
Bitcoin.org removes “fast” and “low fees” from Bitcoin description page - verroq
https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/pull/2010/files
======
codegeek
I am still struggling to understand the whole crypto currency thing. I just
don't get it. Clearly, it has become a tool for speculation and quick money
for most people. Everyone is trying to get on the crypto bandwagon but to
speculate. What is the point ? I thought it was supposed to decentralize
currency and make it easy to "transact" with low fees and less redtape. Also I
could be really dumb but isn't centralized wallets/exchanges like coinbase
defeating the entire purpose of crypto currency ? Weren't we supposed to
manage it peer to peer so that anyone could get paid anytime without worrying
about borders and boundaries ?

~~~
bobcostas55
Here's the best possible view of crypto:

When the internet first got going, everything worked with protocols. Protocols
are open, decentralized, interopable. Think email. Anyone can send an email as
long as they follow the protocol.

Then people figured out that you can't make any money from protocols. Instead
we got platforms: closed, centralized, and most importantly monetizable. Think
facebook.

Cryptocurrencies are a way to combine open protocols with making money.
Instead of building a cloud-storage business, you build a cloud-storage
protocol and make money on the coin that is used within that protocol. ICOs
are how you fund development of these protocols.

Now, in reality, a huge number of coins are borderline useless or outright
scams, and the current valuations are absurd. But long-term I think it's a
very valuable technology.

~~~
ebbv
Maybe I'm dumb but I don't follow. If I invent a new messenger protocol, how
does a cryptocurrency enable me to make money on that protocol better than any
other method? Just because I make an ICO for my new protocol?

Seems like a bit of wand waving going on in your description there.

~~~
nirv
> If I invent a new messenger protocol, how does a cryptocurrency enable me to
> make money on that protocol better than any other method?

This is my limited understanding:

1) You want to allow users to send and businesses to receive (micro-)payments
within your messenger/protocol.

2) You want to allow users donate/vote/gift/award other users/groups/posts
with their tokens within your messenger.

3) You want to allow users create custom (chat-)bots which could apply some
scripted logic to send/receive tokens; etc.

Inventing a new distributed messenger/protocol with cryptocurrency, you
essentially create (and own) a new platform with services operating on
"virtual money". Rules of money (tokens) distribution in theory must be
guaranteed by your protocol implementation (usually presented via whitepaper).

If potential future users like your idea (whitepaper), they may invest into
your new shiny platform via ICO (with other cryptocurrencies) to get some of
your initial (limited) tokens. They want to get them while they cost less than
they potentially will cost later, if your platform becomes popular. It's
assumed that in the case of an open distributed blockchain platform, amount
and belonging of tokens won't be able to be painted by you, but guaranteed by
algorithms and public network.

We've seen how it works on totally scam projects. And apparently, we'll have a
chance to witness how this works out in case of the already popular
platform[1].

[1] [https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/inside-telegrams-
ambitious...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/01/15/inside-telegrams-
ambitious-1-2b-ico-to-create-the-next-ethereum/)

~~~
epicide
Telegram is a great example for me to finally start understanding how this is
supposed to work.

It seems like a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem (at least in the way I keep
seeing it described): you fund your project/app/scam with money from your ICO,
but you only get money from your ICO when people believe in your project
enough to put ("real") money in it prematurely.

At best, this is basically the Kickstarter model that everybody likes to
trash, is it not?

------
j0rd
I've been running e-commerce stores for 12+ years.

The main business I work for started to accept bitcoins for our physical goods
in 2014ish. I did the integration.

I adopted Bitcoin because I'm not a huge fan of payment processors, I'm a
cryptonerd and because I wanted to provide a use case for a technology I
believe in, which wasn't illegal. I've also helped chime in with devs on open
Bazaar and assist them with issues people who run stores have.

Over the years we've processed ~10,000 dollars worth of Bitcoin transactions.

We've ran into issues where confirmations take longer than our fulfilment
center are used to, so we needed to wait to ship out orders.

We've run into issues where refunds get weird due to price fluctuations.

I've always noticed customers buying our products when the price of Bitcoin
was too high and due for a crash, but since it's run up over $2000 I've
noticed barely any transactions.

This is a fundamental change in how people are using it, and due to the high
fees and slow confirmation times, it's no longer useful for us and it seems
people would rather HODL than use.

Personally I enjoy the tech, but never cared for it as a speculative asset,
which now I believe it has become (but kinda always was).

Have fun with your digital gold.

~~~
jraedisch
It is a combination of HODLing, long transaction times and high fees. At least
the latter two can (and hopefully will) be lowered by improving the tech. And
HODLing should lessen if Bitcoin become less volatile. It might still take a
while though. In the meantime will/do you try any altcoins?

------
shawn
There was interesting discussion here about disk usage over time:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154682](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16154682)

I wanted to ask again here, directly to Bitcoin techies: How can BTC survive
100 years if no one can download the massive blockchain? Most residential IPs
enforce a 1TB/mo cap. Much of the internet is also on slow connections
(Australia).

The BTC whitepaper is surprisingly hand wavey on this one subject, and the
more I think about it, the more it seems like an Achilles' heel.

Can we eventually reboot BTC back to the genesis block, but with all current
BTC pre-mined and allocated to current holders? Kind of like a manual GC, or
hard reset back to initial commit.

But it doesn't seem that simple. Millions of people have certain quantities of
BTC, and even tiny ones add up. You have to track that data somewhere. It
doesn't seem possible to encode the whole state of the world into a 1MB
genesis block.

So the question becomes, at what point to we reboot, how, and by what
mechanism can we achieve community consensus?

This is combined with the fact that BTC is deflationary, so eventually miners
will charge nothing but tx fees. No more block reward = the TX fees must be at
least as high as the current block reward. That is a staggering cost since a
1MB block can only encode a couple thousand tx.

That leads to the difficulty death spiral: difficulty re adjusts every 2016
blocks. Two weeks when every block mines at ten minutes. But if miners leave
en masse, then suddenly it will take a very long time to mine blocks. It could
be months before the difficulty readjusts down.

This must sound identical to all the previous BTC naysayers, but believe me
when I say I believe this can work. I'm trying to discuss the technical merits
and set aside the question of whether it will fail.

~~~
snikeris
> I wanted to ask again here, directly to Bitcoin techies: How can BTC survive
> 100 years if no one can download the massive blockchain? Most residential
> IPs enforce a 1TB/mo cap. Much of the internet is also on slow connections
> (Australia).

Presumably in 100 years, your cap will be larger, and your internet will be
faster.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Short story is that bitcoin is a ledger that keeps track of where coins go.

So if I give you a coin, and you give it back, 1 trillion times, we have a
huge database with two trillion transactions. But at the end of the day,
nothing changed, I still have a coin and you don't, because you gave it back
each time.

Much of that data (i.e. 99.9999% of it, in this case) can be reliably thrown
away for all practical intents and purposes.

That's the gist of it. I'll spare you the technicalities (which I'm not
intimately familiar with anymore myself, in any case), but the basic idea is
that you don't need all data to run the network reliably.

That, plus moore's law's equivalents for storage and networking, google them.
They're not as strong as for CPU, but they're quite good anyway.

------
elmar
In the long term you can't have fast and low fees with decentralized and
censorship-resistance you have to chose one or the other.

Bitcoin Cash is fast and as low fees but if it manages to scale to something
like a Visa network number of transactions, it will be centralized and then
some geographical jurisdiction or miner cartel will try to have control over
it lowering the censorship-resistance characteristic.

I think is great to have to different paths on Bitcoin BTC vs BCH so we have
opportunity to see own they evolve.

~~~
jamoes
> Bitcoin Cash is fast and as low fees but if it manages to scale to something
> like a Visa network number of transactions, it will be centralized

This just isn't true. Today's commodity hardware can already process gigabyte
blocks[1], which corresponds to approximately 3000 tx/s globally. In addition,
Moore's and Nielsen's laws will bring down the cost of cpu power and
bandwidth, and will enable terrabyte-sized blocks within the next decade or
two - all while still running on commodity hardware.

[1] [https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-
mine-...](https://news.bitcoin.com/gigablock-testnet-researchers-mine-the-
worlds-first-1gb-block/)

~~~
elmar
A big problem is latency even today anything above 3s is unacceptable for
mining, half of miners are not validating blocks before starting to mine
because it takes to "long", miners spy on other miners and then try to mine
empty blocks, Bitcoin doesn't have a lot of orphan blocks today because mining
is centralised in China, do you think increasing the block size will help with
any of these problems?

One thing is to test on a controlled environment another completely diferent
thing is to test on real world.

------
dmm
Maybe it will be true again someday... Here's a cool map of mainnet lightning
network node: [https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/](https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/)

------
ozim
Going to get popcorn, when it will hit news BTC will drop another 30%.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Did anyone make a bitcoin miner that doubles as a popcorn machine? That would
be fitting, and would at least put electricity to some more reasonable use.

~~~
paulmd
I don't think anyone's done popcorn, but perhaps you would care for some
delicious (filthy) rigberries?

[https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/639287717705089024](https://twitter.com/a_man_in_black/status/639287717705089024)

------
statoshi
I'm the author of the pull request that made this change; feel free to AMA
related to it.

~~~
quadcore
Why did you do it? _Fast_ and _low_ are relative terms when it comes to
marketing, isnt?

------
quadcore
Anyone has an idea as to when the lightning network will get out and how good
it is?

~~~
serg_chernata
I'm sure it's still months away but they're already performing test
transactions such as buying coffee with the tech.

~~~
dmm
There are experimental lightning network nodes on mainnet now and the first
transaction has been made: [https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-
pizza-day-...](https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-networks-pizza-day-
first-ever-physical-purchase-on-lightning-network)

Here's a map of the LN network. So far there are about 100 nodes:
[https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/](https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/)

~~~
nwah1
I'm extremely skeptical that they can solve the double spending problem in a
trustless way, without all the same scalability drawbacks of the blockchain.

Once you insert trust and centralization, then all of the supposed benefits of
the blockchain are gone, but all the shady behavior will remain and almost
certainly get worse.

My understanding is that it is a bit like IOUs redeemable for bitcoin. But
just like with Tether and so many other supposedly-redeemable IOUs on the
blockchain, there's always going to be serious doubts about whether there
really is anything backing them.

~~~
45h34jh53k4j
No its not like IOUS -- thats just FUD that those big blocker bcash dweebs
keep saying.

LN tx's are actually bitcoin tx's. Micro ones! Proper real bitcoin segwittx's!
Secured by the network. Its just they are not registered on chain until the
payment channel is closed.

~~~
jamoes
> LN tx's are actually bitcoin tx's.

This is an oversimplification. LN transactions have much different properties
than regular bitcoin transactions. Most notably, LN transactions require the
user (or someone they trust) to be online in order to verify that they aren't
being defrauded by someone broadcasting and earlier state of the payment
channel.

~~~
dmm
> require the user (or someone they trust) to be online in order to verify
> that they aren't being defrauded

You're right but to clarify, the user getting online once a week or so is
enough. They don't have to continuously be online.

------
mrfusion
Level with me guys. Is there any chance bitcoin can survive? How might it
happen?

Has there ever been a technology that had a first mover advantage and large
network effect but still got bested by a superior technology?

~~~
andrewla
When was the last time you played a VHS tape. For that matter, when was the
last time you played a DVD?

------
rplnt
The comments there make me sad.

~~~
statoshi
The pull request was brigaded by folks from /r/btc who were not interested in
positively contributing to the discussion; they just wanted to waste our time
rehashing the past 3 years of scaling debate.

------
jpmoyn
Bitcoin is too energy intensive, slow, and the fees are crazy. It served a
good purpose for educating the market, but I think a second-mover might end up
taking over

The only truly 0 fee, virtually instant cryptocurrency i have encountered so
far is raiblocks. It only achieves this by using block-lattice, not
blockchain. The whitepaper is pretty interesting.

~~~
nwah1
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

~~~
TeMPOraL
No, but there is such a thing as morally repugnant dish you should abstain
from, no matter the price. For instance, one that promises to waste unbounded
amounts of energy just to make some anti-authoritarians and some scammers
rich.

~~~
keymone
energy spent is proportional to the amount of security people need in their
transaction platform.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Security does not scale linearly; blockchains are way in the "diminishing
returns" territory of real-life security.

------
crispytx
I thought bitcoin was 'legit' until I actually bought some in the summer of
2017. Before ever purchasing any Bitcoin, I assumed that transactions were
either free, or the fees were extremely low. However, after actually
purchasing some Bitcoin and trying to move it between wallets, I found that
the fees to make a transaction with Bitcoin are extremely high! In August of
2017 it cost me around $5 to make a single transaction using Bitcoin. At this
point I knew for certain that Bitcoin would go to $0. Convenience store owners
hate the $0.30 transaction fees currently associated with VISA debit cards,
how do you suppose consumers and merchants are going to feel about $5
transaction fees? And the technology behind Bitcoin, blockchain, is equally
ridiculous. In order to make a single transaction, one has to process a record
of every other transaction that has ever occurred? That is a horrible idea.

~~~
lawlessone
You did 0 research before buying.

~~~
crispytx
I bought $10 worth, and that was my 'research'.

------
TomMarius
Well, I mean, these are not and never have been the main benefits of Bitcoin.

EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes (please check out their purpose, it's not to
disagree with people). You guys should go and read the Bitcoin Whitepaper.

~~~
gooseus
So looking at the updated site, I see:

1) Peer-to-Peer transactions

Thats's nice, but so do Square Cash, Venmo, Paypal, etc... and they currently
do it cheaper.

2) Borderless payments

How do we define borders? They're just arbitrary demarcation lines regulated
by governments, so wouldn't the developing regulations in South Korea and
China be creating borders for bitcoin?

3) Fraud Protection

Maybe someone can explain this to me. If any weird activity happens on my bank
account, my bank contacts me and shuts down my card until I verify
transactions. If I make a purchase with my CC and the seller is fraudulent, I
can charge-back and have the CC deal with the seller. How does Bitcoin even
come close to that level of fraud protection? I assume multi-sig is their way
of defining "fraud protection"?

Is it the decentralization? Because isn't the bulk of the mining being done by
large pools that can then be regulated and controlled by the governments of
the countries in which they operate? I just checked the mining breakdown[0]
and the two top mining pools (BTC.COM and AntPool) are owned by Bitmain[1],
which is a Chinese company, and the next two (BTC.TOP and ViaBTC) also look
they're controlled by Chinese companies. I'm not anti-chinese, but lets not
pretend that companies operating in China aren't in some way beholden to their
highly centralized and non-democratic government.

So what are, and have always been, the main benefits of bitcoin again?

[0] [https://blockchain.info/pools](https://blockchain.info/pools) [1]
[https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitmain](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitmain)

~~~
Cthulhu_
> Thats's nice, but so do Square Cash, Venmo, Paypal, etc... and they
> currently do it cheaper.

With the difference that your wallet and means of transferring funds is
centralized; you can't transfer money from your Paypal wallet without using
Paypal's services. With crypto all you need is a connection to the network and
your private key.

> How do we define borders? They're just arbitrary demarcation lines regulated
> by governments, so wouldn't the developing regulations in South Korea and
> China be creating borders for bitcoin?

They are, plenty of countries where crypto tech is not officially allowed. Or
well, they can block the exchanges; in theory, using a VPN service people
could still get on the network. But that too can be blocked. So you have a
point there, while transferring coins is a global thing, there will be
countries without an open internet where it won't be possible.

Re: fraud protection, that's a tough one indeed. I think that implies that you
can't get hit by a malicious bank? I'd argue it's more insecure than regular
currencies, and like you said, official banks and currencies have a guarantee
system, that is, if e.g. a bank gets hacked, or even when, due to your own
fault, you get scammed, banks and credit card companies will reimburse you,
often backed by national / global banks and systems.

~~~
statoshi
Fraud protection is referring to protection against double spending and
protection against chargebacks - it's not the same type of consumer protection
that folks are used to with credit cards. However, it's worth noting that this
type of consumer protection /is/ possible and can be built on top of the
system using reputation and escrow services.

