Bitcoin transaction fees are currently around $8.

My credit card pays me 2% to use it.

No one wants to use the Bitcoin blockchain for average transactions.

No one is buying Bitcoin as anything other than a speculative investment right now.

Nano has 0 fees and 1< second transactions. What is your argument against that?

I've read briefly about nano and its super interesting. I don't really understand how its feasible though. What is the incentive for operating a node in the network?

A cryptocurrency that would ACTUALLY be used as a currency needs a resilient network. But if operating a node yields no financial incentive, how is that network supposed to be created?

The incentive is the exact thing you're worried about: merchants get to avoid fees. If Nano ever takes off as a payment method, then you'd probably see e.g. large grocery chains operating Nano nodes to avoid fees.

It looks to me like Nano will suffer from the free-rider problem.

If Nano becomes an established currency, then a grocery chain can just rely on the existing Nano nodes to process its transactions (which will still be free), they don't need to run their own node for it.

They can publicize their brand with a node. Moreover, if they want special functionality they may have to run their own node. In general, running nodes is so cheap that is not prohibitive to wider audiences. Today there are easily more than a hundred nodes running, exchanges, services, etc. The number is bound to increase as the ecosystem grows.

Cool. But why not just use the nano technology with a USD-backed currency instead?

Cut out all of the alternative currency speculation and just let the technology do the work on people's money.

Like USDC.

Sounds great. Why not just use the nano technology to let me move around the USD in my bank account?

Why do we have to invent an all new currency for these technologies to use? There is no good reason, other than to make early adopters wealthy, which they would like very much.

What's stopping the US government from taking nano and creating a USD-backed version?

Exactly. So where is it? I've been using the internet since 1997. Banks had the chance to make it. I read here all the time "a single database would be a better solution". So where is the single database? Where is the instant money transfer? Where is the free money transfer over country borders?

My wife lived in US for a while, she is now in EU. She still has some bank account there with a few thousand dollars on it. She can't transfer it to EU (some limitation of that account), she can only get cheques, or ask for some credit card. I told her to see how to purchase crypto with that card, and then transfer the money like that. It's fucking 2021, are you serious?????

So yeah, if you expect banks to come up with a system that can compete with current gen crypto, good luck to you.

> Where is the free money transfer over country borders?

I use a major US bank. They offer $0 wire transfers to EU accounts. Wire goes out same-day.

Would much rather do that than transfer to a crypto exchange, convert to crypto (with fee), send crypto (with fee), exchange crypto on the other end (with fee), and the transfer to other bank.

Alright, can you send some 0 fee, instant money to Cuba, Nepal, Burundi, Bolivia?

> Wire goes out same-day.

That it goes "out" the same day is pretty obvious. That it arrives 1 second later a bit less.

Bitcoin is only good for large transactions, but there are 1000000 cryptocurrencies that solve this problem such as BCH, USDT, and LTC. Use one of them.

Honestly, why?

My credit card pays me 2% to use it.

If there’s a problem with my transaction, I click some buttons and the card company reversed the charges.

If I lose my card, I call them up and get another one overnight without losing all my money.

Why would I give all of that up, pay exchange fees on both ends of a transaction, pay transaction fees (however small), and wait longer for my transactions to clear?

The parent comment is making a philosophical/ethical point - there is a lot of power concentrated into two private companies (Mastercard and Visa). They are the gatekeepers to being able to take payments, without them you can't have consumer income, and they make moral judgements that make it hard to operate certain kinds of (legal) businesses.

Sure, but why not use a stablecoin cryptocurrency?

Why do we need to invent an all-new alternative currency and asset class just to use these technologies? Why do I have to invest in 1 of 1000s of altcoins just to arbitrary change numbers in a shared ledger?

Because the US monetary policy and inflation, and USD not being backed by anything, and because people don't want this power in corruptable governments.

This is not even some dispited facts (that this is one of major reasons for why some people want a new currency), this thing has been discussed over and over into oblivion, since the beginning of cryptocurrencies. It is a question that has been answered millions of times at this point. You just haven't researched any of it.

I regularly invoice internationally. I can get a crypto payment through with a small transaction fee (a few cent for $20k) which clears in ~5 minutes, or I can get a payment that takes several days to clear with a larger fee. Crypto works perfectly for me!

Or you could use any of the far cheaper options for international payments (Transferwise, etc)... why do cryptocurrency enthusiasts think that all international payments need to be done via Western Union?

That's a $7.50 charge, this is cheaper. I do however use those methods if the client won't pay in crypto.

Taking the bigger picture, those rewards and disputes aren't free. These things get paid for by transaction fees, cardholders that carry balances, and vendors taking a loss. On the whole, prices for everything go up, but people fortunate enough to have "good" credit cards get a slight discount at the expense of those who don't.

I'm not necessarily saying this system is better or worse than some alternative, just pointing out that it's not all upside.

I don't think anyone would argue that you should stop using your credit card if it's working well for you and you're very happy with it. But of course, credit card companies are only solvent because on average they're not paying their users to use it. Miss one or two bills, or make one big purchase that you wouldn't have without the credit line, and you'll likely wipe out all the rewards you've "earned."

You can't get deplatformed from $whateverCoin like you can with credit cards.

Most people can't put >$20,000 on their credit card and large money transfers over traditional financial institutions (wires/ACH) at best take many hours or days.

And let's not forget that bitcoin can process on average less than 7 transactions per seconds. That's incredibly slow. It can be used for anything irl as long as this fundamental problem is not fixed. Nobody will spend 10+ minutes in front of the cashier waiting for the transaction to be confirmed.

Most cryptocurrencies are plagued by the same issue. Everyone and their mother still come out with their own cryptocurrencies, but none has been proven to have any actual usefulness outside of speculation. I guess Monero and ZCash are at least really used as a transaction method because of the "black market", but, outside of anonymity, they also have the same fundamental issue that btc has.

I have a feeling that traditional cc system are slower than the time user waits for confirmation. Isn't it buffer based like disk io ? the bank has a buffer to accept any card that is legit (for small transactions) and the rare time a problem occurs they deal with it on the side ?

> I have a feeling that traditional cc system are slower than the time user waits for confirmation.

Raising this in response to Bitcoin’s limited throughput is a nonsequitur, as this is latency, not throughout. Yes, the time between initiating and settling a credit card transaction is nontrivial, but that doesn't effect the number of transactions the system can process per second. If the credit card system didn't have the throughput to handle transactions at the rate they are initiated, there's be an ever-growing queue, and there isn't.

note that I don't promote bitcoin .. i just want to avoid people judging the current credit card system from afar.

We shouldn't forget that there are other cryptos that don't have these ridiculous fees.

Also, your credit card pays you 2% because they extract a larger fee from the merchant, who will raise prices to cover that expense. So you're not really saving money.

Will the merchants give me a 2+% discount and cover the BTC transaction fee if I pay in Bitcoin?

One of the largest consumer electronics merchant in Japan does give you a discount if you pay with bitcoin, coincidentally.

Intellimeds.net gives 8% off.

Made a transaction last week, paid 0.50 $. Transaction went through just fine. What am I doing wrong?

No one wants to buy gold because the fees to move it are currently around $100.

> My credit card pays me 2% to use it.

That's not how it really works, but you're right that $8 is a pretty insane transaction fee.

Hardfork BTC to use Algorand consensus. Put stablecoins on the same chain. See the magic happen.

This is so ignorant. Please raise your game.

Bitcoin transaction fees are set by the sender. At least, that's true if you aren't a nOOb and you control your own wallet.

Transaction fees vary, at this very moment, between 1 satoshi/vbyte to 9,900 satoshi/vbyte. That range is 10^5. See https://mempool.space/

Last week at this time, a tx could be placed in the very next block for 13 sat/vbyte.

But sure, claim it's "$8". But it's better to educate yourself before sprouting off like that.

With Bitcoin you pay the fees you want to pay. If you want fast settlement, you pay more. If you want to pay next to zero, you can do that too.

So would these longer settlement times, at a lower cost, then necessitate using a centralized escrow service to verify trustworthiness?

Hasn't Wikileaks published crypto addresses for a long time? You can send directly to them right now. I'd be very surprised if there wasn't a porn site out there taking payment directly though a Bitcoin address too.