
Why We're Updating the Minimum BitPay Payment Amount to $100 - qeternity
https://blog.bitpay.com/minimum-invoice-update/
======
omarforgotpwd
Bitcoin undoubtedly is a technical and social phenomenon, but it’s also
definitely almost useless as a digital currency at the moment. Other
alternatives like Bitcoin cash, litecoin, ethereum etc. are much more useful
for actually... sending money to people. The dev team needs to make Bitcoin as
good as Venmo for sending payments between people, or someone else will beat
them to it. People have talked for a long time about currency X being better
and replacing Bitcoin but with Bitcoin rising so fast that the network has
basically shut down, this may be the first time another currency or fork has
the opportunity to overtake it in market cap.

~~~
VMG
None of the coins can scale realistically on-chain as a peer-to-peer system.
If you run the numbers, the transaction volume of 1B people making one
transaction a day goes into the terabytes. If you externalize the costs of
verifying that to third parties, you lose properties that make Bitcoin
interesting to begin with.

For many people it was clear that off-chain transactions are the only feasible
way to solve this. Small purchases in particular do not need to be broadcast
to the whole network and can be routed in payment channels. Lighting Network
is the most promising solution at the moment.

~~~
Retric
Nothing prevents a sharding as long as you have some way to prioritize in case
of conflicts and you require delays from moving money into and out of
accounts, but even that's not really needed.

You don't need to store Terabytes per day for 1B daily transactions. BC does
it differently, but you could get away with 4 byte time-stamp, 4 byte amount,
32 byte source public key, 32 byte destination public key = unique transaction
+ 32 byte signature demonstrating sender with correct private key signed that
transaction. Now, 1 billion of those = 100GB per day = 36 TB per year which
sounds like a lot but most nodes don't need the full amount just current state
+ verifiable hash + new transactions.

But even that's not needed, suppose every node includes a subset of the
account amounts so every K nodes allows you to recover the state of all
accounts. That way you don't need a full database just the most recent K nodes
and they have complete state. Some people can keep a historic archive, but the
system operates even if that information was lost. (You would want some GC as
well so accounts must either be larger than A or have a transaction within the
last Z steps.)

Granted, managing pending transactions increases bandwidth needs, but nodes
can manage reputations based on only forwarding valid transactions. Some
metrics so their is some statistical chance of conformation and you end up
with ~2x overhead for unconfirmed but likely transactions.

PS: You can also have the protocol grow so if the 11 of the last 20 nodes
where full the new node is 1% larger.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
> "36 TB per year"

Satoshi made a similar argument in Nov 2008 in response to a claim about
Bitcoin not being able to scale:

"The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction
would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be
broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion
transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices."

"If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by
then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big
deal."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6navjt/very_first_disc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6navjt/very_first_discussion_of_bitcoin_by_satoshi_btc/)

Note: this was before the DoS attack in 2009 where hackers tried to freeze the
network by creating blocks of uneven or massive size. Which is why in Oct
2009, satoshi imposed the 1MB block size limit (I presume was intended as a
_temporary_ stopgap measure) to prevent future similar attacks.

~~~
CryptoPunk
Long after the 1 MB limit was put in place, Satoshi wrote:

>>The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended
configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their
own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users.

-July, 2010

>>It would be nice to keep the [block chain] files small as long as we can.

>>The eventual solution will be to not care how big it gets.

>>But for now, while it’s still small, it’s nice to keep it small so new users
can get going faster. When I eventually implement client-only mode, that won’t
matter much anymore. (note to readers, "client-only mode" refers to SPV mode)

-August, 2010

and in an email to Mike Hearn:

>>The existing Visa credit card network processes about 15 million Internet
purchases per day worldwide. Bitcoin can already scale much larger than that
with existing hardware for a fraction of the cost. It never really hits a
scale ceiling.

So your explanation for his reasons for putting in place the 1 MB limit are
not consistent. Others have said that he was afraid that someone would soon
come out with GPU miners and be able to DOS the network with large blocks, so
put the limit there as a temporary measure. Now that mining hardware evolution
has slowed, and the mining ecosystem matured, this kind of threat is non-
existent.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
> "So your explanation for his reasons for putting in place the 1 MB limit are
> not consistent"

Actually the reason I stated is consistent with what satoshi said:

"In 2010, a block size limit of 1 MB was introduced into Bitcoin by Satoshi
Nakamoto. He added it hidden in two commits[1] in secret, when challenged
publicly he said it is a safety measure to prevent miners from creating large
spam blocks." [1]

[1] top of:
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy)

~~~
CryptoPunk
But not consistent with what he said after the limit was put in place (see the
quotes I provided). The motivation I suggested is consistent with all of his
actions and statements.

------
smaili
Worth calling this out:

> We are also working quickly to add support for a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) payment
> option on all BitPay invoices. Bitcoin Cash is a modified fork of Bitcoin
> which will allow purchasers to send payments with significantly lower
> bitcoin miner fees. Bitcoin Cash payments will allow us to re-enable
> payments as small as $1 or smaller.

------
brndnmtthws
They should probably focus on implementing segwit instead of these
shenanigans.

BitPay lost a lot of credibility when they published instructions telling
people to "upgrade" their Bitcoin wallets by switching to btc1, which was a
hardfork that failed spectacularly. What they did was bordering on fraudulent.

~~~
x775
Sure, and a 40% transaction fee reduction sounds great in theory, but with a
median fee of ~$28.58
([https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/](https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/)) it will still
inarguably leave BTC at a significant disadvantage compared to virtually every
other available payment option. Mind you, this calculation is done at current
prices and network congestion; the numbers can only be expected to increase
assuming further adoption. Not viable.

------
webninja
At this point, it's faster and cheaper to get the private key delivered by
FEDEX than making transactions on the Bitcoin network.

~~~
bdcravens
Every transaction I've conducted in recent weeks took about 20 minutes and
cost less than 1%. (Using Trezor at highest fee level)

For those who don't follow Bitcoin subreddits, this was discussed here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7lfyrf/psa_its_faster_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7lfyrf/psa_its_faster_and_cheaper_to_get_the_private_key/)

~~~
webninja
You must have been moving over $5000. 1% of 5000 is still $50.

The minimum fee for me yesterday was 0.004btc (about $55), the suggested fee
was 0.008btc (about $112), and the priority fee was prohibitively high. My hd
wallet had 3 inputs though which increases the fee. When I sent with the
minimum fee, it stayed unconfirmed for a little over a day before it flat fell
off the network. When I resent it with the suggested fee ($112), it stayed
unconfirmed for several hours until the early morning when it started getting
confirmations finally.

~~~
bdcravens
$2000 for $3

$13000 for about $8

------
tradersam
Looks like another Bitcoin v. Bitcoin Cash argument thread getting started
again. I'm getting really tired of this.

~~~
anonytrary
When kings fight, princes rise.

------
paulsutter
Lightning protocol looks like the right solution

[https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-
protocol-1-0...](https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-
protocol-1-0-compatibility-achieved-f9d22b7b19c4)

~~~
colordrops
No it doesn't. The reason BTC is choked off is because the core devs are
promoting the lightning solution instead of on-chain scaling because they have
a stake in making money off the lightning network. And now that we've reach a
critical mass of transactions this lightning network is nowhere to be found
even though its been promised for years.

The core devs are like the DNC. They'd rather kill the blockchain than
capitulate and update the block size.

edit: downvoting me out of visibility won't change the truth. The lightning
network, which is driven by Blockstream, which makes up the most core devs, is
planning to make money off of lightning network fees, and they aren't willing
to give that up even if it means killing BTC. It's not even a secret - there
is plenty of public info on Blockstream's business model.

~~~
VMG
> they have a stake in making money off the lightning network

How? Anyone can run a lighting node

> And now that we've reach a critical mass of transactions this lightning
> network is nowhere to be found

That conflicts with the other statement.

Please tell me where you are stuck: [https://medium.com/@JimmyMow/announcing-
zap-a-lightning-netw...](https://medium.com/@JimmyMow/announcing-zap-a-
lightning-network-wallet-47622acd89fb)

~~~
colordrops
Don't play ignorant.

The lightning network is no where near the availability to be used by
everyone. Blockstream is trying to get it out as fast as they can, and they
are trying, but it's not adopted yet, despite years of development and
promotion.

[https://medium.com/@luxushub/the-truth-about-blockstream-
and...](https://medium.com/@luxushub/the-truth-about-blockstream-and-the-
lightning-network-896d69b48f0f)

The lightning network is backed by Blockstream, which employs the most core
devs. Blockstream plans to make their profits by making fees off of providing
lightning network channels to exchanges.

~~~
VMG
What competitive advantage would Blockstream have? Why would exchanges not
peer directly? It is all open source protocols and software. There are three
major implementations to choose from.

~~~
colordrops
What advantage? The fact that they designed and developed it, and are first
movers, and it's their entire business model?

How does github.com even make money? git is open source. Redhat? Linux is open
source.

~~~
VMG
Yet Torvalds runs neither of those businesses. What is your point here?

~~~
colordrops
What is Blockstream's business model?

~~~
VMG
Certainly not running open source software on commodity hardware. Other than
that I don't know, same as for 90% of Blockchain companies that get the same
level of investment or more.

~~~
colordrops
That's a non answer.

------
MrBlue
This is why Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is gaining momentum with merchants.
Transactions are verified quickly with the typical fee of half a penny.

~~~
nkkollaw
Looks like Bitcoin is more like gold that you stash, and Bitcoin Cash more
like money that you buy things with.

~~~
acchow
Still, at ~26 transactions/sec it's a far cry from something like Visa.

Maybe we can do much better international trade with it tho.

~~~
Fnoord
I wager mankind can do more than 26 gold transactions/sec.

