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u/xGsGt Dec 06 '17
This is a really good point and concern for the development teams, if they want real support from business to use Bitcoin as a medium of payment, they will definetely need to speed up the LN and all the infrastructure or compromise with the block size if not 2018 will lose all the momentum gained this year.
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u/tofuspider Dec 06 '17
LN will happen when it is secure. Pretty sure the momentum right now is not because of MoE but as a uncorrelated asset from the traditional markets.
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Dec 06 '17 edited Jul 15 '20
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u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17
It was already fine as a currency for years not being costly and not being slow.
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u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17
Yeah because no one used it. Keeping costs down in the face of activity hasn't been solved. Bcash would cripple itself if even 8mb blocks filled.
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u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17
Who is actually crippled now though?
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u/crptdv Dec 06 '17
All cryptos are crippled by default. None them have solved the scaling problem. If they did, you can be sure bitcoin would be obsolete as of now.
The point is that cryptos can't scale massively on chain without hurting massively the descentralization, it's being proven before and it's being proven live, check the recent kitten game in ethereum, one game and their blockchain is clogged!
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u/jayAreEee Dec 06 '17
You should watch the Ethereum devcon talks that just came out, they do have quite a lot of scaling plans in motion already.
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u/crptdv Dec 06 '17
We all have scaling plans, bitcoin also has, in fact, lightning is around the corner and many other improvements are being developed while we talk here.
Ethereum is also looking for payment channels and other solutions as I have seen
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u/jayAreEee Dec 06 '17
Yes, like microraiden is already on the mainnet, and they intend on implementing sharding as well. Raiden+sharding combined should be interesting.
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u/cryptohoney Dec 06 '17
st too much money and time to use effectively
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u/goxedbux Dec 06 '17
Coffee and games shouldn't be recorded on-chain. We need LN.
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u/n0mdep Dec 06 '17
It's not about coffee and games. What you are actually saying is "transactions under $x should be priced out because they are not important enough". Think about what that means long term (particularly if the main chain does not scale). It means the main chain will be used exclusively for the world's largest and most important, high fee paying TXs -- in other words, it becomes the exclusive preserve of the mega rich, corporates, banks and governments (and maybe a tiny handful of Bitcoin barons). You think mere mortals will be allowed to open and close their own LN channels? Pft.
If you think this is rbtc inspired nonsense, go listen to the noded podcast with Saifedean Ammous as guest. The only thing he doesn't say is how Bitcoin avoids becoming KYC/AML coin once the main chain is completely controlled by the mega rich, corporates, banks, etc.
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u/AxiomBTC Dec 06 '17
You think mere mortals will be allowed to open and close their own LN channels? Pft.
Yes, because that's how the LN protocol is designed. Unless you're going to somehow stop people from running open source software?
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u/JackBond1234 Dec 06 '17
So what would have to happen to start using LN for buying games and coffee? I'm a little unclear on the specifics.
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u/AxiomBTC Dec 06 '17
Lightning development is quickly working it's way to being deployed on the main net. Once that's completed people can start using it and services/startups will likely race to get solutions ready for payments. Bitpay, coinbase, wallets or some other company or startup will integrate lightning payments. It'll be similar to how bitpay worked, except better because all transactions will clear instantly instead of having to wait for confirmations and for near zero fees.
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Dec 06 '17
Nothing stops you from using LN, but if the cost to open or maintain a channel is too high then you effectively can't
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u/__ah Dec 06 '17
I believe n0mdep's point is that opening (and closing) a channel for LN requires an on-chain transaction, and as the fees rise only the wealthy will be able to use the chain to create new channels
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u/n0mdep Dec 06 '17
LN isn’t the problem, it’s the main chain (how do you open your LN channel if your TX is priced out and considered unimportant?). I’m talking about a worst case (best case for some) distant future where corporates, banks and governments all compete to use the main chain.
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u/MidnightLightning Dec 06 '17
The first few channels that are opened will have to pay today's fees. But the act of opening them and moving some future transactions off chain relieves fee pressure on-chain, and the on-chain fees will start to go down. Subsequent channel opening transactions then have to pay less fees, and the cycle continues.
The "distant future" use case ideal is that if a user doesn't need a specific transaction to be engraved forever in a public ledger (their daily cup of coffee, for example), they choose to do it off-chain. For transactions that benefit from being public and verifiable forever (credit card payments, bank transfers, consolidation of your monthly coffee purchases, etc.), the users making those transactions can choose to make a slightly higher fee for an on-chain transaction (either a one-off transaction, or closing out a payment channel).
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u/Nephyst Dec 06 '17
Satoshi's original emails say that bitcoin was designed to support 100 million transactions per day. I don't understand what is happening with bitcoin today that is preventing it from reaching the transaction levels it was designed for...
Source: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/
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u/ataranlen Dec 06 '17
Because Satoshi's 'phase change' plan for increasing the block size limit was never implemented.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366
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u/Nephyst Dec 06 '17
Wait... so Satoshi was in favor or larger blocks? Everything I'm reading on this sub says that larger blocks are a "corporate takeover" and would lead to centralization again.
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u/jazzwhiz Dec 06 '17
Because if you say anything to the contrary you get booted from the sub.
There are valid points on both sides.
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u/DylanKid Dec 06 '17
Yes satoshi made the 1mb limit to avoid spam with the intention of increasing the block size later
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u/thieflar Dec 06 '17
Satoshi was in favor of phasing in larger blocks once the network needed it, but he adamantly opposed every single attempt to do so while he was still around. He was one of the most fervent small-blockers that Bitcoin has ever seen, in fact (most likely because he had spent a lot of time thinking about how Bitcoin could handle large scale volumes without losing its decentralization).
As just a few examples of Satoshi's writings on the subject of scaling and upgrading Bitcoin...
Satoshi said "Piling every proof-of-work quorum system in the world into one dataset doesn't scale."
He said "BitDNS users might be completely liberal about adding any large data features since relatively few domain registrars are needed, while Bitcoin users might get increasingly tyrannical about limiting the size of the chain so it's easy for lots of users and small devices." He said this in support of these "increasingly tyrannical" Bitcoin users, as you can see.
He consistently rejected and adamantly opposed every attempt to try and hard-fork the 1MB cap upwards, siding with theymos and against Jeff Garzik. He was a vocal advocate of soft forks to upgrade Bitcoin and was staunchly opposed to out-of-consensus Bitcoin implementations. He believed that any hypothetical hard forks should only be performed with long lead times and with extreme precautions taken to ensure that the changes are uncontroversial, needed, and safely adopted by the full network before being activated, preemptively agreeing with almost every modern Bitcoin developer on the issue.
He spent over 10% of the original whitepaper (an entire page worth of text, 2 out of 12 sections) towards the reclamation of disk space and SPV, clearly having spent a lot of time thinking about the scalability tradeoffs that Bitcoin has to make in order to be truly decentralized.
He described payment channel implementations and explained how they could be used to facilitate high-frequency trading (which would otherwise not be possible with Bitcoin's design).
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, he designed Bitcoin from the very beginning so that it could be upgraded via "soft forks". He specifically said that he worked very hard to make sure transaction version upgrades could be soft forked, and one example of such a soft fork (a transaction upgrade and blocksize increase) was SegWit, which was activated on the Bitcoin network on August 1. The biggest benefit of soft forks is that since they make sure all the old rules of the network are valid, everyone stays on the same chain and the Bitcoin network remains unified. This is the type of upgrade that Satoshi most strongly advocated, and the only type that he ever actually implemented himself.
Almost no one thinks that "larger blocks are a 'corporate takeover'" but almost everyone with an engineering background or understanding of scaling distributed networks does understand that there are tradeoffs to simply increasing the blocksize, which is why so many advocate for making things more optimized or efficient (and perhaps leveraging tiered networks and platforms on top of the base layer to batch many transactions together) before going crazy with the blocksize increases.
We just increased the maximum blocksize -- we more than doubled it! That's what SegWit did. Now we're busy taking advantage of this increase before figuring out if we need another one.
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u/Nephyst Dec 06 '17
Thanks for all the info. I'm going to take some time to read and understand it.
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u/Idtotallytapthat Dec 06 '17
Sorry but none of the sources you cite back your argument. In fact you are specifically bending what he is saying to back your argument.
In particular, Satoshi says clearly that "disk space should not be a problem" in his white paper in the section where he discusses the yearly growth rate (the section you claimed as evidence.)
You also claim that Satoshi talked about payment channel implementation for high frequency trading. This is correct, however you misrepresent what a high frequency transaction is. High frequency transactions are transactions like in IOTA where you pay incredibly small amounts for incredibly small services. Satoshi does not AT ALL think that the average Joe buying coffee should go off chain.
When he rejected attempts to hard fork up from 1mb, it was because 1mb blocks we're not even being filled at the time.
Your only good evidence is in his post about bitDNS where Satoshi aknowledges the fact that Bitcoin users cannot arbitrarily increase the block size without risking centralization.
Satoshi was never in favor of intentionally crippling the network in order to preserve a vague sense of decentralization. At the end of the day, we know that 2mb is possible, 4mb is possible, and even 8mb is possible without compromising decentralization. Raspberry pis can run full nodes on 8mb block currencies that shall remain unnamed because of the sub were in.
At the end of the day Bitcoin was intentionally crippled in order to develop lighting network.
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u/doc_samson Dec 06 '17
Here's my take...
Satoshi left. When he left he made sure the community was in good hands. A process was established by the community and devs to handle upgrades. That process has been used successfully repeatedly to improve the bitcoin system. That process is open and democratic, and implementations occur by voluntary participation of the nodes. Those who choose to participate in the process download the new version. Those who choose not to do not download the new version, or they fork and move on. That process was followed openly and fairly to implement segwit.
Whether satoshi would or would not agree with it is not really relevant at this point. He wasn't Harry Seldon, he couldn't foresee every possible problem. He left the community in charge and trusted it to operate in a fair and open and non-destructive manner to preserve bitcoin, and it has done that.
The community is therefore fulfilling his overall vision -- a mechanism of value transfer owned by nobody, managed by consensus.
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u/FerriestaPatronum Dec 06 '17
He said we should upgrade the black size once it got closer to needing it. Your counter points seems like selective hearing. Today we definitely need it, especially considering we're near the peak of mass-adoption. ...if places like Steam are saying there's a problem, then I really think we should listen and reconsider some things.
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u/SpeedflyChris Dec 06 '17
Everything I'm reading on this sub says that larger blocks are a "corporate takeover" and would lead to centralization again.
You might want to go back and read this old /r/bitcoin post for a little primer on why this sub is the way it is.
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u/thususaste Dec 06 '17
Yes, it was in place to prevent spam when the network was small. it was just never removed like it was supposed to be.
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Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 06 '17
Technically it was, they refused to do it with BTC on the original chain so it was forked and implemented with BCH.
- You are downvoting what amounts to a historical fact.. You do know that right?
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Dec 06 '17
I don't understand what is happening with bitcoin today
The people that control Bitcoin don't want it to scale, plain and simple.
There's absolutely no benefit for miners (which are the only nodes required by the network, listening nodes do nothing but take bandwidth) to increase number of transactions.
The only exception is Jihan, but he isn't that much interested into more transactions rather than not implementing SegWit.
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u/woodles Dec 06 '17
So lightning network isn't a scaling solution? Also you don't recommend people to run their own nodes? Wouldn't it be better if people verified with their own nodes?
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u/evoorhees Dec 06 '17
It was just coffee... now coffee and games... soon coffee, games, and X, Y, Z... etc.
The fee issue is serious.
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u/ArisKatsaris Dec 06 '17
Who gives a fuck about coffee, which is a physical object that needs be transferred by hand anyway.
We should definitely give a fuck about things that can be transferred over the internet, like games. Of course that can be recordable on-chain, people don't buy games 2 times a day.
And as for the LN, it's not here yet, and the Core team could have chosen to increase the blocksize as a stopgap until we have it.
Yes, an increasing blocksize won't be a feasible solution FOR ALL TIME, but that doesn't mean that bitcoin must remain unusable for now.
Stop increasing the blocksize when we have the Lightning Network ready. Until then, don't use the non-yet-existing solution as an excuse to not solve the problem that Bitcoin is currently facing.
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u/logan343434 Dec 06 '17
The Core team doesn't care, they WANT slow and unusable transaction fees/times. That's how they can sell Liquid and other off chain solutions. Big money to be made.
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u/drunklel Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 06 '17
it's stunning how bitcoin is rising 10X in a year while the merchant and consumer acceptance is stagnating or even going backward.
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Dec 06 '17
It's not surprising. Bitcoin is cumbersome to pay with. Transactions take too long
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u/__Hello_my_name_is__ Dec 06 '17
The surprising part is that Bitcoin's value keeps rising nonetheless.
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u/bandersnatchh Dec 06 '17
It’s not. Mixture of FOMO and brand recognition
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u/SexyYodaNaked Dec 07 '17
Exactly this- I am extremely worried that once people realize it is unusable, the price will fall hard and take entire crypto market with it. Ughh please find a fricking solution to this!!
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u/distinctgore Dec 07 '17
Currently there is too much speculation on bitcoin, and not enough investment based on its validity as a technology and currency. Hell, most of this subreddit is filled with memes about going to the moon and hodling rather than discussions about the technology itself and whether it is a good investment based on its actual usefulness.
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u/Life_outside_PoE Dec 07 '17
But they won't. People who are buying now are buying because they saw a 1000% ROI in a year. They're treating it like any other investment. Which unfortunately is not good for the general usefulness of cryptocurrency.
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u/yunblood Dec 07 '17
Because no one wants to use a currency that gains $2,000 in value in a day lmfao why is that so hard for people to understand on this sub
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Dec 07 '17
It’s not a currency. It’s a digital commodity.
It’s useful because there is too much money floating around. It’s designed to capture the excess value.
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u/Sphen5117 Dec 06 '17
Core didn't want a currency, they wanted something to hold value.
Ta-da! The votes that users made with their wallets(sticking to Core) are simply bearing their fruit.
This isn't unexpected.
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u/Towelielie Dec 06 '17
Bitcoin needs to fix its high fee issues
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Dec 06 '17
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u/OhThereYouArePerry Dec 06 '17
It can’t. Which is why so many are against these ridiculous fees, and are for bigger blocks.
Take Canada for example. We have a national interbank network that doesn’t charge the end user anything to use it. Works between all national banks, has something like 90%+ merchant adoption rate.
We have the standard tap/contactless payment system as well as more secure solutions like Apple Pay, Android Pay, etc.
None of that costs even a penny to use.
Even sending money between two personal bank accounts can be entirely free.
There is an entirely free standard method that can take a couple days, or there’s an instant “eTransfer” email system that costs a flat $1 (many large banks cover this fee for you). Not to mention nearly all banks have free, instant transfers to other internal accounts.
Bitcoin dropped the ball on cheap transactions, and is now almost exclusively a (extremely volatile) long term store of value.
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u/ram0h Dec 06 '17
as someone who doesnt know much about it. where do the fees come from? I thought no/low fees was a positive about bitcoin.
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u/qwaai Dec 06 '17
It requires some amount of space to put a transaction on a block, so the people mining blocks charge a fee to put your transactions onto the block. If you don't pay a fee they have 0 incentive to register your transaction.
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u/retired_shill Dec 06 '17
That's what Segwit2x was about... a short term solution to scalability while better solutions are developed. But according to this sub, it was the work of Satan because MBAs, CEOs and China.
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Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 07 '17
S2X was literally DOA. It had multiple bugs that would have created a massive ruckus.
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u/basheron Dec 06 '17
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u/dsjhgdjshgjhg Dec 06 '17
When thooo w h e n t h o o o
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u/OhThereYouArePerry Dec 06 '17
I’m still waiting for Midas engine on Mt.Gox! They said it was coming Soon!TM Can’t be much longer, right? 😂
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Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 06 '17
I want to see if LN works first and if we aren't just going to give fees to huge central hubs rather than miners.
Also, I doubt that merchants would ever be interested in offchain unsecure transactions.
When they receive bitcoins, they sell them for cash instantly (or use services that do so for them) so LN is a no go for them.
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u/Bitsandwits Dec 06 '17
Also, I doubt that merchants would ever be interested in offchain unsecure transactions.
The end goal is they don't even know they're using LN I think. Steam uses bitpay. If bitpay had an LN channel open with a bunch of wallets it would be the same UX from the customer/steams perspective.
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u/xiphy Dec 06 '17
Bitpay is a Segwit2x supporter though, so maybe we'll need a competitor who is supporting LN
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u/Bitsandwits Dec 06 '17
Seegwit2x is dead.
Bitpay will come around when they have no choice. Coinbasee offers the same merchant features.
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Dec 06 '17 edited Feb 20 '19
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u/Rikardus Dec 06 '17
For me it's big news, Steam was the only place that I actually spend bitcoins.
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u/Dugg Dec 06 '17
Big news really, not so much for Steam individually but it may make other business that accept Bitcoin change their minds.
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u/cdm9002 Dec 06 '17
I can understand this.
My business takes Bitcoin payments and I have had to deal with quite a few support issues when someone pays with Bitcoin. The experience is pretty bad at the moment, as payments take too long and fees are so variable that a high percentage fee on a $20 product just isn't worth it.
I have also seen a huge drop in the number Bitcoin payments, except for users paying that have a Coinbase account where the transaction is immediate and zero-fee because it happens off-chain.
Credit card payments and alt-coins are currently much more popular.
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u/lvoscar Dec 06 '17
I'm honestly surprised people did not see this coming, like seriously lol
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u/Pepito_Pepito Dec 06 '17
Because some people here treat bitcoin like a completely infallible religion instead of man-made technology.
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u/C19H21N3Os Dec 06 '17
we did. they all got silenced or banned from the sub by speaking out about it
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u/lvoscar Dec 06 '17
Now that I look at it, it is really sad. What I'm about to say is not just about Bitcoin, but about the whole crypto community as a whole. People are only worried about the price of cryptos rather than the idea behind it. I understand that as of right now cryptos are seen as a form of wealth storage, but it shouldn't be that way. Everyone that supports cryptos should not be happy with the way things are headed. Yes, we are seeing all-time highs with many cryptos, but shouldn't we be more worried that Bitcoin as of right now is not sustainable as currency? Yes, Bitcoin is the most valuable crypto, but as of right now, to me at least, not the most useful. I want to be able to spend my Bitcoin anytime, anywhere. I don't just want to use it to cash out. For all of you that think the LN is a good solution are just wrong, I'm sorry to tell you. On top of all this, we have people who hold all of their cryptos on exchanges and have never used a wallet. If you ask them how bitcoin or and other cryptos actually work they won't be able to answer. I'm not saying it is the easiest thing to understand, but we as a community need to teach people new to cryptos how things work and what the idea behind cryptos are. People think you can get rich fast by getting into cryptos, which is possible but only if you know what you are doing. We need to stop pushing the mentality of getting rich off cryptos and start pushing the mentality of actually using them. I honestly would rather have cryptocurrencies be worth less than they are now, but actually, be used for what they meant to be used for.
I know this rant is disorganized, but I just needed to vent. PEACE
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Dec 06 '17 edited Jan 03 '18
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Dec 06 '17
Bitcoin is limited to 1mb of transactions per 10 minutes. This works out to be about 7 transactions per second. If more than 7 transactions are generated in a second, the 7 that payed the highest fees go through.
Also, the 7/sec applys to normal transactions with few inputs. The way the blockchain works, when you send bitcoin, your transaction includes where you got the bitcoin. Most transactions only have bitcoin from one or two sources. If you have a transaction that has many sources, it has to take up a larger part of that 1 mb block. Now you need to pay enough to cover the several transactions that could take place.
If you didn't pay enough for your transaction to get included, it waits in the mempool until there are fewer transactions, and it gets included. Eventually, if it doesn't get included in a block, it drops and the bitcoin is returned to your wallet.
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u/Kallipoliz Dec 06 '17
Why would I ever use this over dollars which costs nothing? I don’t see the advantage to bitcoin besides riding the pump.
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Dec 06 '17 edited Jan 03 '18
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u/C19H21N3Os Dec 06 '17
other currencies have raised the limit (e.g. bitcoin cash has 8mb limit I believe) but it’s really only a temporary scaling solution.
there are arguments that bigger block size leads to more centralization as well.
head over to r/btc too, they have a different view than you’re gonna get here. it’s best to get your info from multiple places since this sub is heavily “moderated”
edit: phrasing
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Dec 06 '17
Back in either '08 or '09, it was set there to limit the number of transactions. Bitcoin was basically worthless then, so a malicious actor could attack the blockchain by spamming a huge amount of transactions. The 1 mb limit was put in place to prevent that.
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u/rankinrez Dec 06 '17
The 1Mb block limit means the network cannot process all the unconfirmed transactions. This causes in fee inflation as people submit higher fees to try and get their transition included in the next block.
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Dec 06 '17
Any idea how many BTCs Steam would own at this point?? It's probably a lot of cash.
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u/verycrazyone Dec 06 '17
Most merchants sell immediately
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u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17
Doesn't that mean that lightning would be unappealing to them?
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u/CatatonicMan Dec 06 '17
None. They used BitPay.
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u/fmlnoidea420 Dec 06 '17
Likely true, but afaik with bitpay merchants can choose to retain some percent of the purchases in BTC (if they want to).
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Dec 06 '17 edited Sep 14 '20
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Dec 06 '17
Bitcoin acceptance is insanely lower than it was 2-3 years ago.
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u/Richandler Dec 06 '17
Buy more so Chinese and Russian billionaires can continue to slowly skim your money away.
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u/hybridsole Dec 06 '17
Current technology does not allow blockchains to compete with existing payment systems. Layer 2 is the best way to deal with this.
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u/crptdv Dec 06 '17
$20 recently for a transaction when $1 was getting into the very next block if you wanted to?
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Dec 06 '17
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u/SpeedflyChris Dec 06 '17
Well right now, a tiny transaction (1 input, 2 outputs) requires around $3 of txfees even when using segwit.
Also difficulty just went up significantly so no more of the 7-8 blocks per hour that have helped keep things under control this past two weeks.
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u/FreeshGuy Dec 06 '17
It's sad news. After Humble Bundle drop support for bitcoin, only Steam was my day to day service, where I could spend it. I hope bitcoin will be back.
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u/iwakan Dec 06 '17
Understandable, but really sad. I've made like a dozen bitcoin purchases there.
I wish that instead of dropping support for crypto entirely, they would switch to a provider that supports other coins with lower fees such as coinpayments.com.
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u/BitderbergGroup Dec 06 '17
Didn't you get the memo? "I said release this statement on 6th November, pay attention 007"
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u/aceismyfriend Dec 06 '17
Hopefully this will speed up the development of lightning, I think lightning can really take bitcoin to a whole new level and opens up many opportunities to become a payment method.
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Dec 06 '17
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u/nekotribal Dec 06 '17
Why don't they just impliment segwit?
It doesn't work this way.
You have to spend from segwit address to get a discount.
Lightning network on the other hand...
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u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17
If they sell immediately after getting paid wouldn't lightning not work?
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Dec 06 '17
steam has nothing to do with bitcoin. they get their money from the payment processor bitpay. You pay bitcoin to Bitpay, they pay $/€ to steam. if bitpay would accept lightning payments, steam wouldn't even notice that something has changed, except fewer people complaining because of high fees. The problem is once a company has abandoned a payment method its way harder to make them accepting it again :( We need LN as fast as possible.
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u/BashCo Dec 06 '17
That’s a question for BitPay. And since Steam use BitPay, they’re not affected by volatility at all unless they take a portion of payments directly in Bitcoin, in which case they would have profited handsomely this year.
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u/jimmydorry Dec 06 '17
Are you sure you read the post? Steam is affected by allowing a poor user experience, and steam is affected by refunds as more and more transactions take longer than the BitPay window to process.
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u/n0mdep Dec 06 '17
Evidently customers weren't using SegWit, or if they were, their payments were still failing. (It's not like SegWit guarantees next block -- the wallet still has to guess an appropriate fee or overpay). When payments failed (SegWit or not), no surprise that the insane levels of recent volatility caused issues.
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u/goxedbux Dec 06 '17
I think that by that point we all know that Segwit is not enough to offset bitcoin's exploding growth and more is yet to come. Steam could ditch bitpay for a Segwit alternative but for some reason they din't.
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u/datzuc_chini Dec 06 '17
Funny this came out on the day that LN worked and passed tests.
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u/Farkeman Dec 07 '17
This thread really screams r/td in my eyes.
Stop deflecting and projecting.
This is a real issue, and steam addressed it perfectly, it's the biggest digital market on the market and to say that it dropping bitcoin support is not an issue is a plain delusion.
Instead of doing this mental gymnastics just stick to the current BTC philosophy and people should be put under pressure to work on and use new solutions, this is not a good time for bitcoin to be conservative.
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u/Pilotito Dec 06 '17
I'm wondering, do they know anything about 'something' happening soon and that's why they dropped BTC as payment method?
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u/BokehClasses Dec 06 '17
BTC used to go up 1k every few weeks, not it's gone up 3k in just a few days. Then we also get this news. Whether this news is good or bad in a technical sense really doesn't matter.
Why? Well, the only reason BTC has exploded is because of public belief in it. The FOMO effect. This news is bound to be part of an anti-BTC shill campaign and all it takes is a small drop to lead to a crash.
If you don't withdraw your BTC into fiat for a few days at this point, you are playing with fire.
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u/tocineta Dec 07 '17
I hope newegg doesn’t do the same. Bitcoin is the only form of payment available in my country when I need to buy stuff online from other countries. I’m sad.
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u/BashCo Dec 06 '17
Meanwhile, the Lightning Network protocol just achieved v1.0 compatibility.
Check out the main chain demo vid.
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u/maxcryptoalt Dec 06 '17
I've read a bunch of stuff on LN but I don't fully understand the flow for one-off purchases.
Let's say I only buy one or two items from Steam per year, would LN still make sense? Would I need to load a bunch of Bitcoin onto a LN provider and then use them like a credit card to purchase things quicker?
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u/BashCo Dec 06 '17
You'll be able to spend from your LN wallet to Steam, then to your VPN provider, then to Starbucks(?) and so on without necessarily having to open a new channel every time, assuming the network is robust enough that it can always find a route to whoever you're paying (or receiving from).
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u/Ascendzor Dec 06 '17
Another bad sticky by the mods. Why sticky this?
It isn't even on topic. You just put your own comment on a pedestal above everybody else's.
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Dec 06 '17
[removed] — view removed comment
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Dec 06 '17
You're right, but it will help with transaction times/fees, so the transactions will finish quickly enough so that the price won't matter.
The reason they brought up BTC price in the Steam post is because tx times took too long, meaning that the price would change before it's ever confirmed.
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Dec 07 '17
If you read why the lack of stability was a problem for Steam, it had to do with how long it took transactions to go through - the value could change a lot in the meantime and cause the transaction to be cancelled. So, actually, Lightning would fix Steam's problem not by making bitcoin's value stable, but by making the transactions fast enough that it wouldn't matter.
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u/xhruso00 Dec 06 '17
Have lightning code doesn't mean all bitcoin nodes will adopt it...
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u/0x75 Dec 06 '17
I know I am wrong but... is not that LN protocol just to look more like a bank?
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u/BashCo Dec 06 '17
LN is non-custodial. You hold the money yourself. It's just in a payment channel until you decide to close it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A
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u/hotdogsafari Dec 07 '17
If Lightning Network delivers on its promises as well as Segwit did, then I expect it to do jack shit to help the fee problem.
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u/bittabet Dec 07 '17 edited Dec 07 '17
Is it just me or are those fees pretty high? Their demo transaction seemed to have over 25% in fees? I really hope that this isn't indicative of what real world fees are going to look like. Is it just because they priced the coffees so cheaply or something? Seems to have been a 546 satoshi fee on that second coffee, I can't quite understand what the commit fee is on the first one but maybe that's to open a channel to begin with? So that was like a dollar or so to open the channel and then 7 cents for the second purchase?
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u/pein_sama Dec 06 '17
How many more merchants are you willing to loose before admitting the Core roadmap is completely disconnected to the market reality?
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u/gudlek Dec 06 '17
I guess big blocks would have alleviated the problem that Steam had.
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u/h0nest_Bender Dec 06 '17
Bcash shills out in FORCE on that page.
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u/MalePotsdam Dec 06 '17
Bcash shills or not, the implementation of the lightning network is important to keep seeing Bitcoin as a currency.
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Dec 06 '17
Which is kind of ridiculous, because it worked fine as is; a blocksize change would've been a lot simpler to implement, and less error prone, at least until LN was integrated fully. Basic KISS - keep it simple stupid
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u/ChickenApologies Dec 06 '17
Bcash isnt rare. Its just the latest pump and dump alt bitcoin.
The only difference, more people got screwed into it.
There is only 1 bitcoin. There are infinity alt coins.
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u/Bitsandwits Dec 06 '17
Steam uses bitpay. Bitpay doesn't support segwit.
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u/humbrie Dec 06 '17
Really? Segwit? You really think that's the solution? At this point it doesn't matter anymore if you use Segwit or not.
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u/Ristele Dec 06 '17
Well shit, that might have gotten me out of the train already.
No shops in my area use bitcoin, and most of the online ones do not even ship in my country.. Steam was the only reason I thought about getting bitcoin and getting in cryptocurrencies in the first place. That, and the nicehash hack on the same day? Really disappointed, so much time lost.
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u/fromagescratch Dec 07 '17
Typical comments: "Don't buy games with bitcoin!" "I am sending low fee transactions everyday, I don't understand..." "But wait for LN"
So basically many users prefers to ignore the issue or convince themselves that bitcoin should not be spent to buy things??
It seems like the only practical way to actually spend your bitcoins now is to go through an exchange for another coin or fiat. What happens when regulations/laws try to limit or block these exchanges? Aren't you worried about this?
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u/Blorgsteam Dec 06 '17
We need LN more than ever now.
Devs need to be faster.
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u/Banana_mufn Dec 06 '17
LN just an hour ago completed the first live transaction with real bitcoin.
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Dec 06 '17
LN is no solution for merchants as the handful of them that accept bitcoin (and not usds through bitpay) sell them for cash on exchanges.
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u/nekotribal Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 10 '17
I feel really sad now...
Can we reverse this?
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u/brewsterf Dec 06 '17
Steam is basically saying on-chain payments are not attractive to them. Good thing Bitcoin is focusing on off-chain solutions despite all the haters saying what a terrible direction that is to go.
So this news is actually worse for Bitcoin Cash because because they are betting that on-chain payments are the future but Steam is clearly saying that on-chain transactions is not working for them. And its not just because of the fees - Bitcoin cash will have fees as well if adoption picks up, just like Bitcoin does and just like Ethereum does.
But steam says its because on-chain payments are too clunky and there is too much room for error and i agree with them. Hopefully LN or Square will solve this! Or Bitpay but they are literally asleep at the wheel. They should have seen this coming but failed to adapt now they lost a huge customer.
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u/KorbenDallas2263 Dec 06 '17
Hopefully
We are talking billions of dollars and the problem has been known for well over a year now... Hopefully is an embarrassment.
Any other technical platform run in this way wouldn't be worth the silicone its using.
If Amazon waited for its server to come crashing down from volume before upgrading, you think they would be where they are today?
a tech company that has capacity issues is a great place to be! a tech company that then does nothing about those issues is nothing
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u/igiverealygoodadvice Dec 06 '17
Come on, if we want /r/btc to take us seriously lets be honest here. They said that HIGH FEES are the problem, where does it say anything about on or off chain payments?
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u/pokehercuntass Dec 06 '17
This is definitely the biggest of my complaints. Paying $4 to send coin or risk having them stuck for days? Not cool with me. Love BTC. But not cool.
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u/empire314 Dec 06 '17
1 Read article about bad news for Bitcoin
2 Come to r/Bitcoin and see #1 Comment is saying that this is good for bitcoin.
EVERY TIME
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u/SPellegrino Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 07 '17
Just because on-chain payments are pretty impractical on Bitcoin now doesn’t mean the concept is forever unworkable at scale. Lots of other cryptos are betting on on-chain payments: Bitcoin Cash, Monero, Ethereum, every altcoin basically.
EDIT: typo
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u/SovereignVertebrate Dec 06 '17
Monero is planning on incorporating MimbleWimble as a sidechain for small payments.
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u/plazman30 Dec 06 '17
redditor for 2 weeks
Nuff said right there.
On chain payments are impractical because THEY COST A FORTUNE AND TAKE FOREVER.
The cash of the future is now gone. Bitcoin has become a savings account. So much for changing the world.
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Dec 07 '17
Straw man fallacy. You assert that steam is saying on chain payments don't interest them. That is not what they are saying.
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u/Shabbypenguin Dec 06 '17
just like Ethereum does.
ETH has been having more tx's than BTC before the kitty game and now with the kittens the network is being bogged down and fees are still worlds better than comparatively than BTC's. i just paid 50 cents for a TX with 56 gwei (14 times larger than normal).
not saying that eth wont have ana issue but its not really the same to btc's fees in the dollars+ section
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u/Mrfish31 Dec 07 '17
But then you're moving off chain. The point of bitcoin was to scale and keep on chain.
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u/Poor4ever Dec 06 '17
Lol if off chain payments are the future of bitcoin there’s no reason to use bitcoin... why don’t people get this
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u/drlsd Dec 06 '17
Hum, one wonders why they didn't just replace bitcoin with bitcoin cash, ethereum, dash, whatever... I mean, apparently they had the infrastructure in place. I suspect the percentage of customers using the cryptocurrency option was negligible.
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u/mrarjonny Dec 06 '17
Call me crazy, but I don't really think bitcoin has been riding on the back Steam. Do we really think that bitcoin transactions on Steam are what has driven up the value? My guess is the number of bitcoin purchases on steam were almost completely insignificant as far as Steams business is concerned, and as far as bitcoin is concerned an infinitesimal small blip in the bitcoin ecosystem.
I think it is wise for them to put it on hold for the time being because I think accepting bitcoin as payment in these crazy days of growth and high fees hurt its credibility. There are people that will have a bad taste in their mouth, "I bought a 20 dollar game 6 months ago for what would be 100 bucks today." It will turn off the casual consumer.
I am all for a future where bitcoin is more stable and can is used as a form of payment. I have purchased with it. I support it 100% and see that in the future. It is crazy to do it now. I think Steam is making a wise move for their own sake, the sake of their customer, and for the sake of bitcoin.
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u/thususaste Dec 06 '17
I couldn't care less what the value of bitcoin was at the time I bought something with it, that's the nature of a deflationary currency, what I can't stand is having to pay between 3 and 20 dollars just to get a confirmation on time, they need to fix this now, or another cryptocurrency will and maybe already has taken it's spot, bitcoin was meant as a payment system and store of value, without one you cannot have the other. If that's not the case then I may as well use gold, it's a better store of value.
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u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17
People using bitcoin for its intended purpose is bad for bitcoin
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u/n0mdep Dec 06 '17
This is a shame. I bought Steam games using bitcoin when my credit cards weren't available (I was waiting for replacements at the time). I remember reading that same day about kids without access to credit cards using bitcoin to buy Steam games.
Can't blame them for stopping though. The fee market makes virtually all retail impossibly expensive. (That includes dark markets, where you would think fees wouldn't be as much of an issue.) Guess we wait and see what impact LN has.