[zallarak]

Clarifications (this comment perpetuates some common misconceptions):

- A single bitcoin "transaction" can actually have thousands of inputs and thousands of outputs. So energy "per transaction" or "transactions per second" is not analogous to a typical monetary transaction.

- Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions (although some use it like that today). I'd compare Bitcoin on-chain transactions with how nation-states settle their central-bank ledgers with gold. Gold is the best comparison to Bitcoin because trading in hard gold is "final". Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash. As do bank transfers. All of these bubble down into interbank transfers that eventually settle on the base layer of central banks. So compared to shipping and securing gold, Bitcoin is quite cheap!

* Pasted and modified from an earlier comment I made on HN.

[sfjailbird]

> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions

That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.

> Credit card transactions happen on a higher level in the financial stack. As does cash

How so? As far as settlement is concerned, a cash transaction is pretty much exactly like a bitcoin transaction (and quite unlike a credit card transaction).

[bduerst]

>That's, like, just your opinion. For a lot of people it competes just fine.

Until it doesn't. A payment network is graded on how it handles disputes, not regular transactions. Bitcoin can't do refunds or chargebacks, making it rife for fraud.

Sure, you can implement escrow, but then it's no longer competitive like GP said.

[kain_niak]

Still limited to 1 000 000 bytes per 10 minutes and then some for segwit which was a unnecessary hack job that actually makes blocks bigger without much added throughput.

[nullc]

That isn't true.

In Bitcoin the block size limit was eliminated and replaced with a block weight limit which better reflects the long term operating costs for node. The raw 'size' of transactions inherently is becoming less meaningful in the long term with things like transaction compression and compact encodings.

The weight limit doesn't map perfectly to any size limit because its limiting different things, this evening most blocks have been about 1.3 MB.

[mathiasrw]

> Bitcoin does not compete with literal credit card transactions

Why not?

[ra5]

From a slightly more nerdy perspective:

Because these credit card companies have thousands of _their_ machines, in _their_ locations, running _their_ software, to meet _their_ standards.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin is run god knows where, for god knows who (as rightfully intended of course), on god knows what software.

Sadly speed is just naturally part of the tradeoff in this scenario.

[nemild]

Compared to credit cards:

- Bitcoin doesn't have chargebacks

- Bitcoin's base protocol transaction throughput is low

- There is a fixed cost per transaction (credit cards have low marginal costs for the credit card processor, and variable, percentage-based fees)

[__s]

Credit card transactions are not immutable. This is a feature

You could build that feature on top of bitcoin, but it isn't a feature that should be built into bitcoin transactions. See the lightning network