BTC was fast and cheap when adoption was low.
These kinds of transactions aren't feasible on the Bitcoin chain since the fees are prohibitive, so all those small unspent outputs remain in the UTXO set forever and are essentially unspendable.
I'd also argue that increasing the block size scales fine as long as network speeds and storage continue to scale as they have been over the past years.
It's like every time you buy something, the change just disappears, and once a week you have to spend another $20 to sweep it up. This is not how currency is supposed to work, and it's been retconned as somehow being a good thing.
Don't hate on me for stating the obvious here. Whatever happened to the "no fees" that advocates like Marc Andreesen were promoting circa-2014?
https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/why-bitcoin-matters/
(yeah, obviously false given the transaction fees paid to miners that have since become prominent when the blocks filled up)
Also it is important to note that BTC could be like BCH at higher transaction levels if they increased the block size but that won't because of this lightning network idea. Which is what I don't get. You can increase the block size right NOW and work on the lightning network as well. Yet, they don't do that because the lightning network is everything and any other solution is not even considered.
I used to also think that bigger blocks were always bad but that is simply not true. The original block size limit was purely implemented to stop spam when bitcoin's userbase was very low. Satoshi actually wanted to implement bigger blocks as the userbase grew. Bigger blocks is the not the long-term solution but it is a solution that we have right now that works.
160,000+ bitcoin nodes are not interested in your centralization scheme, whether it is done 'steadily' or immediately.
But it could be years later; years in which other scaling solutions can be researched. If you only accept scaling solutions that can scale to infinity today, you will never accept a single one.
In fact, SegWit negatively affects decentralization because it is much harder to build and maintain your wallet because of all of the complexity of SegWit, pushing people to crowd around existing solutions.
And what happened? After they got exactly what they wanted with the doubling of capacity, they said "we want more" which demonstrated the entire exercise had nothing to do with blocksize, but about stealing the blockchain away from its users, and centralizing it in their data-centers. Which is why, months after the segwit implementation, the biggest and loudest people clamouring for a capacity increase for years, which includes bitpay, the subject of this thread, and coinbase, which has been an actively undermining the bitcoin developers for years, have not even implemented the blocksize increase. So much for blocksize being important.
All full nodes had to upgrade or risk mining invalid blocks.
http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...
I don't think you really understand the relationship between nodes and consensus.
Hmm that's not how it used to be. You must be talking about something other than Bitcoin.
I've tried to refer to them using the less loaded "BTC" and "BCH" symbols instead; but it's kindof getting tiring, hearing people insist "Bitcoin Cash is Satoshi's True Vision". It's like somebody starting a "Apple Phone LLC" and saying it's Steve Jobs' true vision, ignore that other "Apple" company.
Just because the first generation of bitcoin was the beginning doesn't mean it still reflects the original vision.
Bitcoin : Peer-to-peer cash.
You went right over the first part, and only talk about the second part, even though in the first part, the word 'peer' is used twice.
If suddenly someone spins up a million bitcoin cash nodes will you call it bitcoin? If total PoW exceeds core will you? If core finally hard forks to increase the blocksize will you stop calling it bitcoin?
But that you'd compare it to Apple, that's just weird.
There is no reason that the name of an unauthorized fork of a cryptocurrency should use the name of the original within it.
In a decentralised system based wholly around cypherpunk distrust of central authorisation, you call something unauthorised?
I'm not sure if that's hilarious or just sad.
There has to be some acknowledgement that if you take someone else's work and modify it, you shouldn't then be allowed to claim you are them.
It is by definition a decentralised, anarchic system. The idea of authorisation or ownership of the one true core is hilarious.
That's great, but it's not what I wrote. What "one true core"?
Taking someone's software, modifying it, and touting your change as the next version of their software is wrong. Regardless if the code is meant for a block chain, or anything else.
Which is true, so what's the problem?
God knows what Satoshi thinks about all the stuff going on around bitcoin...
I guess I've decided - it's just sad.
I'm sorry you don't see that.
All I can do is guess that you are talking about users not only being inundated with forks, but not even being able to tell one fork from another, or even one coin from another because they all use the same names. And this is all fine for you because of anarchy or something.
It's an abbreviation. Bitcoin Cash = Bcash/BCH. This acronym is not confusable with Bitcoin or the BTC acronym at all.
Why is this considered remotely offensive? People are incredibly reactive to this and I don't understand why. It's a pretty straightforward mechanism of acronyms that has been going on for hundreds of years.
Why is this actually considered a serious point of discussion, at all?
(and the thing is, it's not even the bcash people who are bothered by the term - it's the BTC people! it's like you got insulted when someone recognized me enough to call me PMD... which is what I suspect it comes down to.)
That's not doable today, but it is not TOO far off.
And by the time adoption catches up, maybe the technology and bandwidth costs will be capable of supporting it.
The blocksize does not need to increase forever. All it has to do is replace all of the world's financial transactions.
- the whitepaper itself solved the storage problem with old transaction pruning.
- The block propagation and validation bandwidth requirements can be brought down 90%+ by canonically ordering transactions, memoizing transaction validation, and propagating only the block header and metadata.
- the inefficiencies in the actual code are being worked out by Bitcoin unlimited's gigablock project among others.
There is a lot of technical complexity to this, and no real working proof at scale (AFAIK there is no production implementation even at a small scale).
Lightning Network at scale will involve routing problems between coinholders analogous to a mesh network (or more realistically, FidoNet/UUnet) which risks centralization since those problems are not solved at scale in any fashion except hub-and-spoke/backbone. BGP is not an acceptable solution for LN since it involves a substantial degree of trust, and manual routing devolves into centralization.
You actually have to be able to say: "See, I found a route A-D through B and C: ABCD and all nodes are sufficiently funded to execute the payment."
And that's the big unsolved issue. Can you make an algorithm that will reliably do the latter while keeping the network decentralized?
I think this is very hard, as the channel states between individual nodes will change for each payment, and that's entropy that somehow needs to be synchronized.
Of course, simple centralized solutions like making B and C big enough ("banks") to deal succesfully with almost any payment are possible.
But solving this problem is pretty damn hard, and I have yet to see a satisfying solution to this. Note that satisfying absolutely must include being decentralized.
Because else, we can as well do the simple and sane thing and scale just on-chain, which also ensures that the miners get their fair share of the pie and makes it less likely that the bottom falls out because there's lots of layers, each taking a cut, to the system.
Now, don't get me wrong: I am fine with LN and I think it might have good use in the micro/nano-payment space. Regular, simple payment channels (like BCH and BTC have since the beginning) might fully cover that use case as well. Who knows. In any case, LN as the (and the only) solution to scaling is not going to work out.
We can't don't gigabyte blocks tomorrow, but that is within shooting distance.
Bandwidth costs have gone down by 20% every year for the last 20 years. And they will continue to go down, making on chain scaling absolutely doable.
Micro transactions will never work on a blockchain. But coffee transactions are definitely within shooting distance of possible.