Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[adamstgbit]

@albin
you make me want to code it, so i can prove you wrong and make some money in the process

if 1/2 a million dollars a month are tipped and later withdrawn... thats 5K a month
[doublepost=1479627250][/doublepost]Ill Call it tidbit, it'll be HUGE!

 

[molecular]

LN makes sense when you want to make a High volume of small TXs to the same channel over and over.

A "simple" payment channel would suffice here. Pay-per-view (camgirls) and pay-for-access (wifi-hotspot) are great use cases.

LN goes a step further. LN makes sense when you want to do a high volume of small TXs to different entities without having to open a channel to each payee. The elegance (challenge?) is in making this possible by use of 3rd parties in a trustless manner and without somehow giving these 3rd parties too much power.

 

[awemany]

@albin
you make me want to code it, so i can prove you wrong and make some money in the process

if 1/2 a million dollars a month are tipped and later withdrawn... thats 5K a month
[doublepost=1479627250][/doublepost]Ill Call it tidbit, it'll be HUGE!

Do it! I'd love to be proven wrong on the viability of something like Changetip now.

One thing that I think will also change the equation by a lot is that there is so much red tape involved. Money service business, KYC/AML and all that.

 

[adamstgbit]

@awemany
do i need to do KYC/AML when i tip a street performer a dollar?
pretty sure KYC/AML does not apply when handling 20$ of customer funds.
plus we got trump
i'll be fine.
[doublepost=1479665600][/doublepost]

A "simple" payment channel would suffice here. Pay-per-view (camgirls) and pay-for-access (wifi-hotspot) are great use cases.

That SOUNDS good, but user will have to "timeLock" the coins they plan on using, and bla bla bla.
IDK for real, but my feeling is that LN is not going to be attractive to individual users.

 

[lunar]

kind words.

 

[Richy_T]

There is no imaginable scenario where the 1% withdrawl fee is any remotely viable amount of money.

Apparently it wasn't.

I won't suggest one way or another on the privacy issues but it wouldn't be the first time a tech company has gone live with a weak or shoddy business model. In fact, their model might have been "get hyped then sell out" in which case privacy would likely have been a real issue down the line. In the end they just semi-sold-out to AirBnB apparently (which seems weird in itself).

Hmm. Is it possibly BashCo is a small blocker in the hopes that high fees would push people to solutions like changetip. Didn't seem to work out though. In fact, possibly counterproductive since high fees will discourage withdrawal which is where they put their fees. So typical core-type logic there.

By the way, I haven't heard but are funds getting refunded automatically?
[doublepost=1479671632,1479670986][/doublepost]

if 1/2 a million dollars a month are tipped and later withdrawn... thats 5K a month

But 1/2 million dollars a month tipped and left for later use is $0.00. Which is the way I used it. Tips are too small to bother withdrawing and I just kept them around to tip others. (Edit: this does suggest another funding method which is investment of deposited funds. Shades of fractional reserve there though. Which is to be expected really)

The best way to fund would probably be to keep a small percentage of inbound tips. Thus if I tip you $10 , I still feel like I tipped you $10, you get $9.98 and are still happy and the tip service gets its cut. It would probably help if people could advertise that they consider their writing supported by the tips (like ChartBuddy has a tip icon). The only other way really is analysis of what's being tipped and targeted advertising (which hasn't yet totally proven itself as far as I'm aware and would probably upset a lot of the Bitcoin crowd).
[doublepost=1479671848][/doublepost]

One thing that I think will also change the equation by a lot is that there is so much red tape involved. Money service business, KYC/AML and all that.

That's definitely put me off of developing several ideas that I thought would have been pretty cool.
[doublepost=1479672338][/doublepost]

IDK for real, but my feeling is that LN is not going to be attractive to individual users.

I have yet to see a mock-up of a user-interface for using LN and I strongly suspect you are correct.

I am particularly interested in how competing implementations will supposedly be handled.

 

[awemany]

@awemany
do i need to do KYC/AML when i tip a street performer a dollar?
pretty sure KYC/AML does not apply when handling 20$ of customer funds.
plus we got trump
i'll be fine.

I totally like your attitude, but I also find it dangerous and am not brave enough to act like that myself. I am also not an American. Further, even though Trump might be more open to new business ideas than Clinton, he's just the head of state, and it appears that the U.S. government can still wreak painful havoc (up to and including jail time) on you. And doing something start-up-y 'with money' makes this quite a bit more likely, as far as I can see. Or you go the lawyers-at-every-step route, but then I'd guess that the business plan falls apart due to the expected fees.

It isn't just $20. It is $20 from hundreds of thousands of people (in your business plan).

Still and again: If you think you can make it work, go for it. But CYA. And maybe talk to the Changetip guys for hints and tips on how to proceed?
[doublepost=1479674015][/doublepost]My non-monetary, purely for-the-fun bet: No blocks bigger than 1MB before we reached page 1000 on this thread. (Not that I want it that way, but given the speed with which things are moving in general ...)

 

[adamstgbit]

Tip:awemany+0.005BTC

 

[adamstgbit]

wow dirtiest code i ever wrote. ( thats a lie )

@awemany
did you get a message from my bot?

i'd need to make a new account for testing...

Tip:tidbit+0.001BTC

LOL sorry guys, my bot only checks This page :S

 

[adamstgbit]

Its alive!

this is going to be a fun project.
right now it only check this page when i ask it to, and sends a PM to the guy that got tipped.
is this thing expected to contentiously crawl ALL Social Media sites looking for new "Tip: commands"?
sounds insane..
i wonder how the change tip bot knew where to look for these "Tip commands"...

 

[awemany]

LOL. Thanks for the tip, but I got 19 of the same privmessages and they all ended up at the same 404 page. Continue with your efforts, but I think it isn't time for the release yet...

Regarding this:

i wonder how the change tip bot knew where to look for these "Tip commands"...

I think the magic is that /u/changetip had to be summoned by calling him out. Then the user 'changetip' will just be notified and can the programmatically react to the tip command. I am pretty sure that some special API call for something similar is the same on how they did it on FB and twitter (I believe changetip had support for those platforms, too?)

If they'd just listed to a special hashtag with some kind of streaming API on twitter, for example, they'd get all tip commands, I would guess?

I am pretty sure that they didn't go the polling/crawling route. That seems to be a horrible approach on a larger scale.

 

[albin]

@albin
if 1/2 a million dollars a month are tipped and later withdrawn... thats 5K a month

Changetip wasn't some set-it-and-forget-it one-man part time operation, they had several employees and ran a $3.5 million series A. The minimal sort of thing you're suggesting would be reasonable, but that's not was Changetip actually was in terms of business aspirations.

 

[Roger_Murdock]

In a follow-up conversation regarding the article I linked to yesterday, /u/Noosterdam provided what I thought was a really nice summary of the problems with artificially-high transaction fees:

"[A]rtificially high tx fees damage wealth preservation directly by draining holder purchasing power, indirectly by risking altcoin competition, and speculatively by reducing investor outlook for Bitcoin's ultimate use as a currency. Overtaxed, endangered, and future-handicapped."

 

[Dusty]

user will have to "timeLock" the coins they plan on using, and bla bla bla.
IDK for real, but my feeling is that LN is not going to be attractive to individual users.

In my opinion what will happen is that a new (bitcoin) user will buy 20-100$ of LN bitcoins. I.e.: his wallet will only be able to handle LN bitcoins, and it will never settle on the blockchain.

So, we will have two kind of users: A level users lucky enough to have bitcoins on the blockchain, and B level users with LN-bitcoins who don't even know that a difference exists...

 

[jbreher]

And those B level users' 'LN bitcoins' may not be anything remotely resembling bitcoins. Once the hubs are in place, there will be a natural tendency for new users to just start accounts with those hubs, and never deal in bitcoin itself. Once this pattern is in place, it will be only a matter of (short) time before one of the hubs tries to dominate the space by offering interest. That hub will pay for the interest by implementing a partial reserve scheme. Once one does, they will all need to to remain competitive.

Bye bye magic inflationless internet money.

 

[satoshis_sockpuppet]

None of this would be a problem, if LN was a choice.

(First: It doesn't fucking exist. Everybody should stop talking about it, as if it was just a matter of putting some finished parts together. There - is - no - known - solution - to - the - routing - problem! Which is Lightnings interesting part..)

If the majority of Bitcoins mining power is too stupid to protect their investments, (SHA256)-Bitcoin will fail anyway. Either a ledger-fork or an altcoin will then replace Bitcoin.

But a Lightning (as a free choice!) with "reserve schemes" is no threat to Bitcoin. Bitcoin gave people the chance to select freely, which money they want to use. If money with inflation will be the markets choice, it might be because it's ultimately better.

But I doubt that.

 

[adamstgbit]

i think you guys underestimate the reluctance and resistance user ( new or old ) will have toward using LN exclusively. and also how long it will take for the infuratuter to make LN widely used to be in place.

i sure as hell won't use it, TX fee's could be 1$ and i probably will still choose to settle 50$ payments using Bitcoin not NLBitcoin.

sure 1$ fee out of 50$ = 2% but considering the alternative (learning to use LN, and trusting that crazy system i cant understand ) its not much...

Even if the product i am buying cost 5$ ( a item for an MMORPG, lets say ) if my options are use bitcoin and pay 6$ in total or use LNBitcoin and pay 5.05$ in total, i'll choose the most convenient / trusted path, every time!

 

[Tomothy]

I'd probably just convert my bitcoin to an altcoin and transact with the faster alt. Or just use the alt if I already owned it. It seems dogecoin works well for the tipping aspect; talk about micro transactions right? I think a lot of these issues all boil down to differing visions of what bitcoin is and more importantly what it should be. Sorry for being a dick; I'm out of coffee...

 

[Richy_T]

Good point @Tomothy. If you're going to lock up your Bitcoins anyway, just buy some of a different, less crippled currency and transact in that. And then why go back?

I think it's only a matter of time before we see a wave of alt adoption. Many companies that sell things for Bitcoin receive their money in USD (or other local currency) anyway so it would make no difference to them. I figure the only reason Coinbase hasn't done this already is because they are invested in BTC and are hoping a satisfactory outcome can still be pulled from the trainwreck. But they're eating up their first-mover advantage by doing so.

 

[Norway]

brg444 has spent some serious time writing a blog post to explain why the block size limit is not artificial. I guess he is very proud of it. Feel free to comment below his blog here:

https://medium.com/@bergealex4/the-artificial-block-size-limit-1b69aa5d9d4#.ar31athx8