in others.

~~~
Amezarak
Bitcoin is the opposite of untraceable. Every transaction is recorded in a
public ledger for all time.

------
lossolo
I have paid ~180$ dollars of fee couple of days ago while sending around 600
dollars. Tx was around 6 KB though. I was using wrong client for transaction
(I had newest bitcoind-qt with fee set manually and older client with
automatic fees) and fee was automatically set to that amount.

------
idibidiart
Also like I said removal of net neutrality regulations means ISPs esp big ones
can kill Bitcoin by blocking the default port used by the Bitcoin client and
ISPs can more than just blocking a certain port. ISPs can identify and block
all P2P traffic (anything that is not being sent or received to/from an
approved central service) and do it in the name of protecting MPAA member
revenue or whatever blanket execuse like killing off encrypted p2p
communication like Signal et al)

~~~
swarnie_
Is Net neutrality going to be the next "Russian hackers" which gets shoe
horned in to and blamed for everything?

~~~
idibidiart
Get informed. Don't talk out of your ass\:

[https://www.coindesk.com/eroding-net-neutrality-hurt-
bitcoin...](https://www.coindesk.com/eroding-net-neutrality-hurt-bitcoin/)

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notyourday
That's because the current state of the crypto currencies is CryptoScam
designed to fleece the consumers.

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tek-cyb-org
and so the BCH propaganda has started...

~~~
mohamedmansour
BitPay loves BCH, maybe they are doing this just to screw with peoples mind?

