Ask HN: If Bitcoin is so great, why doesn’t it help the people in Turkey? I thought bitcoin is great for exactly such situation like we see currently in Turkey. Is it being used? |
Ask HN: If Bitcoin is so great, why doesn’t it help the people in Turkey? I thought bitcoin is great for exactly such situation like we see currently in Turkey. Is it being used? |
For that you must go to Argentina and Venezuela. Bitcoin is solving real societal problems there, by simply existing and working as it promises.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/z434a3/can-bitcoi...
But suppose Turkey's problems were entirely monetary, so that an alternative currency really could fix them. That currency has to fulfill some requirements. It must be price-stable enough for people to be willing to hold onto it. It must be convenient enough for people to be willing to use it. It must be widely understood and popular enough (this is a bootrstap or "chicken and egg" problem) that one can expect to be able to buy what one needs, when one needs to, with it.
Bitcoin charges something like $4 per transaction lately, and they take on the order of a day to process. It's unstable, and it's confusing to most people.
Maybe someday, though.
Bank transactions take that or longer to fully settle. The merchant and bank are just giving you credit to bridge the gap when you use your card at the checkout line. Your bank sends a best guess that you actually have the funds but won't know for sure until the daily batch job is run. If you look at the actual mechanics of bank transactions you'd find it much more confusing than BTC - everyone just papers it over for you in exchange for a fee which you probably don't know your paying.
You could do the same thing with BTC, look at the source addresses balance since everything is public and make a short term credit decision.
That said, while the timing of bitcoin might be similar to bank transactions, nobody would use a debit card that charged a flat $4 on every transaction.
Huh? Current fees are $0.16 or less, and there's almost no backlog, meaning transactions confirm at maximum speed. Where are you getting your information from?
https://bitcoinfees.info/ https://www.blockchain.com/btc/unconfirmed-transactions https://www.blockchain.com/explorer
If bitinfocharts.com is to be believed, the fee has been as high as $55/transaction.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
"Bitcoin" is a protocol, like TCP or HTTP. It does not charge anything.
You may as well have said "SMTP charges monthly access fees".
The miner's accept transactions and prefer ones with the higher fee. User chooses their fee in accordance with how fast they want some miner to pick it up.
Note that this clogged, congested network is due to Bitcoin Core (BTC) being crippled at 1MB block size ... this is not inherent to the _bitcoin protocol_ itself.
This can be seen with Bitcoin Cash (BCH) where the block size is 32MB (and will be soon 128MB) where the median fee is less than 0.005 USD (half a cent) for pretty much guaranteed confirmation within the next block (10 minutes or so).
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the only "crypto" that now actually implements p2p electronic cash system ... as a chain of digital signatures as described in Nakamoto's original paper and original implementation.
Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin.
That's awesome!
It's still not obvious to me how a kind of transaction that takes 10 minutes to clear could replace cash -- but the outlook looks much better than when I was conflating the Bitcoin protocol with the Bitcoin Core currency. Thanks.
Uncensorable stable cryptocurrency might benefit people in the developing world, but it's not clear such a thing is even possible.
1. Bitcoin would need to be more stable. No reason to think it couldn't drop more than Turkey's currency.
2. You'd have to predict that the lira was going to drop a fair amount of time before it did... (meanwhile take the risk of #1... and ho man has it been wild).
Neither of those are things and even if Bitcoin was say stable and predictable #2 means you'd have to have "the people" speculating about currency.... that's not something most people are good at.