Tim_N
8567
This is the part I don’t get. Being mineable affects supply, but I don’t see how it could affect the demand for a given coin. Since price speculation is 95% of the reason buy altcoins (with some exceptions for the legitimately good projects), I would imagine knowing that miners will switch all their GPUs to mining a certain coin and then dump them on exchanges (to try and get back any capital loss from ETH moving to PoS) would cause a reduction in demand if anything.
Aceris
8568
Yeah, I’ve always struggled to understand how miners actually offload all their coins. But clearly enough people are buying ethereum for GPU mining to be profitable.
The question is whether the miners are capable of shifting that speculative interest to another altcoin, via exchange-based price manipulation and crypto hype sites.
There’s undoubtedly a large element of wash trades and similar, but even so the big coins are relatively liquid*, such that it shouldn’t be too hard to offload a large amount. For ETH it looks like daily trading volume is a bit under a third of the total “market cap”.
- At least if you’re exchanging to a different token
It’s all speculation, cryptocurrency isn’t being used to purchase goods/services other than illegal drugs. Bitcoin transaction cost is $19 today, you aren’t going to use it to buy a pizza.
Aceris
8572
That’s … just insane, for a speculative asset. Unless people are really using this thing as currency? (Which was not my impression)
I don’t doubt there’s liquidity - there pretty much has to be because the miners have to be able to sell the coins they’ve mined for hard currency to cash out or reinvest.
But those huge volumes stink to high heaven. If the real trade is speculative, then given the high transaction fees on ETH there’s no way it makes sense for the volume to be that high.
Unless the real profit is elsewhere, such as laundrring dirty money…
Holy crap. Today I learned. A transaction fee has been as much as $62. How does anyone ever think this is going to replace credit card transactions? Orders of magnitude higher cost and electricity usage [I’d only considered electricity before.]
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee
In particular if it’s almost all inflated value token to inflated value token trading, then it’s easy to imagine that individual transactions are very large in nominal terms, and hence transaction fees are relatively small. It’s only when you think of people buying real things with them that it seems bonkers.
Well it does, if you’re looking to buy ecstacy on the dark web. Otherwise no.
There are various ideas to control the fees but they don’t seem to be going anywhere because nobody really cares, it isn’t really used as a currency, it’s primarily speculation.
Also fees are cheaper if you are willing to wait a couple hours for the transfer to go through but again that doesn’t work for most commerce.
Crypto is weird. This kind of gambling sketchy bullshit is why I never got into it. Which was a mistake, of course, years ago.
Let’s see how it would work if we replaced credit card transactions with bitcoin:
There are roughly 1 billion credit card transactions per day. If average energy consumption per bitcoin transaction is ballpark 750 kwh and there are 3.6 million joules per kWh, it would take 2.7 x 10^18 joules to do that proof of work.
According to wikipedia, that’s about a quarter of the explosive yield of all the nuclear weapons on earth.
I saw a Bitcoin ATM in a convenience store in nowhere, TX, the other day (Tahoka, TX to be exact). Have no idea why.
Wait, what? Per bit coin transaction? Isn’t that… a bit high?
It certainly is. It’s a proof-of-work system, which might less charitably be described as “proof-of-waste”.
I was looking at these Bitcoin alternatives mentioned up thread as energy saving. This comparison from a website made me laugh:
Ripple is super fast compared to Bitcoin and is able to perform 1000 transactions per second, compared to Bitcoin’s 3 tx/sec, and it can finalize an international transaction in 3 seconds, compared to the average block confirmation time of 10-minutes for Bitcoin.
It can do a whole one thousand transactions per second?? Ripple is supposed to be poised as a real business-backed alternative currency. I’m pretty sure worldwide there are a whole hell of a lot more than 1000 transactions in a second.
Apparently Visa alone hit a peak of 11,000 transactions per second at one point back in 2011 (Visa Transactions Hit Peak on Dec. 23 « Visa’s Blog – Visa Viewpoints). I’m finding anectdotal evidence that Visa can handle up to 24k per second and averages are around 4k per second but I can’t find good sources to back that up.
Good info! Ripple is only an order of magnitude short instead of two. :)
You should know better than to present that without context.
Bitcoin average transaction value is $200-500k in the last three months. Taking your $62 average transaction fee as a given means fees as a share of value are around 0.03%. I’m no scientist, but I believe that is much lower than that roughly 2-3% charged by Visa per transaction.
I gave both the MAX value of the range, the context of the range over a 1 year period, AND the link to all of the data. How is that not context?
Lantz
8585
In 2017 they say they can do over 65k/second. The lower transaction rates people quote are just taking the # of transactions they say they do a day and dividing. There’s no specific reason to believe that they couldn’t do more, that’s just the current demand. Comparing it to bitcoin or whatever where there’s an actual real transaction limit that is driving up transaction fees is just silly.
Well, I think it’s because you didn’t agree with their existing position. It’s a mistake many of us make.
