this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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Privacy
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As long as you ignore its problems it's great. I'm sure you do.
Meanwhile the rest of us who don't live in cloud Cuckoo land have to deal with your shitty system that takes 45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction. So we can see it is probably not a good idea.
Don't listen to people who are critical of a thing if they clearly don't even understand the basics of how it works. On main chain, a Bitcoin transaction typically take up to ten minutes (the time between blocks). It can take longer if you set a super low fee, but you can guarantee your payment goes into the next block by paying an average fee, usually around $0.75. Your wallet does this all automatically.
On lightning where most transactions occur these days (secured by main chain) transactions settle fully in under a second. Do your own research.
Besides, we all know Bitcoin only takes a single rainforest per transaction, it's been that way since the great rainfork which is ancient history at this point.
I've had bitcoin transactions that literally took several days to process. This was also using an average fee. The more people using bitcoin, especially to handle common every-day transactions, the worse this problem would get.
I use Bitcoin regularly, this has literally never happened to me. If your transaction took days either you accidentally set a super low fee or your wallet was bugged somehow. Generally speaking the only way an "average fee" transaction takes more than a block or two is if you pay an average fee right before a rare massive fee spike, in which case, you can do a "replacement" transaction by upping the fee or just wait. Look up "average Bitcoin transaction fees" if you want to see rarity and size of fee spikes.
A handful of minutes or hours in a high-fee scenario, btw, is still much faster than ACH or international wires. Even if the money appears to move that quickly with traditional banking, full settlement is often measured in days to weeks, ask any vendor whose had a chargeback or anybody whose tried to "withdraw" from their Venmo right after depositing to it. Bitcoin's main chain and Fedwire (used to settle liquidity between US banks) have equivalent daily transaction capacity.
You can open a lightning channel with a single on-chain transaction. That lightning channel can stay open for years and process trillions of transactions, instantly, for pennies in fees. If you need a transaction done quickly, you shouldn't be sending it on main chain to begin with.
Long-term the vision is for folks to be using lightning or other L2s for everyday transactions, not main chain. Most Bitcoin transactions by transaction count are already on lightning. Lightning has been out for 5+ years now. It works well and gets better every year.