Hacker News Reader

Comment by antocv | Hacker News Reader

> It's about removing trust in third parties to send and receive transactions. That's it. And that's a big deal.

Uh huh, so when in 2017 I wanted to send my bitcoins to exchanges to sell them, I could not, since the miners did not increase the block-size.

How is that for removing trust? This happened to me thrice during 2017, bitcoins were not spendable.

In particular around May 2017, I needed to pay for a VPS, a small amount about €5 worth. The transaction fee of bitcoin to get the transaction processed would have been more valued than the "pay for VPS".

Useless is a compliment.

View on HN

One only needs a single instance where Bitcoin worked when other payment processors did not. Wikileaks fulfills that example. Sci-hub is one more example than I need.

Piling on a thousand other obvious cases where cryptocurrencies are useless doesn't change those edge cases.

Just to get another example where this logic plays out: I'd bet the vast majority of cases where people are using GPG, the feature of "irrefutability" isn't needed. There are probably also cases where the user doesn't realize that is a feature, as well as cases where it's dangerous to have that feature. But I'm not prepared to call that feature useless, and if I claimed that it was it would only take a single edge-case from a contrarian to prove me wrong.

This is a straw man. Just because transaction fees were too high for your transaction to be economically viable, does not discredit the fact that bitcoin removes trust in third parties to send and receive currencies.

It is not up to the miners to increase the block size, in fact miners were very much in favor of doing it. Bitcoin has other important constituents (users, core devs, wallet devs, exchanges) that would need to be on board for any modifications made to the core protocol to go through.

They were still spendable, you just had to wait longer for transactions to go through at the smaller fee. At any rate, Lightning network, the tier 2 solution for scalability in Bitcoin, has improved dramatically in the past year. There's also alternative crypto, like Ethereum, that never had such a back log of transactions.

I mean obviously you have to trust that the Bitcoin network works as it should.

And you're right, Bitcoin is broken. It's only an implementation of a cryptocurrency though and using it to dismiss cryptocurrencies in general isn't right.

See for example Bitcoin Cash (BCH) which isn't artificially crippled like Bitcoin (BTC).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com