What? "Instantly and for a very low fee"?

Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction. They've since added hacks on top of the original Bitcoin protocol to get the price back down again, but the original design was not good for low fees.

And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle, that's hardly instant. If you accept a transaction instantly, it's relatively easy for someone to scam you by double spending.

So, no, Bitcoin doesn't make a great digital cash. Maybe a better wire transfer. But the biggest benefit of it is to be unblockable and unrefundable, which makes it great for scames and illegal activity, plus the speculative nature of the pricing, which is great for gambling on.

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kevinak 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Bitcoin via the Lightning Network is near cost-free and instant. And it's not a hack, it's just a network of payment channels.

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singpolyma3 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've never seen $100 for a normal sized transaction that seems rather hyperbolic.

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SOLAR_FIELDS 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pointing at the BTC transaction fee and saying it is super expensive is like pointing at a problematic car model and saying all cars are bad.

There are any number of other popular coins out there that have the same or better liquidity as BTC that charge tiny fractions of the fees. And also settle in seconds.

You're saying Bitcoin like BTC, but the parent commenter was probably referring to the giant ecosystem of coins, that happens to include BTC, but also many other much faster and cheaper options, that are used to globally remit payments every day.

What it's replacing, by the way, Western Union, Wise and the like, is also pretty unblockable and unrefundable.

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lambda 6 hours ago | parent [-]

What? I was replying to someone who explicitly referenced the Bitcoin whitepaper, they were clearly talking about BTC. And the protocol from the whitepaper was actually pretty bad, from a cost and transaction time point of view. It's gotten a bit better with some hacks layered on top of it.

And yeah, the thing is, payment systems that work approximately as well as BTC exist without being cryptocurrency and using up so much electricity on mining. The main difference is that they don't operate in some areas where BTC still can (like evading sanctions, like this), and the speculative nature of BTC (which is actually a net negative on using it as a cash).

	▲	SOLAR_FIELDS 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What’s your point? That BTC was the first and it has these flaws? Ok, fine, but that also doesn’t discount the point being made here which is that shitcoins DO have an actual use case that people are using them for in the real world. It might be the only actual valid (legal) use case, which is kind of what some other responders implied, but it doesn’t mean that there is no value. If payment systems that aren’t shitcoin based are working just as well, then why are these coins absolutely destroying the incumbent players like Western Union in the remittance space? If the existing solutions are good enough you wouldn’t expect incumbents to be taking such a beating here right? The systems are equivalent enough? WU does for instance 100B ish a year currently, which is around 12% of the global market. A fat share of that global remittance market is… checks notes… crypto based remittances. I’m all for trashing the next shitcoin. Don’t mistake me for some crypto apologist. I personally don’t own or use them outside of narrow use cases where they are a transient thing that gets liquidated into actual fiat as soon as possible. It’s a world ripe for fraud and abuse and the whole concept of shitcoins is probably not great for society. But to take some poorly thought out implementation that was, mind you, the first attempt at actually doing this in the real world, and try to extract it to some general conclusion that the technology is not useful 15 years later is just patently false. If the alternatives you mention are so great, why are they not winning on mindshare worldwide? Certainly seems like crypto is winning in the remittance space. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.CD.DT

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whynotmaybe 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>And transactions can take 30 minutes or more to settle >Fees have historically gone up above $100 per transaction

So it's cheaper to use Paypal ?

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lambda 5 hours ago | parent [-]

They've since added some hacks to enable it to handle more transactions and bring the price down. Effectively, the network had hit its limit on the number of transactions it could fit in a block, so you had to pay high fees to get accepted in a block, the miners simply couldn't accept all transactions; but they've added ways of fitting more transactions into a block that have helped drive prices back down again.

So now it's back to being cheaper than Paypal, but yeah, there was a time when there were $100+ transaction fees. And it may hit that again if transaction numbers go up enough to fill up blocks with the new implementation.

	▲	tromp 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		High tx fees are an essential goal in Bitcoin's design: in the long term, when the block subsidy becomes insignificant, Bitcoin's security will rely almost entirely on tx fees.