Early Bitcoin investor and Bitcoin Cash proponent Roger Ver has apparently lost a USD 10,000 bet to crypto influencer Tone Vays, after a Bitcoin transaction Vays made was confirmed for a mining fee of USD 0.01.
During a live debate at the Malta AI and Blockchain Summit 2019 yesterday evening, where Vays and Ver were slugging it out about Bitcoin and its forked version, Bitcoin Cash, Ver had claimed that average Bitcoin fees had cost USD 3.
Prior to the bet, Vers had claimed that Bitcoin no longer worked as digital money (Youtube, 6:35):
“We gave 5 dollars to every single person that was in the room yesterday worth of Bitcoin Cash and that was only possible because the fees were low. If we tried to do that exact same thing with the BTC version of Bitcoin today, it would be impossible because to move the 5 dollars… it would cost 3 dollars…”
Vays vehemently denied this, whereupon he was offered USD 10,000 by Ver if the former’s 0.05 Bitcoin transaction could clear in 24 hours with a 1 satoshi per byte fee. The transaction eventually cost 167 satoshis in fees and was confirmed after 10 hours.
It does not seem clear right now if the bet will actually be settled, as the social media chatter and Tweetstorm surrounding the bet suggests foul play and trickery, as is typical when netizens in the crypto space take to the digital arena to rant and argue.
For example, the first commenter to Vays’ Tweet pointed out that Ver had said “today” and not 24 hours, while others on the r/btc subreddit claim that Vays could have paid a transaction accelerator to get the transaction confirmed. Bitcoin.org owner CobraBitcoin himself saw too much of a coincidence in the miner responsible for the confirmation.
Convenient the block that included that transaction was mined by slush? I would expect the folks behind that pool to never pass up the chance to make Roger look bad… ?
— Cøbra (@CobraBitcoin) May 25, 2019
Whatever the outcome, the argument of raising fees on the Bitcoin network is losing its credibility by the day, as average Bitcoin fees have been dropping since 2017, as the network becomes more efficient with upgrades like SegWit and second-layer implementations like Lightning Network improving Bitcoin’s scalability.
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