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Not the fee, the costs, block reward divided by transactions in the block. Miners will use that to cover their electricity bills and you are paying for this indirectly when you buy Bitcoins.

That's irrelevant to the people conducting the transaction.

If I send $100 worth of bitcoin to someone, they receive $100 worth of bitcoin and I pay 4 cents worth of bitcoin to send it to them. There is no $10-20 transaction cost on either end of the exchange.

The value you're referring to is created by the block reward. It's additional value that did not previously exist, not value taken from someone else.

Bitcoin mining does not create money out of thin air. Running the Bitcoin network costs a lot of electricity and somebody has to pay for that. Right now it may still be mostly covered by the block rewards together with the influx of new money but the day will come where block rewards will no longer pay the bills and then you will have to pay for it with fees.

"Right now" is when you're quoting a $10-20 transaction cost.

There is no such cost for a given transaction, and it's simply incorrect to state that there is.

You're talking about something completely different and stating that it's the same. It is not.

I added the math to another comment and the electricity cost per transaction should be on the order of 8 dollars per transaction. Part of it is payed by the spread between buying and selling Bitcoins, part of it is payed by the influx of new money keeping the spread narrow. The point is that Bitcoin transactions are not cheap, you are just kind of lucky that other people will pay some of the costs for you right now. But this is obviously not sustainable. If the influx of money stops, miners selling their block rewards to pay for electricity will just drive the price down and you pay all the costs with the spread.

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