Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Do you really believe in bitcoin as a currency?
by
Rassah
on 29/11/2013, 03:49:35 UTC
The block propagation time is already 4.5 seconds (I don't know why they took down that linked page, I had discussed in depth a solution to selfish-mining attack on that page). As you may know the equation for orphan rate depends on block propagation time, and  500MB block sizes will increase that propagation delay.

Any way, that "coming" (we can't be sure the vested interests of mining will accept it) fix doesn't fix the fact that transaction fees in Bitcoin are always rising nominally or the relative security must implode, but debit card payments I believe have a fixed fee in some cases (not percentage). Bitcoin devs propose lowering the fee, to counter-act this effect, but the transaction fee is a market rate and it appears to me it will be a Spiraling Fee.

Yeah, uh, don't listen to this guy. He just found out about Bitcoin very recently,  claims to have read most of the forum, and has made a decision that Bitcoin is a scam, which he is so convinced of that he refuses to even consider any conflicting evidence. That, plus he is convinced that he is a super genius who is much smarter than you, so anything you say to him is automatically stupid and wrong.

If you want to read the definitive authoritative explanation is scalability, by the developers who actually know what's what, read this https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Scalability

As for the block size and transaction costs, those will be allowed to float, and will stay low enough to be cheap, but will still be high enough from increased transaction frequency to keep the system secure (instead of 7 transactions a second paying $0.05 each, we'll have 1000 transactions a second paying ¢0.001 each, or something like that). The question of whether transactions will be high enough, or spiral towards zero, was thoroughly discussed over two years ago, and the conclusion was that there are a few ways for miners to compete on transaction costs that keep them above 0, and keep Bitcoin secure.