BuyMeACoffee silently dropped support for many countries (2024)

Don't you pay more in transaction costs than the cost of a coffee? And then pay in environmental costs.

No, on-chain transaction fees aren't higher than the cost of a coffee. They're currently around $0.15 per transaction - cheaper than typical credit card processing fees. Plus, you could always build an off-chain transaction system with zero fees.

As for the environmental impact: individual Bitcoin transactions don’t directly increase energy usage. Miners consume electricity regardless of whether any given person transacts. And while mining is energy intensive, it doesn't have an environmental impact in itself.

I must have misremembered? Last time I looked (maybe 2 years ago) I thought actual bitcoin transactions took maybe an hour to confirm and cost a couple of dollars -- am I just short more marbles than I thought I was or has something changed with how they do transactions.

The context I was looking at related to storing data in the bitcoin ledger. I think I commented here, I'll have to look back and see.

It's a dynamic market so fees can vary depending on congestion, BTC price, etc. Expected time to first block confirmation is around 10 minutes assuming your fee is high enough to be included in the next block (when blocks are full, miners prioritize transactions with higher fee).

When you send a transaction, you get to pick what fee you'd like to use. For this kind of service, transaction speed isn't really important so you can get away with setting a low fee.

Here's a 0.15$ fee transaction that was mined just 6 minutes ago: https://mempool.space/tx/2e66ba1758e233ff1b2395c7db55f8327de...

By "off-chain", I meant something like BuyMeACoffee letting users top up a wallet via an on-chain deposit, and then handling tips internally (e.g., in a SQL database). That way, small payments don't each require a blockchain transaction.

Expected time to first block confirmation is always 10 minutes. If the last block was found 10 minutes ago, then the expected time to the next block is still 10 minutes. It is always 10 minutes until it is actually found, at which point it is still 10 minutes.

The only thing that can change value is if the global hash rate significantly changes. This is why we have the difficulty readjustment every 2016 blocks (give or take 2 weeks).