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jpkoning
grubles
Well the point is with Bitcoin you don't have to trust RBC to not freeze and/or abscond with your $1B.
def8cefe
You don't have to trust RBC (Royal Bank of Canada) to not run off with your money because they are regulated by the Canadian government. Canada has one of the most respected and stable banking industries in the world with a proven track record.
If somebody breaches your Canadian bank account you get your money back. If somebody steals your money from your bitcoin wallet you start all over again.
voisin
You get your money back up to the CDIC insured limit which is $100k right?
Canada’s banking industry avoided the Great Recession only because Canada did not have a housing market reset. Prices continued upward unabated, along with household debt which is now among the highest in the world. They kicked the can down the road, but didn’t avoid the issue permanently.
orbifold
Also good luck getting 1B converted to dollars without a major head-ache. I feel like 1B in bitcoin is as bad if not even worse than 1B in cash. It isn't super useful in that form.
robjan
If you tried to convert it into dollars it would move the market and devalue your holdings. But buying into bitcoin would have also moved the market in the other direction, tbh.
rudolph9
It’s not useful for small payments but I would happily take the equivalent $1k+ in bitcoin as payment.
cletus
Nor can you reverse a transaction when someone steals your Bitcoins. The traditional financial system is far more suitable to people’s needs than Bitcoin is.
gonehome
The most interesting bitcoin story I read somewhere was about a Ukrainian living in the Russian controlled portion of the country getting out with his wealth intact.
The border was controlled by corrupt Russian guards that would steal things of value. You could pass the border occasionally to visit family on the other side, but it was risky to take anything.
He put all his wealth into bitcoin, memorized his wallet seed words like his life depended on it, crossed the border with nothing, and then regenerated his wallet on the other side.
I thought that was pretty cool.
gruez
>Nor can you reverse a transaction when someone steals your Bitcoins.
You're not always able to do that with the traditional banking system. Scammers were able to steal millions from corporations using wire transfers, and they weren't able to reverse them.
cortesoft
Yep... and the more money you have, the more the traditional financial system caters to you.
If you have a billion dollars, you have very little incentive to work outside the system. The system will work for you.
alexpotato
Libertarians would argue that this is where insurance comes in.
Insurance in this example has two functions:
1. Protecting you from losses
2. Applying standards to Bitcoin exchanges etc to help prevent losses. A good example of this is fire insurance. An insurance company will require a potential customer to have fire alarms, use specific materials etc before they decide to cover that company's building.
zarkov99
True, but you also have no recourse if the transaction was fradulent, done under duress or an error.
undefined
erfgh
You do have to trust yourself to have 100% flawless security because one slip and you lose that $1B to a Chinese hacker with no hope of ever getting it back.
thekuanysh
Why do you have to add “Chinese”?
staplers
This happens all the time with wire transfers. It's no different. Banks don't care.
Example: https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2018/05/24/central-florida...
gruez
It's not limited to cryptocurrency. eg. companies losing millions from phishing https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/27/phishing-email-scam-stole-10...
aey
Not quite. You can bribe the miners with your old private key if you act fast enough :)
co_dh
why Chinese hacker? Discrimination.
cycrutchfield
Are you really going to try to argue that you are less likely to get scammed or hacked with Bitcoin than with a traditional bank?
kingo55
No, his point seems to be that bitcoin can be transferred without the approval or moral judgement imposed by a third party (e.g. bank).
Try sending $1B around the world to your Nigerian uncle and seeing what happens.
sp332
Not scammed, but maybe a regulator will take an interest in $1B being moved around.
grubles
The point is the entire point of Bitcoin itself is to minimize or hopefully remove completely the requirement of trust.
koonsolo
You don't seem to know much about banking and large sums of money in practice.
Let me give you an example which I know exists: EU airliner buys an airplane at Boeing. How do you transfer the money?
This is how they do it today: They are at Boeing where the transfer needs to go through. The money needs to be transferred then and there. So airliner calls their bank to transfer the money. But there is a 9 hour difference, so they need to wait when EU bank opens, but before the US bank closes. Call the bank, transfer first to UK bank (I can't remember why they had to do this :(), confirm money is there. Then transfer from UK to US, confirm that the money is there. This all before the US bank closes of course. Very cumbersome and James Bond like.
And I'm not an expert in international money transfers, but I'm guessing it's not 0.
moksly
That’s not how large transfers work at all though. Banks have international agreements, or go through 3rd parties that have. You’ll also never be expected to pay right then and there, if you’re a respectable enterprise entity, the other part will expect you to pay and the funds to arrive within reasonable time, which can be half a year later.
As for the transfers themselves, they are typically free. You’re such a big customer to the bank, and so is the recipient to their bank, that the banks are earning their money without taking transfer fees.
The most important part, and the reason things like bitcoin will never replace old school banking, is that you can roll the money back or cancel if you decide to walk away from the deal like Norwegian just did for 90something Boeing aircraft that they can no longer afford because of corona. Sure you’ll spend a few years in legal, but that’s besides the point.
antepodius
That walkback depends on trust, honor, and suability between all actors involved. You can walk back a bitcoin transaction, too, if you have those preconditions. Just ask the other guy to send the money back.
koonsolo
> That’s not how large transfers work at all though.
Except for the fact that this is exactly how it works today.
So you are in the airline industry? You know first hand how airliners buy airplanes. Please explain to me how it happens at your end.
Because what I explained is first hand knowledge on how it actually works. (Boeing 787 Dreamliner)
You assume, I know.
glofish
What you describe is the process of buying a laptop on Ebay.
When you buy a plane, perhaps you have already payed months ahead, perhaps you'll pay five years later, perhaps you pay on a monthly basis, perhaps you don't pay at all but transfer the rights do to something
it is all contractual obligations, sometimes money does not even trade hands
etc.
the idea that you would need to wait for a bank to open to transfer money while watching the timezones is completely unrealistic
koonsolo
Except for the fact that this is exactly how it works today.
So you are in the airline industry? You know first hand how airliners buy airplanes. Please explain to me how it happens at your end.
Because what I explained is first hand knowledge on how it actually works (this was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner)
You assume, I know.
zMiller
You will never be able to exchange 1 billion dollars at will with RBC or any other bank.
lixtra
That bank transfer won’t happen for free. Both sides will have to go through KYC procedures and it will take plenty of time if one of the parties is new.
pbhjpbhj
What's the cost if I'm with HSBC in Hong-Kong and you're with Chase in USA, say?
vmception
$50 if both using the same currency.
$50 + a few basis point spread if using a different currency, but you don't know exactly what that spread will be from the sending bank and what the spread will be at the receiving bank, so you can lose anywhere from .001% to 4% with major currencies.
greenshackle2
I imagine there are also fees involved to turn $1B worth of bitcoins to local currency.
bufferoverflow
It's never .001%. I've done so many international transactions with currency conversion (one of the most liquid pairs - USR-EUR). On the best day a bank will get that 3% difference. I've been using TransferWise in the last year, it's definitely better, but still over 1%.
ShorsHammer
Find it incredibly hard to believe they will allow an intra-bank transfer of $1B for free, even just going to another Canadian bank all bets are off and they certainly would want something in return.
Do have any proof of this claim or is it extrapolated from the fees for sending $200 to another RBC account?
alexpotato
If I owned bank B and someone was going to send me $1B from bank A, I would pay the fees that bank A was charging the customer.
Source: I've worked in banking and seen this even on the personal level (not at the $1B level of course).
Cthulhu_
Are you trying to argue that a financial transaction - a service provided by a bank where THEY take all the risk and responsibility of said transfer - should be free of charge?
I mean if I transferred a billion and my bank made a mistake, I would not lose any money. Make a typo in your bitcoin transaction, and you're screwed.
asdfasgasdgasdg
> Are you trying to argue that a financial transaction - a service provided by a bank where THEY take all the risk and responsibility of said transfer - should be free of charge?
I think that they are making the point that they actually are free of charge. Fees for moving money at banks are negligible. They might not actually be entirely free, but wire transfer fees are ~$20, and I've moved a million dollars this way before. I don't know if there's much of a difference between a million and a billion in this context.
jpkoning
>I think that they are making the point that they actually are free of charge.
That's right.
An "on-us" transaction, one that simply requires RBC to update its database by debiting funds from RBC customer A and crediting them to RBC customer B, is free. (If your bank is charging you for that, switch banks!).
A wire transfer is more complex than an "on-us" transfer because it involves two bank database. RBC has to debit its database, and Bank of Montreal has to credit its database, and the central bank is usually involved as an intermediary. This often involves a wire transfer fee.
sukilot
Bank transfers are free because you have to deposit (aka lend) money to the bank before transferring it. And the bank get to use that money for profit while it is deposited.
There's a billion dollars difference between a million and a billion. You can't just plop a billion dollars into your checking account. It's part of a hugely complex context (how would you even accumulate a billion dollars to deposit?)
knocte
> Make a typo in your bitcoin transaction, and you're screwed
Not really, bitcoin addresses have checksums.
hh3k0
You're just as screwed if you make a typo in your bank transaction, though.
ForHackernews
lol no you're not. call them up and they'll fix it.
bufferoverflow
They do not "take all the risk". In fact, they have none of the risk. If your money disappears, you can only recover $250K through FDIC insurance. For the rest you will have to get into a lengthy legal battle with the bank.
ur-whale
> It should be ready at the maximum in a couple of days and I will forward it to you as soon as I have it.
And, barring a collusion of miners, virtually noone could have prevented or reverted that transaction.
ipython
Unpopular opinion: why do we care so much about making it cheaper for rich people to move money around? Do we think somehow that will “trickle down” to us mere mortals and put western union and their ilk out of business?
mindcandy
Remittances are one of the big, obvious use cases where crypto can save poor people a ton of money. To the tune of a collective $40-50 billion a year. https://academy.binance.com/blockchain/blockchain-use-cases-...
hocuspocus
Call me when a blockchain-backed remittance service reaches even a small fraction of the customer-base of companies like Transferwise or CurrencyFair.
If it was an efficient way to cut on fees, everyone would do it. Yet almost nobody does.
bjoernw
What's your number? That's exactly what Ripple is working on - replacing SWIFT. https://ripple.com/ripplenet
Karunamon
That strikes me as more of an implementation detail. Day-to-day cryptocurrency use still requires a level of technical sophistication my grandma isn't comfortable with.
sukilot
Poor (and rich) people get computer viruses all the time. Put a Bitcoin wallet on everyone's machine and remittance fees would be a drop in the ocean compared to theft.
_jal
Even more unpopular opinion: humans should be as free as capital.
Making capital transfers easy while restricting the movement of real people ghettoizes and traps people for corporate convenience and cost savings.
as300
Calling nationalities and cultures that arise from a group of people being forced to live together a "ghettoization" is a bit of a stretch
qeternity
That's literally the meaning of the word...the negative connotations came afterwards.
Craighead
Not really, in fact, thats almost the exact dictionary definition.
anm89
Every time you read an opinion regarding financial markets that mentions abstractly how something "should" be. You can know to disregard that opinion.
centimeter
> humans should be as free as capital.
Capital doesn't put a drain on the social welfare systems of the country you're sending it to.
_jal
Ya think? Try googling "walmart subsidy".
regulation_d
I don't care about Western Union. I do care about Visa and MasterCard.
And I'm definitely not saying that the current generation of crypto has figured this problem out, but I am hopeful for the sake of SMB that they won't always have to pay 3% fees on cashless transactions.
ipython
I would agree with you but all I see from “big tech” is further middlemen and more fees- orders of magnitude larger than 3%!!
Want to order food online? That’ll be 30% on top of your order, please.
Oh, you wanted to pay for some bits through our app on your iPhone? Apple will take 30% of that too, thank you very much.
We just switched HOA management companies and they had the audacity to charge a three dollar convenience fee if you pay your bill online! So I will just continue to pay via paper check and make life miserable for them because that incurs no fee.
All I see is hypocrisy and more hands in my pocket wanting my money, not less.
foepys
The EU limited CC transaction fees to 0.3%. That's the reason why there are no cashback deals for CC here.
rudolph9
The ship has sailed for bitcoin as an everyday currency and it has turned more into a store of value than a currency. However, the crypto world is diverse, still infant, and has many applications beyond currency. Look at IPFS (libp2p, IPLD, Multiformats); it’s open source free software that allows user to view content without it being censored.
Filecoin (the currency) exists on top but is completely independent and unnecessary to make use of the underlying utility of IPFS.
While bitcoin is a bit of a monolith even it has utility beyond currency as you can write information along with your transactions. An example is [ION][1] an identity service pegging state to transactions wiring to the blockchain and so long as bitcoin holds value you can have high certainty this information will not go away or be modified.
There are trade-offs to everything but often the benefit of crypto projects is lost when they’re viewed as currency rather than utility. Look at the forest not the trees.
[1]: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-active-director...
lawn
I see the benefit as making it cheaper for everyone to move money around. And make no mistake, Bitcoin has much larger fees than other cryptocurrencies.
stale2002
Wire transfers, between banks, can cost something like 20-50$ depending on who you are transferring too, and if it is across countries.
Rich people don't have to care about a 20$ fee. Poor people do though.
whb07
because the poor people can't move $10 around without paying $3 for it. Have you ever tried moving small amounts of money in poor countries ?
joosters
Have you not heard of M-Pesa? Very popular mobile phone-based money transfer service, low fees (far less than $3 or the 30% you claim), you can even pay companies directly with it
londons_explore
If you want to convert it to real cash, the fee is pretty substantial...
whb07
Yes I've heard of it. So bitcoin is this but better. I agree with you.
ipython
That’s my point, however you said it clearer than I did. I don’t see how bitcoin making it easy for billionaires to move money equates to poor people being able to use it to move $10.
dmix
Bitcoin makes it easy for people with a billion dollars in bitcoin to move it around (or any value).
There’s no way it’s then suddenly a cost effective way for normal currency billionaires to move money around. Converting that amount to BTC would require serious fees and resources.
So this point is largely moot to any wider discussion.
harpratap
Not really sure which poor countries you are talking about but in India the smaller the amount, the cheaper it is to transfer. <10k INR is most simplest transaction you can do by simply downloading any payment app and using UPI. >100k INR is where transaction costs usually creep in.
bane
Imagine if Bitcoin worked by "taxing" transfers and evenly distributing that tax to every other wallet.
kchoudhu
Pretty sure the fund I work for moved several billion dollars for free on Friday...and will do the same thing again this Friday, the Friday after that, and the Friday after that.
Cryptocurrency's obsession with fees is baffling. Fees are not why moving money is hard.
dylkil
Whats worse is Bitcoin's security depends on high fees, but you have articles like this celebrating low fees.
Satoshi intended for bitcoin to scale to hundreds of millions of transactions, all paying sub cent fees. All those fees would add up to millions of dollars per day. The fees are what secure the chain when the block reward runs out. Around 2014/2015 some devs who worked with blockstream started campaigning to keep the block size limit at 1mb. They succeeded and now bitcoin can only process an average of 350k transactions per day.
In order to provide the same financial incentive to miners when the block reward gets too small to matter, the minimum fee on the network will need to be $25 per transaction.
But ye, horray, this whale got to send big cash for a "low fee"
johnpaulkiser
That isn't even slightly true. This debate has been settled a long long time ago.
Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes. It's obvious to anyone who works on Bitcoin that a linear increase to blocksize can never scale, while maintaining an open and decentralized environment.
dlubarov
> Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency.
Another method is to use cryptographic proofs to demonstrate the validity of a blockchain state. A lot of newer projects are taking this approach, such as the project I work on, Mir Protocol.
Granted, it doesn't seem like a realistic option for Bitcoin. The community doesn't seem very open to major protocol changes, and even if it were, cryptographic proofs for Bitcoin might be prohibitively expensive since the protocol wasn't designed with that in mind.
dylkil
>Running a full node is the only way to assure the integrity of the currency. Increasing the block size decreases the number of people that run full nodes.
where is the evidence for this? complete bullshit. How much fewer people would run a full node if the block size was increased from 1mb to 2mb?
rudolph9
You and Satoshi go way back I take it?
bravoetch
That's not the point though. You're not in control of that billion dollars, banks and governments are. The small 48 cent fee is the price for freedom. At any moment a bank can freeze your funds for any reason. The Bitcoin network does not suffer from that.
mumbisChungo
I think the crypto community has a complex about it because of how often tx fees are used as a weapon against them.
In reality, intelligent people on both sides of that dichotomy should recognize tx fees (within reason) are mostly beside the point.
centimeter
Building relationships with brokers that allow you to move billions of dollars "for free" is hard and expensive.
kchoudhu
In my experience having a billion dollars to move is pretty much all you need to generate those relationships.
Ansil849
For all of the talk about how Bitcoin is not truly anonymous, this wallet demonstrates otherwise, with the apparent 'anonymity proviso' being that you don't do too much with it, and just let the coins sit.
hlasdjlfhalwjk
Bitcoin is pseudonymous. Every member can be uniquely identified but if you are careful not to link your pseudonym (e.g. wallet address) to any personally identifiable information, nobody else can. But this is really hard when it is about money since in general you'd want to spend that money an that's where the link appears. As long as you don't spend the money, there is no information to link.
as300
There are ways around this problem. See: https://local bitcoins.com
Doesn't completely de-anonymize you but it does reduce the set of people who have uniquely identifiable information to 1
ajkdhcb2
That site requires identification. So the owner of the coins is known by everyone with the dataset (which that will be shared with chain analysis companies), as well as the website owners and the trader you trade with. Pretty big set
Darvon
Monero
matthewdgreen
We're having a discussion on HN about a specific person moving a specific amount of money around. That by itself is basically the opposite of privacy.
Jtsummers
Ansil849 already said this, but when talking about things like this there are actually multiple related, sometimes orthogonal, factors:
Anonymity - the quality of the user being unknown
Privacy - the quality of the user's actions being unobserved
Authenticity- the quality of the user's actions being certainly the user's
Bitcoin provides pseudonymous transactions, which may approach anonymity if the user is careful. It does not provide true privacy as all transactions are public. But the purpose of the transactions is not communicated, though may be inferred if the parties are identified. If I transfer $20 in BTC to a pizza joint, you can guess that I bought a pizza, but it's just a (well-founded) guess. It provides a high degree of authenticity in that it is a hard problem (in the mathematical sense, unless your keys have been obtained by an adversary) to fake a transaction.
matthewdgreen
Yes, I have a PhD in cryptography and designed two of the first privacy-preserving extensions to Bitcoin. Bitcoin provides pseudonymity. If no other information can be inferred about a transaction from other sources, users may be able to protect their privacy. In practice this is extremely challenging, and the information leakage this post is discussing is highly unnecessary, and a weakness of Bitcoin.
Ansil849
Anonymity ≠ privacy
We're having a discussion about an unknown account - which may or may not be an individual person - moving specific amounts of money around anonymously, not privately.
matthewdgreen
You're describing pseudonymity, not anonymity. We know that a specific user has moved money under a pseudonym. If they do other things with that money, we'll learn more. These are very different concepts.
Cthulhu_
We don't know the person though; we know a wallet address. Similar to a bank account number; it's just a number.
I get what you mean, the transaction is public, but that's the point of bitcoin / cryptocurrencies.
matthewdgreen
Publishing the value and timing of specific transactions isn't actually the point of Bitcoin and specific cryptocurrencies, nor is it necessary to preserve the total amount of the currency. Satoshi specifically called the privacy issues in Bitcoin out as a weakness to be improved upon, and several projects inside and outside of Bitcoin have been doing this.
minikites
I can also be anonymous if I never speak or leave my house, but that's not really how it works, is it?
Ansil849
In this case, it seems to be exactly how it works. Someone is opting to 'never speak or leave the house', and can afford to do so.
Ar-Curunir
Maybe it applies to very specific "Bitcoin as store-of-value" use cases, but it definitely doesn't apply to any use case you'd actually want for electronic cash.
Also, even the fact that we're discussing the existence of this transaction implies that Bitcoin is not anonymous.
ajkdhcb2
Exactly. A messaging app isnt private just because you never message anyone
chinesempire
No, you can't.
Your house has to be registered to someone and you have to declare who lives in it, if it's yours.
Anonymity is not about being a private person.
vageli
> Your house has to be registered to someone and you have to declare who lives in it, if it's yours.
I don't think this is true in every jurisdiction. You can certainly have a property registered under a corporate entity, and there are jurisdictions in the US that allow for anonymous corporate ownership. Further, I'm not aware of any requirement where you must declare who is residing in a property. I've had family members from abroad reside in my house for over a year without informing any authorities, for example.
proGHN2020
Professional gangsters don't register their house in their own name. They're happy with a girlfrield, or 'similar,' and just use their apartment and travel all over the world uninhinged. All cars and apartments etc are usually registered in someone else's name. Someone """"legit"""""", so to speak, apart from the affiliation.
If you have tons of illegal money it's not the worst thing to live in a ~~ 'moldy' apartment and eat SCSI every day and know that you _really_ have a __ton__ ___of___ ____money____
Learn to be a criminal, theoretically of course
lbblack
Bitcoins main feature isn't being anonymous and also the wallet is more likely an exchange wallet than some random billionaire's. There's privacy coins that heavily lean towards achieving anonymity. But I mean if I had a billion dollars and I wanted to have it in Bitcoin, there's nothing stopping me from having one hundred million Bitcoin wallets each with $10. If performed properly, I think that would sufficiently obfuscate my identity until I had to liquidate them.
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avipars
That's the whole idea behind the blockchain. Everything is recorded in ledgers
ajkdhcb2
Most of the genuine use-cases would do much better with privacy, it goes hand-in-hand with payments that traditional finance may try to censor.
Peepootoler
There is privacy-focused crypto like Monero though.
knudsen80
How many times would you double check the address before hitting send? I would think to minimize risk, would slice this up into a few transactions...
RL_Quine
I've been party to large Bitcoin transactions (100M USD or so). It had a team of people involved, each responsible for independently verifying the transaction before it was signed for correctness. It's hard to make mistakes if you have a group of engineers who are all tasked with ensuring the validity of a transaction with their own tools.
The fun bit is that the signer can backdoor transactions, and that part isn't something that can be verified by anybody who doesn't have the private keys.
Drip33
>The fun bit is that the signer can backdoor transactions, and that part isn't something that can be verified by anybody who doesn't have the private keys.
Can you explain this? This is contrary to my knowledge of reviewing the details of a pre-signed transaction.
RL_Quine
Sure. The basic idea is that signer can choose a ECDSA nonce (k) that they know, and leak the private key. If I choose a known nonce for my signature, I can recover the private key from the published transaction instantly. With some ECDSA magic, you can even produce a nonce that is only recoverable with another key that you hold. So a hardware wallet for example can backdoor transactions to leak the seed through the signature, or a specific key, or put any data there that they wish. The "offline signing" defense is only good for one way, as there's always data leaving the system which you can't easily audit.
This is only detectable if you have multiple signers signing the same transaction using the same private key and the same method for generating the nonce, and you compare them before broadcasting. So perhaps using hardware wallets from 3 manufacturers which all implement bit-identical implementations of the signer (with RFC6070 deterministic signatures), and treating the signed transaction as a private key leak until you've verified they all match.
For ECDSA a single bit bias in the nonce, or a single bit leakage of the nonce through other methods is enough to completely break the cryptography. So we could have hardware wallets that produce otherwise impeccable transactions and signatures, but leak a bit of the nonce in the ordering of the outputs, the lock time, the sequence numbers, and that would still be enough to steal all of the funds.
This stuff is trickier to get right than most people imagine.
Drip33
Probably just twice. Bitcoin addresses are check summed so it's nearly impossible to fat finger a mistake.
pjc50
And yet it happens - as does putting the value in the "fee" box!
Drip33
I've never heard of someone successfully and unintentionally fat fingering a Bitcoin address typo to a valid Bitcoin address nobody owns. Fee box is a different thing, the recent $2.5m ETH headline you saw was not an accident but an attack/blackmail. Bitcoin core itself prevents you from using too high of a fee without an express override in the config.
RL_Quine
Bitcoin Core specifically won't let you make transactions with "absurd" fee rates.
ed25519FUUU
When it comes to $1 billion, the three day waiting period of ACH doesn’t seem that bad.
RcouF1uZ4gsC
https://decrypt.co/31956/an-ethereum-user-lost-5-2-million-i...
And if you fat-fingered the transaction, you could have transferred $0.48 for $1B in fees with no way to reverse that.
gruez
1. that's ethereum, not bitcoin. bitcoin core specifically has checks to prevent transactions with unusually high transactions fees from being broadcast https://bitcoin-rpc.github.io/en/doc/0.16.0/rpc/rawtransacti... (see the allowhighfees parameter)
2. In all likelihood this is someone manually crafting a transaction. It's not going to happen to your typical user (eg. your granny). A better analogy to this situation would be someone's trading bot going awry and losing thousands/millions on the market.
ShorsHammer
There's a 1 in 4 billion chance of fat fingering it.
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/guide/checksum
The thing to be really aware about is insidious malware that detects valid bitcoin addresses being copied and modifies them in place, sometimes even to the point of including the same first/last alphanumerics to a certain degree.
You'd hopefully be using a bootable linux distro and multisig for transferring such amounts.
pjc50
Doesn't stop you from making a UI error and entering the wrong value in the wrong box.
Cthulhu_
Said UI could protect the user from it though, by not accepting a 'fee' value more than 10% over the current average (for example).
ShorsHammer
I'd suggest double checking it in such instances and not doing it drunk at 2am like a wall street trader.
tootahe45
There's probably a good chance you could reverse it if you bribed the right 'thought leaders' in the bitcoin community. The Ethereum team was considering pushing an update to reverse a much smaller amount when one of their donators lost money due to a bug, not sure if they followed through. Something similar was also seriously discussed by bitcoin devs when binance lost 40m to a hack not long ago.
sammycdubs
I don't want to sound like a narc, but it seems like a really good idea to have some degree of oversight and safeguards on financial transactions of that magnitude.
Cthulhu_
I agree, and banks + the government do just that; large transactions, or 'pattern' transactions flag up in fraud and money laundering departments and are investigated.
But, bitcoin is free of oversight or centralized control, which was the exact point of the system.
alexmingoia
I had my life savings (all funds in my bank account) frozen, without notice, without explanation, and without recourse for 3 weeks. They literally couldn’t tell me why my account was frozen besides “social security has flagged the account.” This was at one of the largest banks in US. I never committed any crime or suspected of one, or had any weird transactions. When I protested at the branch asking how I’m supposed to pay rent they said “sorry”. After almost 3 weeks they unfroze it without explanation and offered to pay the bounced check fee for my rent.
Yeah I’d rather have bitcoin. Bitcoin removes the need for banks altogether. I don’t want the banks and government in control of my money.
sukilot
I'd start with two separate accounts, less likely to be frozen simultaneously. After that, I'd try holding some cash in a safe somewhere. Or prepay rent for a free months. Or keep some money in a friend or family account. Bitcoin would be lower on my list.
enumjorge
I’d argue that with Bitcoin being volatile enough to have double percentage point swings in a single day, that you’re not in full control of your money with Bitcoin either.
centimeter
And obviously the people who invented and developed Bitcoin disagree. "Oversight and safeguards" translates in practice to "mostly ineffectual but otherwise repressive bureaucracy".
rudolph9
There is oversight, with a high degree of certainty only the holder of the corresponding private key to which funds were transferred is able to make transactions with allocated amounts.
newguy1234
The risk of doing that is if an authoritarian regime gains power then they can effectively black list you from the financial system. This is absolutely an issue in certain countries.
sukilot
That's why rich people under unfriendly governments keep capital in multiple different nations.
DenisM
I have to wonder how long until organized crime starts tracking down and shaking down large wallet holders. The profit is clearly there.
btmoney06
How much did they pay in exchange fees and "slippage" to convert that to dollars? And how long did it take to do that?
adsrginio
I find this a ridiculous thing to brag about. The only way Bitcoin will have low fees is if it fails. Since the network does not scale, if the network sees any substantial load the transaction fees will spike. We have already seen this happen back in 2017 at the peak of the bubble.
High fees are, in fact, part of the security model. The reward for "mining" a block will eventually dry up, so "miners" will be funded more and more by fees. Unless people are paying billions of dollars a year in fees, the financial incentive for "miners" will be too small to protect from bad actors.
Bitcoin can only have low fees if it both remains unpopular and dies before the block rewards dry up. Recommending Bitcoin because of its low fees is trying to sell it by predicting its failure.
pretfood
Dayum. That's about as much as I earn from my fiat in a year!
antidaily
$0.48?
tobyhinloopen
I think he made a interest joke, yeah
jessicauk
I wasn't interested in that (badum-cha!)
treebornfrog
Interesting.
tomlagier
I'm a Bitcoin skeptic, and much of my skepticism is around the practicality of use for day-to-day transactions. Seeing low fees is very encouraging to me - the last I had checked, fees were in the several to many dollars range.
Now if they can hammer out the volatility, figure out a simple UX, encourage adoption at most places of business, and increase trust in exchanges for USD conversions, I'm on board.
louwrentius
And then, what kind of important benefit does it bring us that the USD or any other currency can't give us?
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If we both join the bitcoin network, we can exchange $1B for $0.48.
If we both join set up accounts at a regular bank like RBC, we can exchange $1B for free.
The point I'm making is that fees are not bitcoin's strong point. Any financial network can undercut it. What is unique about bitcoin is that not everyone can get an account at RBC, but anyone can join the more expensive bitcoin network.