[teekert]

It's also very ironic if you think that in the bitcoin based economy you have to pay more than half of your groceries cost to the transaction itself. Bitcoin is inferior, it is for speculators, no longer for the idealists I count myself among.

Yesterday I wanted to install bitcoin core... the blockchain is 153 GB and will eat CPU for days to validate everything. It's crazy. If I look at my early transaction history, I transferred mere euros around and they arrived and were confirmed in seconds/minutes. Unthinkable now. We need something else.

[clarkmoody]

> Yesterday I wanted to install bitcoin core... the blockchain is 153 GB and will eat CPU for days to validate everything. It's crazy.

It's not crazy when you realize that you've verified that you own your coins and that the money supply is correct without having to trust anyone. And all you had to do was commit some disk space and CPU cycles.

> Unthinkable now. We need something else.

As soon as that "something else" becomes as popular as Bitcoin, it will suffer the same issues.

[ringaroundthetx]

> Yesterday I wanted to install bitcoin core

Why did you want to do that? Altruism? Just so that you could truthfully write this comment?

Bitcoin users don't have to do that.

[teekert]

It was my understanding that doing this contributes to the decentralized character of Bitcoin and helps confirm transactions (I may be wrong). If so, this is now nolonger something mortals can do. Yeah, perhaps, call it altruism. I contribute some CPU cycles on my server to balance the power of the network. Or am I misunderstanding? Is it all about the miners?

[drngdds]

Bitcoin mining is dominated by ASIC farms. You'd make more of a difference running a node for an ASIC-resistant coin. (Or by saving energy and not mining at all.)