You can choose to pay any fee you want. The higher you pay the more likely it is for a miner to pick your transaction for the next block. You can pay $3 right now to have your on-chain transaction confirmed within a day.

Then there's the lightning network, which allows you to transact BTC an infinite amount of times off-chain for next to 0 fees. I've used it countless time this year and the prior and have probably spent less than a dollar in fees total. A lot of crypto exchanges are implementing it too, which will drastically lower the fees on the overall network. Bitfinex has support for it right now. Kraken will support it this year

The Lightning Network has no chance of gaining mass-adoption. It has high start up and capital lock-up costs, proportional to on-chain transaction fees, which only grow as Bitcoin/LN adoption ramps up. It has high upkeep costs, requiring you to have your LN node online to receive payments, and for your node to have access to the LN funds via a connection to the private keys, which is a security liability.

To monitor for fraudulent channel closes in order to be able to react in time to challenge them, it also requires you to have an always on-line node, or a trusted third party delegated to do that on your behalf. And if you want rapid/automated reaction to fraudulent channel closes, that node needs to have access to the private keys to your LN funds.

Then there are routing issues when the topography of the network changes with every transaction, and where the existence of routes is dependent on sufficient capital being locked up in channels.

There's a reason why there's 100 times more BTC locked up for use in Ethereum dApps than for use in the LN. Ethereum-based scalability solutions could, ironically, provide BTC with the scalability needed to gain mass-adoption as an instrument for peer-to-peer payments.

Can you be a miner & process your own payment?

You could, long ago. Now, it's unlikely you'll manage that.

Sure. But you don't actually save any money. Instead of paying the "market rate" transaction fee you turn away one "market rate" transaction fee to include yours instead.

Thanks! Genuinely didn’t know about these

Do you ever think that you losing out on tens of millions of dollars might have affected your desire to challenge your believes that "bitcoin is something that cannot work"? I know I'd probably cope in a similar manner

Sorta it does make me slight more bitter about bitcoin in general, and if I made millions of dollars off of it I would likely thing it's the best thing in the world.

However, I do try to self adjust for that bias. When I mined the coins it was a neat concept, but bitcoin wasn't at all practical then and it isn't at all practical now.

I sold it all back then for a few reasons.

- I believed other tech nerds would come to the same conclusion.

- It would never reach main stream adoption because of how utterly impractical it actually is.

- I thought that governments would crack down on it pretty hard, pushing it further into the fringe communities.

I was definitely wrong about governments cracking down and the novelty of bitcoin has definitely caught the interest of many and that has caused many chain reactions of the price going up.

I still think bitcoin is basically useless, but I severely didn't properly estimate that just it being interesting would make it so valuable.

Bitcoin truly is extremely interesting, and the vast majority don't try to understand it at all. So while it may in fact be useless, that does not actually matter for the price to go up.

In the end the only thing I kick myself for was looking at it objectively. Bitcoin wasting untold amount of energy, low transaction rate, high wait times for confirmation, high transaction fees, ever growing public transaction history, long cryptographic identifiers for receiving and sending, and so on do not actually matter.

Not rebuying is because I still have hope that people will come to their senses. But my stubbornness has not made me rich.

> In the end the only thing I kick myself for was looking at it objectively. Bitcoin wasting untold amount of energy, low transaction rate, high wait times for confirmation, high transaction fees, ever growing public transaction history, long cryptographic identifiers for receiving and sending, and so on do not actually matter.

As if there's a better alternative.

Agree 100% with you. Almost same scenario here, I sold my Bitcoin in 2017.

It's also a possible butterfly effect. Would Bitcoin have taken off without those specific few thousand coins in the economy?

If even half of Bitcoin holders at the time thought they'd make it big and held, how could Bitcoin have had the liquidity to gain value?

liquidity never mattered because its not a currency

You still need trade volume. If there is no Bitcoin to buy, there is no Bitcoin to sell.

the bitcoin to sell is being mined, in hype driven markets restricted supply is no issue

No more or no less than it is influencing people who are pro-Bitcoin, and in fact that bias may give them a clear, less biased view.

Oh delicious HN tears!

From what I can tell, Tether's recent printing volume is consistent with that of its FINCEN regulated equivalent USDC ($4B marketcap).

If money came out of thin air from tether's side there should be a big discrepancy between the daily increase in marketcap