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Bitcoin could have been a strong contender to Visa/MC's dominance for online payments if it wasn't for it's pesky insistence to keep block sizes small and enable "Replace By Fee" making it essentially impossible to trust unconfirmed transactions.

How convenient.




Oh sure, I bet the six-transactions-per-second and $20-equivalent transaction fee and the fact that most people use it for speculation and illegal crap had nothing to do with it.


The first two have a lot to do with "keep blocks small". Bitcoin basically has stopped trying to actually be a useful payment mechanism, though other cryptos are trying (still, the fact that wallet access=money gone and no chargebacks makes them not particularly suited for most consumers)


Literally every payment is used for illegal crap. I fail to see the relevance of that point.


Payments are a representation of trust. That is the opposite of crypto and blockchains. People want fast, cheap or free instant payments and if there is an exception, they want their government or legal framework to be able to step in for them, hence why no crypto payment system will ever grow beyond illegal/illicit transactions attempting to avoid the legal payment systems, or speculation (bitcoin, eth, etc). FedNow, for example, will allow you to move up to $100k-$500k (depending on your institutional limits) within 20 seconds (max SLA) for ~5 cents (whether the bank charges you for this is up to your bank). If there is an exception, your bank or the government will step in with Regulation E. Your monies in a demand deposit account are insured up to at least $250k USD (depending on titling). Hard to beat without getting into ideology territory. Crypto likely has a use case where you cannot trust your government and need to stash value somewhere that isn't a reserve currency, but those are edge cases, not the norm. There are even some startups in that space offering more secure deposit accounts to folks in places who need access to secure fiat storage, which is really a regulation/AML/KYC/customer identity play [1].

[1] https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/nsave | https://www.nsave.com/ ("nsave is a fintech that provides trusted $€£ accounts abroad for people from countries where inflation is high and banking is broken.")


> I bet the six-transactions-per-second and $20-equivalent transaction fee

They had everything to do with it, that's my point.


Not everyone is keen on all digital payments being stored in a permanent public ledger, even assuming the data storage could be scaled.


Monero then?


Well, that and being completely public. I, for one, don't want the whole world to know whom I'm paying for things.




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