Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
We should absolutely avoid the danger of instilling into Bitcoin users some kind of belief that they have a right to free transactions. Nothing in life is free and the costs of security & decentralization cannot forever be externalized to nodes & miners.
In that sense it is perfectly reasonable to suggest we should strive to keep block size limit as close as possible to actual network demand. Flex cap proposals are interesting in this aspect.
Those transactions aren't free for the user even if the miners eat the cost. They STILL have to suffer exchange rate risk while using bitcoin. If they have to pay a fee higher than nominal WHILE BITCOIN IS STILL IN ALPHA, for the vast majority of people, that just isn't worth it.
Miners have to subsidize transaction costs to bootstrap usage or this baby will die in its crib. That's why you're getting the goddamn block reward. I am the customer. I am the user who buys your fucking coins. What am I getting for my money if I have to take this monster risk and have to pay a fee anyway? VISA gives me cash back for chrissakes. They are your competition. If you can't beat them, you won't earn their customers.
Don't you small block fuckers know how business works?
This post is full of misguided assumptions.
It should come as a rational observation considering the shortcomings you have pointed out that there exist absolutely no incentive to purchase bitcoins to make purchases. No amount of scaling is going to incentivize mainstream consumers to go through such hoops for a low-cost/free transactions as most of the time they don't pay for the transaction anyway, merchants eat them. You are correct that there is absolutely no way for Bitcoin to compete with VISA as a consumer payment processor and again, no amount of blocksize scale is going to change this.
The reasonable thing to ask then is do we really want Bitcoin to compete with Visa or is there another, possibly more valuable, use case for Bitcoin? What about digital gold? That sounds like an area where Bitcoin could thoroughly outcompete other players in its current state, with little to no change necessary. Why are we targeting to replace payment processors when we could somehow attract the incomparable value that resides in precious metal markets, offshore saving accounts and general safe havens? That sounds like a much more interesting moonshot if you ask me.