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Re:BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Sta... by lawn on Friday December 15, 2017 @05:53PM (#15935928)
> It's poor for small transactions, but works well for storing large amounts of value as it is significantly more secure in terms of PoW than anything else out there.

This is only true as long as Bitcoin is worth more. But with it becoming more unusable, while other coins are growing in popularity, this will change and Bitcoin won't have any use case left.

> The small transaction issue may be overcome by something like the Lightning Network, but in the short term, you can just use other cryptocurrencies with lower fees or other features that are important to you.

The Lightning Network has too many problems to solve Bitcoin's scaling issues by itself. Including:

1. No decentralized routing 2. Hubs need to bind up large amount of capital 3. Nodes need to constantly be online and monitor the state to prevent fraud 4. It is heavily dependent on the network effect: for it to be useful the ones you want to transact with needs to be there. Kind of a chicken and egg problem. And why use it as long as other cryptocurrencies fulfill the users need, with a better user experience than LN would provide as well. 5. Settlements do not work reliably with full blocks (or they need to pay huge premiums)

LN might have a usecase for providing microtransactions, such as paying for every X second of a video or similar, but it will not solve Bitcoin's scaling problems.

Re:BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Sta... by jncraton on Saturday December 16, 2017 @08:09AM (#15939376)
I agree with most of what you said, but I would add that part of the value of Bitcoin vs other cryptocurrencies comes from its incredibly high PoW difficulty. The Bitcoin network currently completes 14 quintillion sha256 hashes every second. A similar amount of computing power would need to be controlled by a successful attacker.

I understand that miners can choose to leave Bitcoin, and this is largely dependent on price, but historically, Bitcoin provides the most security, so it is the safest crypto for storing a large amount of value.

Re:BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Sta... by lawn on Saturday December 16, 2017 @09:13AM (#15939603)
Yes, that's exactly what I mean with it depends on the price. Historically most miners switched to Bitcoin Cash whenever it was more profitable to mine. With the new EDA the miner ratio is expected to follow the price ratio. So if Bitcoin Cash ever were to have a higher price than Bitcoin they would get the most miners. In the long run this would make Bitcoin Cash the chain with the most security.