[scj]

I haven't used Bitcoin, and from what I've read I have two questions about it being a currency:

If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts?

What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?

[ComradeTaco]

> If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts?

It will not.

>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?

There have been times where the average transaction cost was about $20. It's hovering around $0.80 cents now, to the best of my knowledge. So it depends on the market.

I belief that the current strategy is to convince others that bitcoin is a great transaction medium for everything under the sun (i.e. ice cream) and then cash out in dirty fiat once the price reaches a target so you can buy Lambos full of ice cream. It's really not a sincere attempt to create a currency as it is to masssively enrich early adopters by encouraging use by normal people.

[sireat]

Bitcoin as a great transaction medium WAS the strategy in the early years. This was the big promise.

As price and transaction fees rose the transaction medium for everyday things(like me paying for Namecheap hosting/domains in BTC in 2013) went away.

Many big vendors such as Steam actually stopped accepting BTC directly(or through 1 step processor such as Bitpay). It was too much trouble/risk and annoyed customers.

Cheaper/safer/more convenient than bank transfers. That Bitcoin promise has not been fulfilled.

SEPA is way cheaper/more convenient/safer than Bitcoin in Europe. Even in countries with troubled banking systems such as Venezuela, it is not normal to pay for regular items with BTC.

So Bitcoin "pivoted" to store-of-value strategy. Promise that offchain solutions like LN will handle transactions "any day now".

Hilariously Bitcoin.org just put back the low-fees part. https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-org-reverts-back-to-fast-an...

[stcredzero]

"It's really not a sincere attempt to create [X] as it is to masssively enrich early adopters by encouraging use by normal people."

So it's basically a trash startup.

[__s]

Small transactions should be happening on the lightning network. It's live now, allows for transactions which are optimistically both fast & cheap

[solotronics]

I am not sure why nobody else mentioned this but there is a second layer called Lightning currently running very well ontop of Bitcoin. It enables basically instant transactions with fees at thousandths of a cent and people are using it Right Now to pay for VPNs and other goods online.

[rib3ye]

At this moment, the recipient of the payment will receive notification of an unconfirmed transaction in about 10 seconds, and the fee will be about $0.63.

[CryptoPunk]

>>If I attempted to buy an ice cream cone with Bitcoin, will the money be transferred before the ice cream melts?

The transfer is instant. To get a guarantee of settlement takes 6 confirmation, or about one hour, which is much quicker than the 6 weeks it takes for a credit card transaction to become irreversible. Unless you're purchasing something like a house, you don't need the payment to settle to complete the purchase, with either cryptocurrency or credit card payments.

Ethereum's confirmations take 15 seconds, to Bitcoin's 10 minutes, and you need about 12 to have a virtual guarantee of irreversibility.

Only the large-cap cryptocurrencies can provide a high assurance of irreversible payments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17173051

>>What costs more, the transaction fees or the ice cream cone?

In (small-block) Bitcoin, at any reasonable level of adoption, the transaction fee, which is why small transactions could only be economical using an off-chain protocol like the Lightning Network, which has been in development for several years and is still largely unproven as a full substitute for regular Bitcoin transactions.

Bitcoin (Cash) guarantees low fees into the future as a result of a high maximum block size. With Bitcoin Cash, there is a higher risk of settled transactions being reversed with a 51% attack, given it has only 10% of the hashrate of (small-block) Bitcoin.

Ethereum's transaction fees are currently much lower than the cost of an ice cream, but that wouldn't persist with higher levels of adoption. That could change once it implements sharding, with promises to increase maximum transaction throughput 100X, or has the sub-chain plasma protocol deployed, which potentially enables virtually infinite scaling.

[Semirhage]

The long irreversible period of a credit charge is not a technical limitation, it’s a feature.

[CryptoPunk]

It's a feature that creates certain limitations in utility, as this article from Elaine Ou elaborates on:

https://elaineou.com/2016/08/01/the-value-of-settlement-fina...