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Bitcoin Conference Stops Accepting BTC Due To High Fees (bitcoin.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Next week the popular cryptocurrency event, The North American Bitcoin Conference (TNABC) will be hosted in downtown Miami at the James L Knight Center, January 18-19. However, bitcoin proponents got some unfortunate news this week as the event organizers have announced they have stopped accepting bitcoin payments for conference tickets due to network fees and congestion. Bitcoin settlement times, and the fee market associated with transactions, have become a hot topic these days as on-chain fees have risen to $30-60 per transaction. These issues have made it extremely difficult for businesses to operate, and many merchants have stopped accepting bitcoin for services and goods altogether.
Bitcoin Conference Stops Accepting BTC Due To High Fees
Wait! Is this actually ironic?
"For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert"
At least they have something to discuss at the conference...
Just to buy a stick of gum? How is this supposed to be progress?
Oh, you are surprised I want to use Bitcoin as a currency, not as a speculation instrument?
Yes,
And they also do not accept Monopoly money at Monopoly conferences...
Guess what happens to a currency when folks stop accepting it.
SELL Mortimer! SELL!
This seems appropriate: https://xkcd.com/1022/
Bitcoin settlement times, and the fee market associated with transactions, have become a hot topic these days as on-chain fees have risen to $30-60 per transaction.
Also ironic given that the initial justification for bitcoin was to minimize transaction fees. It's why I've been arguing that the notion that bitcoin has an economic advantage is a false economy.
Speculation. I buy bitcoins because I know some other idiots will buy bitcoins with the hope that they will keep on growing in prize.
That's called the Greater Fool Theory. Highly speculative markets can turn the other way instantly.
Hello and welcome to the Bitcoin conference!
You can pay the admission fee in Litecoin, Dogecoin, Reddcoin, Dash, Monero, Ethereum... even freakin' Mooncoins. But not in Bitcoin.
#DeleteFacebook
LOLOLOLOL
Was predictable.
It is called electronic Dollars. It seems to work very well.
It will crash very hard. Positive feedback and all that. You see it go down and sell,
people see that you've sold and they sell. And there will be a scramble to get the
transactions registered, and the whole thing will come to a screeching halt.
If you want to get in on the cryptocurrency mining scene, you need a good motherboard that allows for multiple GPUs: ASRock H110 Pro BTC+, ASUS B250, Biostar TB350-BTC, and GIGABYTE GA-H110-D3A.
Totally a legit currency ANY DAY NOW.. /. mods are whores.
shame.
SHAME.
Makes one wonder who on earth is willing to pay similar fees as international wire transfers for the privilege of doing the transaction in a woefully unstable currency. One would start to think that some attribute of bitcoin (like, say, some degree of anon^H^H^H^Hpseudonymity) must be essential to some kind of money-making business in order to justify the expense. This would almost lead to the suspicion that people still using bitcoin for actual payments have something to hide - something profitable.
Oh well, I'm sure it's just jerks paying for their perfectly legal pr0n in a way their nosy conservative wives cannot find out. Yeah, that must be it.</sarcasm>
They usually don't accept gold for payment at "Gold as an investment" conferences either... but no one calls that ironic.
Same is true at securities (stocks and bonds) investment conferences
If alternative currencies are going to succeed (beyond the next get-rich-quick scheme) they need to address:
- Transaction costs -- I can quickly & securely send value internationally using wire transfers for less than $20 (probably less than $10, if I did it a lot); domestically it's a few cents to write a check or use ACH
- Security - the bitcoin banks seem to get "hacked" way more than traditional banks; rarely (if ever, do you hear of Americans losing their money at a bank because of theft in the bank's processing, and for most bank accounts the value is insured for a few pennies by the FDIC against fraud, theft)
- Portability and acceptance - between cash, credit cards, checks and online payments it's easy to carry around a store of value -- this is partially why gold and cattle are generally not used as a medium of exchange any more
I know that no one has found a true fix to the scaling issues, but newer coins have technical advances that alleviate them somewhat.
What's stopping the Bitcoin network from adopting one of them? Is it that hard to get them to agree on something? Do they just not recognize the problem?
I stole this Sig
The support community for Bitcoin doesn't have to kill it.
But they seem to be trying very hard to do so.
Unfortunate if you are trying to make a universally accepted thing.
Smells like embrace and extinguish?
The TNABC ticketing site says they stopped accepting bitcoin for last minute ticket purchases due to the need to manually input those ticket sales and the associated ticket print deadline. It doesn't seem nearly as ironic (or interesting) as the article referenced in the summary implies.
Initial justification is decentralization.
Decentralization is not a useful end unto itself. It's a mechanism not an end. There has to be an economic reason to want to decentralize that reduces costs. You could argue that having a centralized currency adds to the cost of a fiat currency but then decentralization isn't the goal, just the mechanism to the real goal which is to reduce costs. If a currency is more expensive to use then it will get used less. Whether it is centralized or not matters not at all except to those who are motivated primarily by ideology. People that work in finance do not routinely fit that description.
You know there's a difference between "investment" and "currency" right? You've created a false equivalency.
I can't pay for a ticket to investor seminars with Tesla or Apple stock either. Nor would I expect to be able to. However, in a conference by and for bitcoin currency fanatics, I would think that being able to pay your way in with Bitcoin would be a given, if it's such a great currency.
If anybody called not accepting gold as currency at a "Gold as an investment" conference (if such a thing exists) ironic, they would just be wrong. Either people need to stop pretending Bitcoin is anything but a wildly inflating speculation bubble with zero tangible assets backing it, or admit there are serious flaws and scale issues with the design that are preventing it's intended use as a currency.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
I beg to differ.
Ok, beg. ;-)
Decentralization makes the system harder to attack.
That is such a generic statement as to render it meaningless. What attack specifically do you so earnestly believe decentralization will protect you from? Having to pay taxes? Cops busting you for dealing drugs?
That is a practical benefit that has nothing to do with ideology.
You gave a hand wave blanket assertion about security without any corroborating evidence. Not a single practical non-hypothetical benefit in evidence.
Did you hear that?
Exactly this. Anyone who thinks Bitcoin is an investment or store of value is an idiot. The only value Bitcoin could have is if it actually worked as a currency (except it doesn't). The underlying technology is actually rather impressive and I suspect some other cryptocurrency will eventually fulfil the promise of Bitcoin (despite what some of the extreme detractors say, because a currency doesn't require an underlying value, the value can be simply in providing a medium of exchange).
This is called Bitcoin breaking. That doesn't mean it's irreparably broken though.... it just means BTC is broken for now and currently isn't offering the main advantage that should incentivize merchants adopting it.... IMO They should consider Litecoin instead.
There isn't a single cryptocurrency that has an economic (cost) advantage over the dollar (or euro, or yen, or...) with basically one exception. The one exception is for illegal activities (drugs, money laundering, etc) where the costs of getting caught outweigh the higher transaction fees. This is why it's attractive to those who would prefer to avoid attracting attention. For run of the mill normal transactions the cost of bitcoin is significantly and measurably higher. And as long as there is no economic advantage then there is literally zero chance of any of them becoming more than niche toy currency. People ultimately will go where the economic advantage is and that simply isn't with bitcoin at the end of the day.
Frankly I have yet to see a cryptocurrency that I don't think is a pyramid scheme or at least a boondoggle. But even giving them the benefit of the doubt on that score they still have markedly higher transaction costs particularly if we honestly consider the risks involved. I don't have a principled objection to them per-se but most of the arguments in favor of them are either foolish ideological ones or naive economic ones that belie a grave misunderstanding of how financial systems actually work. I think the really interesting thing about them isn't the currency (those are a boondoggle) but the blockchain technology which has potentially wide spread applications in a variety of venues which require a chain of custody.