We already know at least 2 obvious ways to improve the transaction flow rate of bitcoin in trustless ways, and many others are being proposed that do not also create energy arms races.
Please don't redefine success.
If we can improve the transaction rate without risk, then let’s do it. It just gets tiring seeing post after post suggesting it’s a valueless failure if it can’t be used for coffee. Let’s just keep it in perspective. It doesn’t need to supplant Visa to be successful.
In other words, "financial institutions" have no need for the blockchain.
Want proof? You think the NASDAQ uses anything more than a (fancy, probably very high priced, extremely robust) database to store its stuff? They deal with all kinds of people who are actively trying to fuck them over every day and every second. They have no need for the blockchain. Neither does any other "financial institution".
Why would you want Bank 2.0?
Bitcoin is more scarce and therefore better store of value than any fiat currency could ever be.
Do you not understand second layer solutions do not put your Bitcoin at risk? You commit to a payment channel which defaults to closing the channel according to original amounts when opened.. if the other party doesn't follow through. Again, your funds are not at risk so it's not like a bank, and there's no fractional reserve nor devaluing, so the SOV use case is preserved.
Not at all like current fiat money system.
The vision was, you can have transactions of any value with very minimal fees. like less than 10 cents. People would have micro transactions for all sorts of things.
But what it has now become is a place to store your money. 10X growth in one year. And you can't trust your exchange to still be there when everyone tries to convert that 10X back to cash if the price were to take a dip.
I would love to see online marketplaces taking a flat fee in cents because they can bypass dumb credit card percentage based fees and can still be profitable because they are doing it at scale processing thousands of transactions a second on a digital currency
There is also FLP impossibility, which reduces to the halting problem in an asynchronous distributed system setting.
By this logic, Bitcoin can never “scale”.
Arbitrarily increasing blocksize without addressing propagation delay and centralization impacts is also irresponsible.
Bitcoin has been tirelessly working on the scaling problem in a responsible way. SegWit will allow up to 12t/s. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr Signatures will further compress transaction size and increase t/s to roughly 20t/s. All this without increasing propagation delay (increasing blocksize).
Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary.
Rootstock adds ethereum compatible smart contracts to bitcoin as a side chain.
All these technologies responsibly scale Bitcoin. Your comment implies Bitcoin is stagnant which to me implies you don't know what you're talking about.
Every attempt to date to improve transaction rates on BTC have been hampered by a small group of developers who have a vested interest in it not scaling for reasons explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...
Bitcoin won't get any of the improvements you hope it will because there is too much money vested in keeping it exactly how it is today.
If the vast majority of users and services decided to switch to PoS tomorrow there’s absolutely nothing miners could do about it.
That said, I’m not saying it would be easy to get consensus for such a major change. Futures markets might be useful for determining how much support for a change there is.
I understand big blockers are upset they didn’t get their way. They need to understand the reason big blocks don’t have consensus is that they increase propagation delays and propagation delays leads to centralization. Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues.
Also, miners don’t determine consensus rules. If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme. The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet.
> Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues.
Their strategy of stalling for the last couple of years is the least intelligent approach they could have taken.
> Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues.
Yes they do, that's the point of Bitcoin.
> If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme
You mean if PoS works they can fork and use their altcoin.
> The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet.
The fact that you don't understand this leads me to believe you're either a Core shill or you have been seduced by their pretty words. The whitepaper makes all this clear.
http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23...
The above directly demonstrates how block size results in significant propagation delay.
I ask you again: can you show me the research which demonstrates increasing blocksize won’t result in significant propagation delay?
As I already wrote what matters is propagation between miners which is already very fast, even according your own link, which examins propagation throughout the network as a whole not between miners specifically.
If that’s your idea of research, best of luck to bcash.
triggered
If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming “bank coin” aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you’re a speculator).
This has to change
No need to attack Bitcoin, just go all in on Bitcoin Cash , put your money where your mouth is, and move on.
Big blockers have their Jihan and Roger coin now. Stop trying to steal the bitcoin brand. If there was consensus for big blocks then Bitcoin would have activated. Jihan and Roger couldn’t convince the educated people that their proposals would work. Now they’re throwing a tantrum.
Segwit (besides being a crappy implementation) is by far not enough scaling.
That you blame Jihan and Roger is typical stupid propaganda which doesn't belong here.
Each additional kb results in an additional 80ms of delay until the majority learns about a block. Increasing to 8mb means you’re adding a 9min delay in propagation. That is pretty much guaranteed centralization.
Perhaps you have some research you can point me to that demonstrates otherwise?
How you can conclude a 9min propagation delay for 8MB blocks is beyond me as miners are basically directly connected to each other. This is the only thing that matters decentralization wise.
Bitcoin Unlimited are successfully testing 1GB blocks: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock...
I wonder if it could be measured the _other_ way around - i.e. are the sustained tiny blocks on BCH _increasing_ decentralisation compared to BTC right now? I can't find any good information on block propagation time though :(
Only made by the incompetent/corrupt developers. Regular users just don't want to pay outrageous fees.
Looking at my transaction history, of my last 10 transactions, all had fees in excess of $1, one as high as $14.
I'm not losing any sleep over it, but I'm also not going to call the fees reasonable.
Without micro payments it's stuck in a niche paying ransoms and doing drug deals
I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize.
One side effect of this whole deal is it shows that it is incredibly hard, if not possible, to change a decentralized system. By its very design, it will be all but impossible to make any breaking changes to bitcoin at this point.
> Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary.
Besides being complete vaporware, I do love how the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problems is to not use it...
With regards to blocksize, the only reason it’s not widely embraced is because it’s known to directly impact propagation delay. One side couldn’t care less about centralization, the other side cares dearly. SegWit was activated, which compresses transaction size and doubles transactions per second without impacting propagation delay. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr signatures are coming soon, which are also soft forks and compress transaction size even further. There’s plenty of change happening that are all very intelligent scaling solutions. Big blocks are not intelligent nor difficult to implement.
source? afaik it's open source and it charges no fees.
Congratulations guys, you made the banks SWIFT 2.0. I’m sure they appreciate it very much.
There have even been successful atomic Bitcoin<->Litecoin cross-chain transactions with Lightning last month.
It doesn't matter - it can fork. And if the fork offers something compelling, it will get used. Even Bitcoin Cash, which is not (very) compelling, is now tradable more than most altcoins.
If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world.
(Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)
That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun.
So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?
That shouldn't diminish all the other things that BTC does successfully.
b) Precious metals are too reliant on physical security. Someone can break into your house much easier than into i.e. your hardware wallet.
c) Besides these, precious metals are not a payment system, much less a programmable one. You can't code for example a logic that requires multiple untrusted parties to sign a transaction for it to complete.
Also, Bitcoin settles transactions in 30 days, merchants get their funds in 30 days if they are lucky to not have the charge back.
Apples and oranges.
That is one reason why I prefer centralised to decentralised. I have yet to see a justification for the cost of decentralisation. This cost is an important thing, not a trivial thing.
Other reasons include but are not limited to the governance mechanism of things like bitcoin not being demonstrably better than the governance systems of any other currency, but that’s a much longer topic of discussion.
We had a gentleman visit our booth from one of the big 4 airlines. He asked us what we were going to do to get to 1800 t/s, because that was the load requirement for the reservation system he and his division were tasked with creating, deploying and maintaining.
I’m fairly certain a currency system needs to scale beyond what a single airline needs in terms of transactions per second.
Tl,dr: each additional kB in blocksize adds approximately 80ms of delay until the majority learns about a block.
Tl,dr: each additional kB after 1mb adds an additional 80ms in propagation delay. It’s not just bandwidth that’s the problem. Nodes need to validate the block, then communicate that block to other nodes who also need to validate. Big blockers are drinking Roger Ver koolaid. The man doesn’t even know how to program, yet has convinced an army of redditors he knows best.
why does increasing propagation delay lead to centralization?
Mining a block is suppose to be a lottery, not a race.
I've learned a lot, btw... so thanks for that too.
Seriously. And I'm not trying to be cheeky. If Bitcoin ends up only being a settlement layer, it'll still be a colossal success just being a decentralized, supply-limited, uncensorable, world-accessible payment system and store of value.
If someone else solves the scaling debacle better, I'll be the first to recommend that normal people switch to it. But it's not easy, and the world is watching Bitcoin. Governments are starting to accept its existence, big financial institutions are starting (just this month) to allow options trading, etc. That stuff is far more important even for other cryptocurrencies than low fees.
After six months of no issues with Bitcoin options trading, it's only a matter of time before other cryptocurrencies get the same treatment. That's why we need Bitcoin to be rock steady and predictable, while others can try to solve these tough problems.
“even if it's only ever used for politically sensitive transactions, and it never takes off as a consumer payment service, it will be a very big economy” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5526684#5526972
The goalposts for Bitcoin have always just been “can it sustain its market cap?”
Anyone who was hoping for it to replace credit cards didn't understand the system. Lots of other folks have known the limitations of Bitcoin for years and what we're seeing today was totally predictable.
I started using Bitcoin Cash instead and I'm loving it. All the good parts about Bitcoin Core w/o the brain dead approach to scaling.
Bcash is an appropriate name for the altcoin to eliminate confusion.
Note that there is no CEO and the very same people who refer to Bitcoin Cash as Bcash refer to Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin Gold and others by their proper name...
https://fork.lol/blocks/height
As it says, "Block height. BCH is currently ahead by 9272 blocks." with the block height of both being about 500k.
In fact, with the rate that BTC gains hashing power, and its comparatively less responsive difficulty adjustment algorithm, it is expected to overtake BCH's block height in the next couple of years.
Using your analogy Bitcoin Core is saying they are going to shut down Bitcoin service to all new users until they implement a new algorithm that hasn't been proven yet and is still years away from being ready.
In Bitcoin’s case, I don’t think we have a lack of CPUs though.
So, what happens when all the bitcoin are generated and mining is complete?
Peer to peer cash.
Not "Gold", not "asset", but "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash".
And obviously it doesn't matter if the law is wrong, it's still the law. But in this instance, why do you believe it to be wrong?
It's certainly not as ridiculous an option as it was back before the difficulty adjustment fix when its supporters were promoting it as the fast option despite it usually taking days for transactions to confirm (supporters responding that block times were as low as a minute sometimes, and they were right... except it was a entirely bimodal distribution, with most of the time spent in the "hours per block" part).
However, the increased transaction capacity people are promoting is still about 100x its current transaction rate, and it's entirely unclear how well it'd handle scaling up by that much in practice. Especially since I'm pretty sure it lacks some of the scaling work that the original Bitcoin has. Also, the rampant dishonesty and all the attempts by sites and services owned by a guy with a major investment in it to trick people into thinking it is Bitcoin don't inspire confidence.
https://www.investopedia.com/tech/bitcoin-vs-bitcoin-cash-wh...
Wikipedia
The pro-BTC arguments are becoming absolutely inane
Wikipedia
Let's not get started on verification of the asset!
It literally stopped accepting transactions.
After 72 hours your transaction is dropped.
Without further notice. Until then you must guess if it was processed or not.
Use https://estimatefee.com/. Not paying enough to win the fee auction is not the same as no transactions getting through at all. You seem a bit misinformed to be using the "Dude" prologue.
You’re arguing “nobody died in the titanic that didn’t pay enough”, when the problem is clearly there aren’t enough lifeboats.
Bitcoin Cash fixes Bitcoin by providing a capacity market, where transactions can cost whatever nodes / miners can compete at.
20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers.
Is the limit too strict? Probably. Miners still get a lot from mining rewards and don't need to be incentivised with fees yet, but there must be some limit that will force people pay for transactions because when mining rewards end there will be nothing to keep miners mining.
The real difference is that visa has percentage fees on volume and bitcoin has fees dependent on number of transactions want to do at the moment. It's sensible since to avoid trusting single party bitcoin nodes all keep all thansactions that ever happened. Incentivising people to limit their number is a good thing for bitcoin network.
But thanks to that bitcoin won't ever be Visa 2.0
For me bitcoin for payments should work similarily to how prepaid phones work. You land in another country, you buy a card from local provider, you charge it with bitcoins and you usr it to shop.
I think bitpay is already doing something like that.
In my country (the Philippines) everyone is buying from high school kids to office workers.
The current minimum transaction fee is around $40. To exchange your bitcoin to Philippine Peso (PHP), the fixed conversion fee is 5%. If those don't seem a lot, get this: 83% of Filipinos earn below $400 a month. Most of whom I know are HODLing their bitcoin because it's too expensive to move their money. They would rather wait for their investment to reap huge gains before they cash out.
Bitcoin here is branded as a "get rich quick" investment scheme, and that's understandable, bitcoin doesn't have a valuable use case here. You can't buy anything here with bitcoin.
There are hard physical transaction limits which cannot be surpassed without seriously compromising decentralization... To the point that what would be left of the network would essentially no longer be 'Bitcoin'. Any attempt to abstract away from the blockchain through some kind of batching or delayed settlement would completely undermine the trustless nature of Bitcoin... What would be left would be no better than the current banking system.
The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that you can have your own wallet from which you can spend without going through any intermediaries... All potential Bitcoin scalability solutions that I've heard of rely on exchanges being given more power/trust in order to abstract away from the Blockchain.
You're suggesting Bitcoin just proved it can't scale, but it actually just proved it did--just not with transaction volume. The network continued to process transactions averaging one block every ten minutes exactly as it was built to do, despite the heavy load.
To put it differently: A different online payment system could have stopped accepting transactions, or run out of resources, allow transactions it shouldn't have, disallow ones it should, or something else terrible. But Bitcoin didn't. If you wanted into the next block, you'd need to pay more, but that's (from a technical perspective) entirely by design.
What Bitcoin is proving is that it has clear and well-understood limits and continues to work well within them, and that's incredibly important for public perception. IMO, if Bitcoin's transaction capacity never scales, it'll still be a huge technological success. Other cryptocurrencies can try their hand at scaling, but Bitcoin needs to be rock solid to the extent possible for all cryptocurrencies' sake.