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Comment by devdoomari | Hacker News Reader

um... bitcoin? heard like 3 years ago that bitcoin will handle all sorts of micro-transactions...

anyone know what happened?

I haven't used BTC in a long time but last I read transactions take a very long time to process because the blocksize is too small to contain all the transactions that took place. I read (not sure if this is correct) that transaction fees needed to be upwards of $20 to ensure the transaction was included in the next block.

Bitcoin transactions have something like a $5 average transaction fee. You can offer less but your transaction won't get processed as quickly. Bitcoin is already slow at processing transactions.

Disclaimer: I don't use bitcoin. The $5 number is outdated, but from the graphs I could find in a quick search it seemed to be rising consistently.

That's why you would use an off-chain solution like lightning payment channels with sub-cent transaction fees. Transactions are faster than credit cards too.

Stop spreading FUD. I spent 10c sending a transaction for $20 a month ago.

Smallest transaction I've seen is 191 bytes; [1] says right now to get a transaction in the next block the minimum fee is 240 satoshis/byte; and that today the 251-260 satoshis/byte has been the most common fee.

That's $2.82 according to [2].

And that's with current levels of demand - if there was a transaction every time someone visited a website, demand would be much, much higher.

[1] https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/ [2] https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=(191*240%2F100000000)+BTC+...

Yes, you're right. I miscalculated the fee. I actually paid $1 and was not trying to get it in the next block.

I never spend more than $0.10 on transaction fees for bitcoin. I mean, you could give $5 if you wanted to, but why would you? If I was sending a dollar I wouldn't pay more than $0.01 or less for the transaction fee. And for something so cheap the merchant shouldn't bother waiting on confirmations. Exploiting 0 confirmations isn't easy, and it's not worth the work to anyone for a dollar. Even with sub cent transaction fees they'll still settle faster than 3-5 business days.

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