[Cryptography] What has Bitcoin achieved?

[ianG]

On 20/06/2014 06:37 am, James A. Donald wrote:
> On 2014-06-06 21:19, ianG wrote:
>> Bitcoin payments are hugely expensive, it's just that the payer doesn't
>> pay that price.  Instead, it's spread across the buyer's fee and an
>> inflation tax.  If the system were static, the fees would amount to
>> maybe $30-60, about the same as banks internationally.  Part of the
>> problem is that the mining rewards are incentivised upwards, a race to
>> the most expensive.  When the mining rewards stop there will be
>> interesting times/effects, because all that hardware has to be paid for
>> somehow.
> 
> That seems plausible to me, but I would like to see the basis for that
> estimate.


Take a block.  Calculate the amount of money spent on the mining of that
block, which you can use 25BTC as a proxy for.  Divide that by the
number of transactions in the block.

The result varies.  When BTC was in the 1000 range, it was up to 60 per
transaction.  These days it seemed to be around 30.

Shortly after Ken posted the paper showing this, blockchain.info stopped
showing some of the info, ... oh, but it's back now:

  http://blockchain.info/stats

Cost per Transaction:  $41.68. And a graph:

  http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction

:)

iang