Vitalik Buterin on Digital Gold and p2p Funds for Payments

By Marko Vidrih on The Capital

Marko Vidrih
The Dark Side
Published in
2 min readApr 2, 2020

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On April 1, Blockstream Bitcoin developer Zack Voell and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin entered into a discussion about Bitcoin:

Buterin also confirmed his opinion by referring to the whitepaper of Bitcoin, written by Satoshi Nakamoto, which states that bitcoin is a p2p cash for direct online payments, which also allows you to bypass financial institutions.

Why are digital gold discussions important?

Gold can be considered as a means of mutual settlement of transactions due to the fact that it is scarce. But at the same time, it is more difficult to transfer and share, as well as to use it for micropayments, unless giant banking networks or special payment servers do this. This is a scenario in which high transaction fees inevitably arise.

At the same time, p2p cash is exactly what comes to the aid in bilateral transactions and excludes intermediaries between the parties.

Commissions in Bitcoin and other networks

Today, bitcoin transaction fees have again become the highest in the crypto industry. On March 1, the average transaction fee was $0.40. On March 20, the average commission increased to $1.76 (data from Bitinfocharts).

Over the past 24 hours, the average commission for bitcoin transactions turned out to be 617% — 645% higher than in other cryptocurrencies (than in ethereum and XRP, respectively).

Bitcoin proponents understand that such commissions are necessary to maintain miners that ensure network security in both small and large transactions.

Buterin said on this subject:

Author: Marko Vidrih

Featured image credit: U.Today

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Marko Vidrih
The Dark Side

Most writers waste tremendous words to say nothing. I’m not one of them.