Quote from: Gavin Andresen on February 01, 2015, 11:35:10 PM

Quote from: davout on February 01, 2015, 09:05:16 PM

What's the problem with paying 10 bucks instead of 10 cents to securely transfer a million dollars?

What's wrong?

Lets say those million dollar transactions are 250 bytes. That is 4,000 of them in a 1MB block.

So $40,000 total reward to the miner -- about eight times current block reward.

BUT YOU ARE SECURING TRANSACTIONS WORTH SOMETHING LIKE 2,000 TIMES MORE VALUABLE THAN TODAY'S TRANSACTIONS (estimated average transaction USD value for today's average transaction is about $380). And I GUARANTEE that attackers would have a much easier time pulling off a double-spend of one million-dollar transaction than 1,000 $1,000 transactions.

The math for "large value transactions will generate enough fees to secure the chain" just doesn't work.
The math for "lots of small transactions will generate enough fees to secure the chain" might.

Also:

I still haven't heard a coherent argument on why large value transactions are necessarily also high-fee transactions.

I'd suggest you go research existing high-value-payment networks and see what typical fees are for multi-million dollar transactions. FEDWIRE is running at 6 transactions per second, average transaction value over $6million, with fees per transaction UNDER ONE DOLLAR.

Why? Because if you are giving somebody one million dollars for something, you almost certainly have built up real-world trust, and probably have a longstanding relationship, signed contracts, etc etc.

If you think Bitcoin is different, please explain the scenario where I send a stranger who I don't trust (so have to rely completely on the blockchain) $1million for something.

This argumentation hardly holds.

I can put as much hashpower on top of my transaction as I see fit, I just need to wait for the appropriate number of confirmations.
If my transaction is worth 1mn, the block reward is 40k, I just need to wait for 50 confirmations to put 2mn worth of fees on top of it, this is hardly rocket science...

You guarantee... What exactly?

But I mean if you're happy with Fedwire, what exactly is it you're doing here?