Bitcoin Confirmation
So...
What's the deal?
I hear people wailing about slow confirmations and huuuuuuuge transaction fees. What I want to know is if you are personally experiencing this.
Go ahead and tell me, because I just did a transaction from my Coinbase account to my KeepKey, and it literally took less time to confirm than it did for me to open up and check my balance for confirmation... less than 10 seconds. Faster than it takes that damn chip on my debit card at Target.
I could have bought coffee faster with this transaction than with any other form of payment including physical cash.
And the fee? Such a quick transaction must have cost BUTTLOADS!
Well, no.
It was so minuscule that I don't even know what it was lol
In case I'm just reading this wrong and I got ripped off somehow, here's the hash for y'all to check for your damn selves.
So my question to you is this: what experience have you had with this supposed problem? I've done a good deal of Bitcoinin' these last few weeks and haven't had any lag, any high cost, or ANYTHING.
What's your story?
BTW, follow me @shayne
Coinbase is a big company and they have the tools and tech to consolidate transactions to save on fees. They can also calculate the necessary fee to get it into the next block and may even have deals with mining pools (read something along those lines last year) to get included. The average person using their own wallet does not have the info to calculate the appropriate fee to get into the next block. Even if they calculate it right anyone else can pay a higher fee before the block is solved and bump them out. Enough people keep paying higher fees and your transaction never confirms and eventually drops out of the mempool.
This scenario is only getting worse as fees go up. Unless there is on chain scaling soon people will either quit using bitcoin or move to other coins.
Also keep in mind that coinbase is an online wallet. If you don't control the private keys you don't really own those coins. So there is risk involved with keeping money in exchanges like that. Pushing people towards using these kinds of wallets is one way that high fees increase centralization and risk to users.
So you're saying that Coinbase has connections with miners and calculation technology that other wallets don't have that allows them to get their transactions into the fastest, cheapest blocks? Sounds like a winning business strategy to me! I wonder why other wallets aren't doing this...
I agree and have agreed all along that Bitcoin needs to scale. It's supposed to be able to do microtransactions, streaming payments, etc. That was a big part of the dream, and as far as I'm concerned, it needs to continue to be a big part of Bitcoin's future. You SHOULD be able to buy coffee with bitcoin at near-instant speeds. It has to happen, as far as I'm concerned, and now that scaling is the biggest issue facing Bitcoin (no ETF, no China bubble, etc), I think it WILL happen.
I think that, in the future, most Bitcoin users will be primarily on exchanges or some kind of ETF. It's just easier for people to understand and use that way. Even though the risks of exchanges are shouted from the rooftops by the Bitcoin community, the exchanges will feel like a bank to most people, and that gives people a feeling of security even though hardware wallets are way safer and give you complete control over your holdings. I see the exchanges as being big risk-takers in today's economy: they are the edges that face the most attack and offer the most useful applications; they are also our best price discovery tools.
Well don't get used to those fast free transactions. Coinbase announced last night they are doing away with paying the tx fee so no longer free. If you will get to choose a fee and if they will be as fast remains to be seen.
Do you have a link to this announcement? I didn't see it on their twitter page.
https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-spring-cleaning-4f27710ff821
Interesting. Well, that's fair enough.