I can imagine a future where bitcoin plays a role similar to what gold does now. This would not require much scaling - it would be about few, but high value transactions. But yeah - more probably it will be replaced by something else that would have less costs (i.e. POS, https://medium.com/@zby/proof-of-work-8d8265def194 ), and/or scale. This is the gamble in cryptos investing now - it is conceivable that in the long run some crypto will be worth much - but you don't know which one. Maybe Etherium, which showed it can change rapidly, will do this, but most probably this will be something new. Maybe EOS or Tezos - but they are too much hype machines - this does not fit good development.

a lottery is an absolutely horrible metaphor abuse.

If you put $2 into buying a powerball ticket, you have a ~1:290 million chance at becoming a millionaire and a ~1:50 chance at breaking even.

If you put $2 into bitcoin at any point in history and held for 2 years, you have a 0% chance at becoming a millionaire and a 100% chance at breaking even.

If you left $2 sitting in your wallet for 2 years, you lost $0.05-0.10 depending upon who you believe

>If you put $2 into bitcoin at any point in history and held for 2 years, you have a 0% chance at becoming a millionaire and a 100% chance at breaking even.

That does not compute. What do you mean here exactly? Clearly if you invest $2 in BTC and the value of bitcoins increases 500,000% you're a millionaire. Conversely if it crashes and becomes worthless you've lost everything.

But more generally I wasn't arguing statistics, just pointing out that it's just a big gamble, like the lottery. It's extremely difficult to predict the future of bitcoin so investing in it is not entirely unlike playing the lottery.

I believe he is referring to the past. The history so far is such that there haven't been many losing 2 year stretches. So far, it also hasn't gone up 500,000% in two years either. So, not nearly as risky as a lottery, and not quite the same upside either.

The risk is yourself, not the market. Losing your coins is equivalent to the market crashing to 0. And it's shockingly easy to completely lose your coins, even if you're not incompetent.

> none of the proposed scaling methods so far come even close

you sure? what happened to the estimates related to payment channel proposals: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o...

It'll help but it's really untested and nobody knows for sure how the network will react when you change the topology and incentives like this.

In general it's a pretty complex technology that introduces a big number of new variables in the mix.

Look at the example in your paper:

>You're probably buying a coffee only once, right? Well, maybe the coffee is $5, and you put $50 into the channel and leave it open. Then someone else comes to the coffee shop and she does the same thing. But she has a channel with the grocery store. There's me, coffee shop, Alice, grocery store, they all have channels. When I go to the grocery store next time, I don't have to open a channel. Payments are routed.

[...]

>I am guessing the mean is going to be 3, but it will probably be an exponential distribution. Most people will probably have 1 channel, and then some might have 100s of channels open.

Note the use of "I am guessing". And what happens if I'm not willing to put $50 in the channel to leave it open because it's a one time thing and there's no point for me to do that? I'd say that most of ebay and other "peer to peer" purchases are like this. Would you put 10 times the amount of the transaction in a channel to some alibaba seller just for the sake of being a good bitcoin-izen?

In general I find the idea of people opening only 3 channels a year to be a tad optimistic if bitcoin is to replace Visa.

So it remains to be seen how well it'll work in practice. Maybe it'll work great, but maybe it'll be a huge mess. At any rate I wouldn't say that bitcoin scaling is a solved problem.