It "already" went mainstream in 2012-2013. This is a second speculation bubble. It tells you to get out before it comes crashing down, because it will.

Or to get ready to buy when it does. :)

Yes, this reflects my position: I'm out of all cryptocurrencies except for a small bit to fuel a couple side projects. I'm waiting for the coming crash so I can buy.

Everyone says that but when the crash actually happens they always get cold feet because the prevailing view is that Bitcoin is dead and done and never going to recover so they lose their nerve and don't follow through. But best of luck.

No, I don't think you understand the scale we are talking about here if this becomes a world wide common digital currency. Your political dogma is getting in the way of you understanding what Bitcoin's real potential is.

Bitcoin will never become the "world wide common digital currency": it's deflationary in the long term, very volatile int he short term, and transactions are expensive and slow. Maybe some other cryptocurrency could, but not bitcoin.

It could stay as a store of value though, like gold.

"it's deflationary in the long term"

Whether or not you think that matters is political dogma.

"very volatile int he short term"

Looking at the one year time scale BTC/USD is only about 2-3x as volatile as USD/EUR. Bitcoin volatility in general has been trending DOWN since it's inception as you would expect something to become more stable as the market matures and more people adopt it.

https://www.investing.com/tools/forex-volatility-calculator https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/volatility-index/

"transactions are expensive and slow"

By what standard? A typical transaction costs less than a dollar and takes about 10 minutes. Once the people holding the block size hostage are out of the way you can expect the cost to return to cents and the speed to be more reliable at 10 minutes or less.

Anyone who thinks Bitcoin can be a store of value like Gold w/o having utility as money is fooling themselves. You need to both.

> Looking at the one year time scale BTC/USD is only about 2-3x as volatile as USD/EUR

Are you kidding? BTC/USD easily has 10%+ swings in a day, and 300% in a year.

Lightning Network and thus cheap off-chain (but provably secure) transactions are probably "only" a couple of years away at this point.

But it may probably not be a solution or take a couple of decades, like the scalability of Elon Musk's projects.

I don't understand why you think Lightning Network wouldn't be a solution - the crypto side of it is very well-specced and works, and there's plenty of research papers describing various methods of finding a reasonably short path across routes between nodes. It solves specific problems Bitcoin users have today (it provides fast, cheap transactions, which Bitcoin currently doesn't), so it will gain quick adoption.

It's primarily held up on Bitcoin's variant on party politics, more than anything else - there's functional payment channel code working on Litecoin's main network and Bitcoin's testnet.

Because all this digital coin thing is bullshit. When it becomes relevant, it will be corporate owned (isn't it already?) and it will be the new mainstream politics/economics, not the "REVOLUTION!". Just like Facebook/Google are the internet nowadays. Very far from that liberate and revolutionary thing, right?

It isn't very revolutionary - it's a capitalist system through and through. That has absolutely nothing to do with the technical details of why Lightning Network won't work.

I never said "lightning network" won't work. I said that it doesn't matter. If bitcoin someday becomes a thing, it will just behave like dollar, nothing less. With more technology, someone or some corporation will find a way to concentrate more power. Then someone will come up with an idea of a new way to do transactions. Algorithms don't fix social issues. People fix social issues.

In response to my message saying that Lightning Network is only a year or so away, you said:

> But it may probably not be a solution or take a couple of decades, like the scalability of Elon Musk's projects.

But OK, if you meant something other than what you actually said, fine.

> Bitcoin will never become the "world wide common digital currency": it's deflationary in the long term, very volatile int he short term, and transactions are expensive and slow. Maybe some other cryptocurrency could, but not bitcoin.

You said that Lightning network would drop transaction costs thus making bitcoin workable. I said it would do nothing because the problem is not technical but social. But I don't mind if you understood a different thing.

Bitcoin could be workable, and be a world wide common digital currency, without starting a revolution, you realise. A dollar that I can send to people without a bank being involved is still a useful concept.

I agree with you. I just don't think the banks and their private governmental armies will allow it to happen freely. And yes they can stop it. They probably are behing its creation, not a fake japanese alter-ego.

For starters the people pushing lightning are religiously opposing any increase in the block size. For lightening to even be viable on a world wide scale the block size will need to be increased.

The point of Lightning is that transactions don't go on the blockchain until they need to be settled - payment channels could be open for months or years without being settled if there's no need to access the underlying currency. If everyone uses Lightning Network for the vast, vast majority of transactions (and there's no reason not to), the only times most people would ever have to put something on the blockchain is when the entity on the other end of their payment channel disappears, or they have more currency than they've ever had before.

The issue, if anything, is exactly the opposite - that there'll be little incentive to mine without enough transactions on the chain, and the security of the network will come crashing down.

Lightning Network also provides for decentralised, trustless currency exchanges - so the inflexibility of one blockchain will finally not matter much. You could pay someone in bitcoin and the other person could receive litecoin as easily as you can do similar things with a credit card today.

You haven't addressed my comment you are just blabbering. In order to open and close lightening channels on chain transactions are required. Heck in order to protect yourself from fraud in the lightening model you need to be able to do on chain transactions.

Nothing you said addresses the concern that the people pushing lightening network the hardest are religiously opposed to raising the block size which will make it impossible to deploy lightening on a world wide scale because there won't be enough on chain transaction space to open up these lightening channels.

I'd have to have opened a grand total of one channel over the past four years, personally - I have a suspicion that most people do not regularly gain more income than they've ever had before, as they spend it at a broadly similar rate as they gain it.

In addition to this, as I said, the fact that Lightning Network is a protocol that allows cross-blockchain transactions between any two chains supporting Lightning Network means that if, as you say, Bitcoin has severe problems, everyone will just jump ship to another currency, as there will be far fewer switching costs.

Lightning network design is akin to tacking a vacuum tube communication system onto the outside of a defunct slow steam locomotive rail system.

It's nonsensical, because you might as well just design an entirely new protocol and token network (which is essnetialy what the lightning network is, and there's no reason to tie it to an existing cryptocoin ledger unless you're trying to improve the antiquated design which coincidently you have coin units in).

The issue is that Lightning Network depends on the ability to settle transactions in a double-spend-resistant cryptocurrency in order to work at all - the fraud resistance scheme depends on it, otherwise there is no way to prove that (a) money hasn't been created out of thin air and (b) two parties with a payment channel between them agree on the state of their money.

If you can successfully build a Lightning Network like system without a blockchain, please do.

Not in the short term, bud. I have always said about the real value of Bitcoin since I started mining in 2010: "What really is the value of money laundering, tax-less transactions and a quasi-anonymous store of value?" Bitcoin made the down payment on the car I drive every day. I know what Bitcoin is worth, but I'm telling you, we're in another speculation bubble in the short term, and it would be wise to gtfo of your position.