[lambda]

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.

[kevinak]

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.

[hilliardfarmer]

The lightning network is a joke and always has been. It was never going to work and the creator has been open about that from day one.

Only question is, if Elizabeth Stark knows it's unworkable slop why does she keep raising money for it???

[singpolyma3]

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

[lambda]

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

[SOLAR_FIELDS]

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.

[lambda]

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).

[whynotmaybe]

>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 ?

[lambda]

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.