Cryptocurrency Lolcows

[CrunkLord420]

Pitfalls: bitcoins are an inherently unstable, finite 'currency' backed by no one with no real value whatsoever and are significantly worse in every way than any other form of money including wampum and iron rods.

There's people on r/bitcoin talking about how they made transactions like, four days ago and it still hasn't gone through. If your form of money transference is slower than putting a check in an envelope, with a transaction fee significantly higher than 49 cents, maybe it's not the greatest method.

fftopic: I've used ViaBTC's free accelerator plenty of times in combination with minimum network fee when I don't care about speed. They limit the amount, so try later if they're already full: https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator/

It basically whitelists your transaction to get mined in the next ViaBTC block (which is pretty regular).

 

[AnOminous]

fftopic: I've used ViaBTC's free accelerator plenty of times in combination with minimum network fee when I don't care about speed. They limit the amount, so try later if they're already full: https://pool.viabtc.com/tools/txaccelerator

0.0001 BTC is still $0.67 USD.

 

[CrunkLord420]

0.0001 BTC is still $0.67 USD.

That's about the same cost as the minimum fee PayPal will charge you as a retailer for accepting $1.

 

[AnOminous]

That's about the same cost as the minimum fee PayPal will charge you as a retailer for accepting $1.

It's still sad for a "currency" that was presented to the world as a cure for the bullshit transmission costs of ACH and other shit. It is literally cheaper to transmit cash by those means than it is to use BTC. That is a joke, and the moronic shitheads currently running the main fork of BTC are as corrupt as the Fed they denounced ever were. Tell me it ain't so.

 

[Trilby]

Still, it's fun to see this go up in flames.

 

[CrunkLord420]

It's still sad for a "currency" that was presented to the world as a cure for the bullshit transmission costs of ACH and other shit. It is literally cheaper to transmit cash by those means than it is to use BTC. That is a joke, and the moronic shitheads currently running the main fork of BTC are as corrupt as the Fed they denounced ever were. Tell me it ain't so.

BTC isn't supposed to cure transmission costs, it's about decentralization/immutability/trustlessness. I'm not a BTC minimalist, I believe there is legitimacy in altcoins, but we need a stable BTC blockchain for us to settle our altcoins against.

Transmitting DOGE is almost free.

 

[AnOminous]

BTC isn't supposed to cure transmission costs, it's about decentralization/immutability/trustlessness. I'm not a BTC minimalist, I believe there is legitimacy in altcoins, but we need a stable BTC blockchain for us to settle our altcoins against.

Transmitting DOGE is almost free.

One of the original selling points of crypto was reducing transmission costs. Now they're even worse than with normal currency, unless you're transmitting extremely large amounts of currency and, since the actual cost of transmission is the amount of space it takes up in a block, this makes transmission cheap only for unbroken amounts of currency, i.e. freshly minted currency.

A lot of Bitcoin is lost, or made nearly intransmissible, by blockchain fragmentation, which makes very small amounts of currency nearly useless.

I can have a nickel and spend it for a nickel. For a similar amount of Bitcoin, the transmission cost for a nickel would be well over a nickel. This makes it useless as a universal currency, even by the most optimistic estimates.

It is at this point not even a currency. It is a store of value, perhaps. It is an investment, perhaps.

It is not something you can use to buy a can of soda or something. It is basically useless as cash.

 

[CrunkLord420]

It is at this point not even a currency. It is a store of value, perhaps. It is an investment, perhaps.

It is not something you can use to buy a can of soda or something. It is basically useless as cash.

I do see it as a store of value, or settlement layer, or "digital gold". I do not expect it to buy coffee, and even if the TX fees were low enough blocktimes are really quite slow to approach anything near "cash"-like transactions.

I hope to see people buy into altcoins with features they specifically want to use (Eg. Monero for privacy/faster blocks). There are plenty of faster blocktime, low-fee BTC clones (eg. LTC/DOGE) that can be your PocketChangeCoin. Even with DOGEs infinite supply, if you're simply just using it as pocket change you don't really have to worry about it. Monero has it's own scalability issues (worse than BTC), but it serves a very specific purpose.

BTC shouldn't be the only popular cryptocurrency, in the future I'd be fine if it's seen as gold stores.

 

[Skeletor]

Crazy times ahead, Bitcoin just dropped $1,000 in two days.

...aaaand it's back up. What a wild ride.

One of the original selling points of crypto was reducing transmission costs. Now they're even worse than with normal currency, unless you're transmitting extremely large amounts of currency and, since the actual cost of transmission is the amount of space it takes up in a block, this makes transmission cheap only for unbroken amounts of currency, i.e. freshly minted currency.

A lot of Bitcoin is lost, or made nearly intransmissible, by blockchain fragmentation, which makes very small amounts of currency nearly useless.

I can have a nickel and spend it for a nickel. For a similar amount of Bitcoin, the transmission cost for a nickel would be well over a nickel. This makes it useless as a universal currency, even by the most optimistic estimates.

It is at this point not even a currency. It is a store of value, perhaps. It is an investment, perhaps.

It is not something you can use to buy a can of soda or something. It is basically useless as cash.

It's a complicated and expensive way of buying things online. Compare it to Amazon's one-click system, it's rubbish. No one cares about decentralization or sticking it to the fed when they want to buy laundry detergent online.

 

[CrunkLord420]

https://twitter.com/CryptoCobain/status/931986206468050945 (https://archive.fo/2wOpa)

are we the bitcoin exceptional individuals?

 

[Matt]

Pitfalls: bitcoins are an inherently unstable, finite 'currency' backed by no one with no real value whatsoever and are significantly worse in every way than any other form of money including wampum and iron rods.

There's people on r/bitcoin talking about how they made transactions like, four days ago and it still hasn't gone through. If your form of money transference is slower than putting a check in an envelope, with a transaction fee significantly higher than 49 cents, maybe it's not the greatest method.

Okay, I'll know. Thank you!

 

[RussianBlonde]

It is not something you can use to buy a can of soda or something. It is basically useless as cash.

There is plenty of websites where you can use bitcoin to pay for things already. I love how people here bash crypto while Im laughing all the way to the bank.

 

[AnOminous]

There is plenty of websites where you can use bitcoin to pay for things already. I love how people here bash crypto while Im laughing all the way to the bank.

Suppose I want a soda right now and not after 3 confirmations, a wait time of 30-300 minutes, and a transaction fee larger than the price of the soda?

 

[Solzhenitsyn]

There is plenty of websites where you can use bitcoin to pay for things already. I love how people here bash crypto while Im laughing all the way to the bank.

Serious question--why would I want to use it to buy things when it will just make me more money if I hang onto it and sell it myself? What advantages does it offer over regular currency as far as payment goes?

 

[Skeletor]

There is plenty of websites where you can use bitcoin to pay for things already. I love how people here bash crypto while Im laughing all the way to the bank.

I think for those of use who are oldfags and remember the dotcom bubble or the beanie baby bubble or the housing bubble, or the silver bubble, it's hard to not be skeptical of all this. But maybe we're the suckers, time will tell.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

Either bitcoin is an alternative to the dollar, or it's an alternative to gold stores. I don't see how it can be both. If I have a thousand dollars right now, I can feel pretty confident that the purchasing power of it is going to be about the same in January. Not so with bitcoin.

 

[AnOminous]

Either bitcoin is an alternative to the dollar, or it's an alternative to gold stores. I don't see how it can be both. If I have a thousand dollars right now, I can feel pretty confident that the purchasing power of it is going to be about the same in January. Not so with bitcoin.

Fiat currency is basically programmed to decrease in value slowly and somewhat predictably. This encourages spending or actually using it to buy goods over holding onto it or speculating on its future value, which likely loses you money. Or depositing it in banks which then, themselves, do something economically useful with it, or that's the theory.

Bitcoin is more similar to gold, and this is why goldbugs are often attracted to it (or inordinately hostile to it). It has some attributes of cash, in that you actually can buy things with it directly rather than selling it for cash and then spending the cash, but unlike cash, it doesn't scale well for small purchases. Transaction fees are based on the number of bytes in the actual message authorizing the transaction rather than the size of the transaction itself, for reasons inherent to the protocol. So they're virtually nonexistent for huge transactions, but absurdly disproportionate for small ones.

 

[Crunchy Leaf]

It's basically just a high-risk investment vehicle, then, yes? But most of these people don't have a diversified portfolio because they're so pro-bitcoin, which is dumb.

 

[AnOminous]

It's basically just a high-risk investment vehicle, then, yes? But most of these people don't have a diversified portfolio because they're so pro-bitcoin, which is dumb.

People who dumped a whole bunch into it when it was $5 are pretty happy now. I wouldn't expect it to happen at this price, although it's continued to maintain value. Frankly, the price has seemed so divorced from actual events occurring around BTC that it's hard to think they're completely tethered in reality.

I think a currency built to be mildly deflationary with the same guarantees would be better as an actual currency, i.e. be able to act like fiat while retaining the insurance against some government going nuts and setting off hyperinflation by just printing a bunch of the stuff.

 

[Un Platano]

It's basically just a high-risk investment vehicle, then, yes? But most of these people don't have a diversified portfolio because they're so pro-bitcoin, which is dumb.

There are diverse portfolios in cryptocurrencies in that there are hundreds of altcoins you could put money into. Some like XMR are even potentially good. In fact, altcoin speculation is one of the quickest ways to get rich off of cryptos, but once you start getting into the shitcoins it's basically gambling. But saying that cryptards are too pro-bitcoin is pretty far from the truth. There are some people out there who think you need to be invested in at least 20 shitcoins or else you're just a bandwagoning normie, and heaven forbid if all of your cryptocurrency is in just one or two coins.