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Comment by vivan | Hacker News Reader

I say this unironically: this is good for Bitcoin. In my opinion, the best time for Bitcoin was when it was sitting at around ~$1000, where fees were low, transaction times were low and acceptance was high.

Bitcoin was a great currency for online transactions back then. Once prices skyrocketed as they did, it lost the ability to function as "Internet money" because it was simply too expensive to use. Fees are high, transactions take hours, and a lot of the companies that famously accepted Bitcoin (Microsoft, Valve) no longer accept it. As someone who regularly made purchases with Bitcoin before the ridiculous growth, I'm hopeful for a return to those times.

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Forgive my ignorance but that makes no sense to me. Things were good when they were good. But Bitcoin has proven to be incredibly unstable. I want my currency to be consistent. My understanding is that currencies like the USD have a central authority that pulls levers and knobs in attempt to make its value consistent across time. What mechanics exist within Bitcoin to do this?

Bitcoin isn't really attempting to fulfill the currency use-case anymore. It's pretty much sticking with digital gold. Likewise with Ethereum, the currency is primarily used to run the protocol. Low price volatility is not a pressing design goal for either system.

For a token that does have the levers and knobs, check out the Dai whitepaper: https://makerdao.com/whitepaper/DaiDec17WP.pdf

>> Bitcoin isn't really attempting to fulfill the currency use-case anymore

... because it failed miserably at it, due to technical limitations.

Now we hear a story about "digital gold", but you know what that story really is? It's just the people who bought Bitcoin on its historical maximum (near 20k USD) refusing to admit their loss and hoping for a miracle.

They weren't technical limitations. It failed due to problems with its community. They deliberately drove it off a cliff-edge and claimed the new broken Bitcoin was better than the old working Bitcoin.

I thought that those insane transaction fees and processing times were due to technical decision to use too small block size, and to hashing algorithm used. But I'm no expert on technical side of Blockchain so I might be wrong about that.

"Bitcoin" doesn't really "attempt" anything.

I attempt to use Bitcoin as a currency, but that doesn't mean you have to.

Yes, I think most early Bitcoin supporters would agree that things were much better when transaction fees were low and confirmation times were fast. Bitcoin is worthless if the underlying utility is broken.

It's unfortunate that the community wasn't organized enough to come a consensus on "scaling" ...

It was only a few months ago that it appeared as though the possibilities were endless. We had excellent "long-term" solutions in development (Segwit and Lightning) AND a good "short-term" fix ready to go (Blocksize increase).

As an early adopter I feel betrayed, that we were forced to choose a side, that politics trumped usability. It's toxic. Self-limiting, and difficult to "buy" into at this point.

The block increase was looked down upon by many, probably the more technical minded, because we were taught that simple constants in equations (block size of 1,2,8...) are not as important as the exponents. However, a 2MB increase on something that was probably arbitrarily 1MB seemed like a fine middle ground until Lightning Network. Then again, hard forks are no fun.

> It's unfortunate that the community wasn't organized enough to come a consensus on "scaling" ...

I thought the principle appeal of bitcoin was its decentralized nature. Why do you want to forge a consensus and remove the best feature bitcoin can claim?

> ...that politics trumped usability

You mean, bitcoin operates in The Real World (tm) operated by humans?

fees have been as low as 0.5$ for a couple of weeks now

Do you have any evidence to back up that claim? All of the data I've seen suggests that the average fees are still $8-10.

I've done several transactions over the last week for less than 10 sat/byte, usually less than $0.25

See https://bitcoinfees.earn.com for what it looks like now

Unfortunately lots of wallets/presets are still recommending the higher fees from when traffic was higher.

How long did you have to wait for confirmation?

The most was probably about twenty five minutes, but I was pushing it -- I wasn't in a hurry and I wanted to see how low I could go on the fees.

If you want a more nuanced look at bitcoin fees, take a look at the mempool [0]. That way you can see for yourself fees that will probably clear in 1 block, 1 day, etc.

[0] dedi.jochen-hoenicke.de/queue

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