Quote from: illinest on December 05, 2017, 07:28:04 AM

Quote from: thecodebear on December 05, 2017, 03:12:26 AM

One of the big features of Bitcoin is that it is cheaper than paying with credit cards. Of course currently the Bitcoin fees are very high since it needs scaling so its only cheaper right now if you're buying a couple hundred dollars or more worth of stuff.

I disagree. I think that some businesses promoted cheap fees or free transactions as a primary feature of Bitcoin, and years ago, that was okay because Bitcoin's network was small and demand for confirmed transactions was low.

Now that network demand is high, Bitcoin's use as deflationary money trumps any desires for cheap payment systems. There are any number of those -- Venmo, Paypal, Square, credit cards. It's clear that investors are okay with increasing fees, and that's probably because most of them see Bitcoin as digital gold rather than the next Paypal.

Quote from: thecodebear on December 05, 2017, 03:12:26 AM

I've never bought anything with Bitcoin, so maybe this is already done by newegg and overstock, etc, but do you think retailers will subtract the fee paid from the price of the item when buying with Bitcoin? Do retailers do this now? If this doesn't happen, even if fees go way back down, this would be a terrible user experience if you have to pay a fee on top of the cost of a product when compared to paying with credit card where the fee included in that same sale price.

Bitpay charges a network fee (usually ~ 0.0002 BTC) on top of the miners fee that consumers need to pay. They started doing that a couple months ago. It's annoying, but I suspect that consumers can live with it at a time when the price of BTC doubles in a matter of weeks.

Right it is clear that investors are fine with large fees right now because we're not using Bitcoin for payments. I'm talking about when Bitcoin has scaling solutions in place and fees go back down (or just using the fees of second layer solutions). I'm specifically talking about using Bitcoin for payment, so using it not for payment (just investing in it) doesn't have anything to do with this. I'm talking about the user experience and fees related to buying things with bitcoin. I'm not talking about the high fees we have right now.