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0 pointsolegkikin9y ago0 comments

That "cost per transaction" chart is misleading. It includes the 25BTC per (roughly) 10 minutes that gets created and is given to the miners.

The actual transaction costs are way under a dollar, and it is, by far, the cheapest way to move the money, it's cheaper than the European SEPA, which is normally 0.9 EUR.

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6 comments · 5 top-level

joosters9y ago· 1 in thread

If you don't include the 25BTC in the costs, you're pretending that the electric costs of running all the bitcoin miners to 'secure' the chain don't exist.

Bitcoin is a very expensive and inefficient way of transacting.

olegkikinOP9y ago

Yeah, but the miners pay for it, not the users of the network. Thus, it is not a transaction cost, but yeah, it is the cost of running the network. You're confusing the two.

davidgerard9y ago

The cost per transaction is incredibly cheap, if you don't include the cost!

The 12.5 BTC per block is given to the miners as incentive to keep mining and verifying the transactions. Also, the cost of mining rapidly converges on 1 BTC per 1 BTC mined (both theoretically and in practice). Thus, that is actually the cost for the bitcoin system to process transactions.

(Ignoring for the moment the BIP66 incident and the discovery that many miners were literally not bothering to actually verify the previous block, in order to save a few seconds per block.)

Just for the record, transfers within the SEPA zone cost me nothing in fees with either of my two banks.

Where does that 0.9 euro number come from? I have never seen any charges associated with SEPA transfers.

bestnameever9y ago

There are likely to be fees to convert cash into bitcoin and vice versa.

I've found that this would up the cost quite a bit but it's possible there are cheaper ways of doing it that I'm not yet aware of.

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