cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17303063
An enlightening and high quality video on how money and the banking system work, why they are corrupted and what is the solution.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/17303063
An enlightening and high quality video on how money and the banking system work, why they are corrupted and what is the solution.
Bitcoin is the same speed it’s always been. Blocks happen every 10 minutes. The transaction is transmitted at the speed of light but final settlement requires a block. Pay a high fee? Get in on the next block. Want to save on fees? Maybe it takes a few blocks for your transaction to go through. If you use Bitcoin lightning (a scaling layer built on top of Bitcoin which moves transactions off-chain but secures them on-chain), transactions take under a second for pennies in fees. Fees are much, much lower than credit card, paypal, or other similar competitors. You could send a billion dollars in a single transaction and pay $1.50 on main chain, or you could send $5 on lightning and pay <1c in fees. Lightning has been around for 5 years now, it works, I use it regularly.
The supply of Bitcoin, 21 million coins, is known and has always been known. It can’t be diluted beyond that point.
Nobody owns 51% of the network. Even such an actor can’t print extra BTC or force money to move without the appropriate private key. The best they can do is temporarily delay transactions while burning north of a trillion dollars in energy and equipment doing so. Which is why nobody has ever done it.
Given that fees have continued to increase with time, this seems like not a problem. It’s not “dangerous”, it’s part of the design. If hashrate drops, it drops, but given that fees and hashrate have continued to grow despite continually minting less coins, it’s not really a problem.
Anybody can have a cash wallet without disclosing their identity, yet they still pay taxes. Bitcoin’s rules prevent the kind of fraud where the value of your money is printed away via supply inflation of central banks or “currency restructuring” on the global scale by the the world bank. People pay taxes because they think it’s the right thing to do and/or because the government has guns and makes them. Either way, if you run a company, if you are providing goods and services, you have a place you can send somebody with a gun and enforce those rules. All the companies currently paying taxes would keep paying taxes if they used Bitcoin.
This is a fancy way to say that it is slower unless you pay higher fees.
The fees are fluctuating and can be much higher than you claim (https://decrypt.co/234446/bitcoin-fees-skyrocket-okx-exchange-burning-utxo)
While it is true you could pay lower fees if you send larger amounts, if we take your 5$ fee at face value, then any transaction below 147.35$ will have lower fees on a payment service like Stripe (3.4% for international transactions + 0.30$ per transaction).
I did not claim otherwise.
Nobody currently does. However, it is my understanding that theu could fork the network and update it if they had 50%+1 of the network. It is not impossible.
It is a problem because people do not want to pay higher fees.
They can pay taxes but they don’t have to. There is no system to know the identity and know the tax rate that should be applied using the raw bitcoin transaction method. This has to be applied using an external centralized service at best.
This is not fraud and it is not what I’m talking about.
The tax and identity layers have to be added on top. They are not built-in. While it is true a country can force things, it is not true they can force the bitcoin network to apply these rules. This is in fact one of the selling points of Bitcoin according to this video.
My bank takes:
So my bank is also “slower unless you pay higher fees”… or “slower even with higher fees”… and on top of that, it has an amount cap.
Meanwhile, on Bitcoin Lightning (https://1ml.com/statistics):
No. There are 3 components to Bitcoin: Miners, P2P nodes. and coin owners.
Neither of those are impossible, some are just easier and have a higher ROI than others.
Same as with cash.
Yes, this is one of the selling points of Bitcoin vs. Banks, in an age where cash is getting phased out.
The opposite, is also a selling point of “OpenSource Money with Taxes built-in” vs. Bitcoin.
Pick whichever side you prefer.