
Remove Mentions of Low Fees and Instant Transactions from Bitcoin.org - ikeboy
https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/972
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lifeisstillgood
User Harding gets some kudos from myself for responding clearly and patiently
in the comments, showing an enviable example of managing public commits. Nice
one

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kleer001
Good. Looks like it needed some serious clean up.

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forgotmypassw
As a few have mentioned in the discussion, instead of removing large chunks of
texts and adding replacements "later", the website should just have its text
slightly altered.

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pbreit
This seems pretty stupid. Is my understanding that Bitcoin txns are no/low-
cost and fast incorrect?

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grey-area
Fast is a completely reliable transaction in seconds (as banks currently
provide in many countries with CC or with transfers, or paypal does for
example). Bitcoin doesn't provide that because you need to wait for real
confirmation, and it doesn't provide a predictable time-frame for that. So it
is slower than many other payment methods.

No cost is not accurate, because to get fast, you need to pay. Low cost is
debatable but possibly accurate compared to current payment methods (though CC
charges are mostly borne by the vendor, an important distinction).

I do think these criticisms strike to the heart of why Bitcoin will not be
successful - it doesn't compare well to other payment methods, and because of
the nature of its distributed consensus and proof of work, it never will. It
has some interesting ideas but also embeds some ideas about transactions which
make it impossible to satisfy the requirements of most vendors/customers.

We will probably see a digital global currency supplanting government-backed
currencies, but it needs to have very low volatility, a transparent guidance
structure, a credible backer (probably corporate in today's world), verifiable
identities to prove both sides of a transaction took part and prevent fraud
etc., fast and low cost transfers (BTC has the low cost bit at least at
present), and most importantly of all regulated central institutions like
banks or exchanges which normal people can trust to carry out business,
because most people do not have the time, resources or inclination to secure
their servers/computers against determined intrusion and fraud.

Personally I think the concepts of mining, a distributed block chain, and
unique tokens which are hoarded and passed around like gold coins are
fundamentally flawed and will prevent Bitcoin taking off long-term and are the
cause of many of its issues like volatility. It is full of interesting ideas
though and has triggered a renaissance in online payment, so I see why people
find it interesting.

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ikeboy
> completely reliable

>paypal

So accepting risk of a chargeback counts as "completely reliable" to you. In
that case, one can accept 0-conf.

