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by mrb
2961 days ago
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«Cryptocurrency is slower than card networks» Not inherently. If you compare apples to apples, accepting a credit card transaction is equivalent to accepting a zero-confirmation cryptocurrency transaction, which is just as fast as a CC charge (instantaneous.) And it is technically safer for a merchant to accept a 0-conf crypto tx because a CC charge is trivial to reverse (via a fraudulent chargeback) while a tx in the mempool of thousands of nodes is typically (not always!) hard to make disappear. «It's more expensive than practically any other way of sending money» Far from true. Average remittance fees are around $7 per $100 sent. Meanwhile Ethereum has fees typically under $0.50 per tx: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/ethereum-transactionfee... Of course there are periods of fee surges (over $5 per tx!), but it's not common. «a full record of every monetary transaction performed with such a currency» That's technically not needed. There have been proposals to implement what we call UTXO commitment sets, which is basically a way to revamp a blockchain so that it can discard old transactions and just keep track of current balances. (This is different, but roughly the same principle as "pruning.") |
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Except my charge is guaranteed to happen (or be rejected) within a reasonable amount of time. If you scale up anything to the size of, say, Visa, the transaction times are going to grow to be unbounded. I know my credit card charges are going to settle in about a day. There's no guarantee when the miners will work through the backlog of transactions and actually give me my money in any time frame.
If you're a small business, this matters a LOT.
> Average remittance fees are around $7 per $100 sent. Meanwhile Ethereum has fees typically under $0.50 per tx
My bank charged me $10 to send a 50k wire transfer last week. What service, exactly, is more expensive than a 7% fee?
Ethereum, meanwhile, swings in price violently enough that in the time it takes for an ACH transfer to complete, the value could have shifted enough to negate the entire savings on fees. What benefit does low fees have on a currency if the currency is worth 5-10% more or less day to day?
There's no reason to assume a government issued cryptocurrency will be any less volatile than cryptocurrency.
> There have been proposals to implement what we call UTXO commitment sets, which is basically a way to revamp a blockchain so that it can discard old transactions and just keep track of current balances.
And here we are, talking about creating a new legal tender for the second largest economy on the planet. As I said in my original post, it doesn't matter if it's on its way. Speculative fixes for a real problem don't make the problem go away. Major cryptocurrencies currently don't do it, so we shouldn't talk about them as if they do.
Even still, the number of balances will grow over time. Unlike a real bank, you can't just close an account when someone dies. Anyone can create as many balances as they want. And losing your private key means there's a permanent record of the money you lost.