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RE: Who here uses Bitcoin for regular transactions (not trading)?
"Transactions usually time out after three days" - 72 hours used to be the default in Core, it has been lifted to two weeks by now. Further, transactions can be purged from the local mempool dependent on memory constraint set, etc.
Transactions have no timestamps included, so a transaction can be rebroadcast by anyone - the sender, the receiver, any third party - either manually or automatically by the wallet software used.
Details aside, there is no guarantee that a low-fee transaction will confirm. I have experienced twice that a transaction did disappear and the original inputs got double-spent.
There is a risk of course and what I do won't be acceptible with people you do not know personally. I only accept low fee transactions from people I know very well. Looking forward to the Lightning protocol becomes useful.
It's not about trust, but about the potential mess caused by lost transactions.
In the good old days one of us could buy a round of beers in the bar, and everyone in the crowd could pay for the beer through their phones - it was easy and it was fire and forget.
Not anymore, nowadays the sender and recipient have to baby-sit the low-fee-transactions, and one almost needs to be a bitcoin expert to be able to send and receive payments with a proper but not too big fee paid, choosing weather to use or not to use RBF, eventually try to get the transaction "unstuck" through CPFP and other means, rebroadcast a timed-out transaction, etc.
Yes, lightning will eventually be good - but I am quite concerned that it's overhyped, hailed as a silver bullet while it's not.
For one thing I expect it will probably be at least a year until a majority of wallets supports lightning.
Further, the two parties needs to be connected via a payment route. I can easily see that it will be easy since "everyone" would like to connect with the biggest hubs, but then again, there is the centralization risk.
Also, it's needed to make one or two on-chain transactions to move funds into the lightning network, this may eventually become very expensive if we'll stick to the 1 MB block limit.
Finally, one has to decide weather to store the bitcoins in a payment channel or on a private key; every movement in or out of the lightning network (as far as I understand it) involves on-chain transactions (and it may be easier to move funds into the lightning network than out from it, I believe?).
I think Lightning is not so different from any alt-coin. It's fully possible to move value measured in bitcoins cheaply through ethereum, bitshares, ripple and probably several other alts.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, I haven't read the whitepaper.
You are completely right. I'm a bit of a tech guy so I know how to fine tune the fee. But it's not user friendly. I am a bit concerned about Lightning too. I wait and see before I judge - because I don't know what to believe right now. I hope it is a move in the right direction - because I doubt any blockchain would ever be able to handle a Visa-like throughput.
Is lightning a good buy this week.