{"id":8880,"date":"2017-08-23T08:45:07","date_gmt":"2017-08-23T16:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/08\/23\/news-2653\/"},"modified":"2017-08-23T08:45:07","modified_gmt":"2017-08-23T16:45:07","slug":"news-2653","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/08\/23\/news-2653\/","title":{"rendered":"Here\u2019s Why People Don\u2019t Buy Things With Bitcoin"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Jordan Pearson| Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:37:40 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

You may have heard that bitcoin is a digital currency worth more than $4,000 USD. What you may not have heard is that it’s basically impossible to buy anything normal<\/i> with it.<\/p>\n

One reason for this, if you live in Toronto<\/a> like me (or anywhere else<\/a> for that matter), is that there’s basically nowhere to spend digital coins in the real world. Coinmap<\/a>, a service that maps bitcoin-accepting locations all over the world, shows a few places that accept bitcoin in Toronto, but it’s clearly out of date\u2014I called several businesses listed on the site and they had no idea what bitcoin even is.<\/p>\n

A bigger problem is perfectly illustrated in a Reddit post from Wednesday morning<\/a> complaining that a bitcoin transaction<\/a> worth just $9 still hasn’t gone through the network after two days of waiting. Two. Days.<\/i> The likely reason is that the fee attached to the transaction in order to incentivize faster confirmation\u201450 cents, which is about as much of a premium as I’d pay for a $9 transaction\u2014simply wasn’t enough. “Should I have paid $3 on a $9 transfer to get it processed?” the poster, who goes by “vt_dev” on Reddit, wrote. “That’s fucking broken and if you think that’s ok you’re a fucking moron.”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/picture>\n
Screenshot of the transaction. Screengrab: Blockchain.info<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

What this means is that during a traffic spike in the bitcoin network,<\/a> if you want to pay $3 for a coffee with bitcoin, you might have to pay an extra $3 or more just to get your transaction confirmed in a timely manner. The restaurant (or bar, or shop) could let you go before the transaction is confirmed, but then they take on the risk of selling their goods for IOUs<\/a>. <\/p>\n

This state of affairs has been a looming problem for a while: We wrote about the dying dream of buying coffee with bitcoin<\/a> last year. Arguments over how to fix this have torn the community apart, and splinter groups are coming up with their own solutions. <\/p>\n

On the original bitcoin, a measure to speed up the network called Segregated Witness is set to kick in<\/a> in the next day or so. If that doesn’t work, there’s also a planned hard fork in November<\/a> that will implement Segregated Witness and double the size of transaction data blocks. On top of that, another currency called bitcoin cash already split off from bitcoin<\/a> and increased the size of blocks eightfold. <\/p>\n

Whatever bitcoin is at the moment<\/a>, it’s not a way to pay for things. <\/p>\n

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day <\/i><\/b> by signing up for our newsletter.<\/a><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

Credit to Author: Jordan Pearson| Date: Wed, 23 Aug 2017 16:37:40 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thankfully, a potential fix is about to kick in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10643,13328,10378],"tags":[11526,11052,13984,32,1571,1705,13983,13986,13985],"class_list":["post-8880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-motherboard","category-security","tag-blockchain","tag-cryptocurrency","tag-mempool","tag-news","tag-reddit","tag-tech","tag-transactions","tag-unconfirmed","tag-usability"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8880\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}