Hacker News Reader

I love how mining is essentially transaction clearing but nobody calls it that because it might sound like there was actually just a proxy for financial system at the bottom.

Miners are just another form of payment system like Visa. You have to pay them transaction fees to process your payment. Sometimes it's reasonable, sometimes it's insane.

Bitcoin has solved exactly zero problems.

View on HN

The benefit is the miners are fungible. If one miner wants to enforce unusually high fees or restrictions on what kinds of transactions can be sent (such as which countries can send funds between each other, etc), then it just means that if that miner mines a block, some transactions have to wait an extra block to get mined by a miner without those extra restrictions. And it will be more profitable for that miner because of the extra transaction fees, so in practice miners don't impose extra limits.

And how many extra blocks will they have to wait when a cartel of mining pools controls most of the hashrate?

>Bitcoin has solved exactly zero problems

Sending an infinite amount of money anywhere in the world 24/7 in less than an hour from your command line for a couple of dollars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com