The lightning network could fix everything, or fail spectacularly. I think an even bigger danger than failing spectacularly is if they take too long to roll it out. Other cryptocurrencies are already gaining some favor because of the situation BTC is in now with the high transaction fees.

It has a good chance of working, in my opinion (the lightning network), if they don't dawdle too long. But the clock is ticking.

IMO Lightning network solves a non-problem. It only sets up a transactionless channel between two parties. The whole promise of Bitcoin was secure transfer to anyone. Maintaining a balance between two parties is trivial and solved thousands of years ago.

The whole reason we have currency is to allow transactions between people that don't trust each other, so I don't think Lightning network will do anything significant

This is incorrect. Lightning Network transactions are trustless just like Bitcoin [1], even over multiple hops. You set up a channel with one or a few peers and then can pay or be paid by anyone in the network [2] with no counterparty risk.

1. With the caveat that you (or a service you delegate) need to be prepared to broadcast a transaction within some time period if a peer tries to defraud you, which is unlikely since if they fail they lose their funds in the channel.

2. Assuming enough liquidity in the network

Lighting network channels don't require you to trust the other party.

Lighting network is also distributed, you don't need a direct channel between you and another party to pay them. You just have to find a route.

Most transactions fall into the first -solved- category, a minority is in the second.

> I think an even bigger danger than failing spectacularly is if they take too long to roll it out. Other cryptocurrencies are already gaining some favor because of the situation BTC is in now with the high transaction fees.

Who cares? Honestly, who cares if BTC is the one that wins? I only care about some cryptocurrency seeing mass adoption, I don't care if that's BTC or any of the other thousand coins.

Well certainly all of the HODLers care. Some of them have a lot to lose if Bitcoin fails.

I think a bigger risk than specifically Bitcoin failing is all this crypto fragmentation. If not Bitcoin, then what?

When Yahoo was replaced by Google people switched and their lives didn’t change.

If/when Bitcoin goes to zero people could lose faith in crypto completely there might never be a replacement.

The fragmentation is fine. Technology is in the works to make blockchains interoperable. Look up Polkadot.

I’m aware of some of these efforts. I’ve been following REQ.

If currencies go to zero and the masses lose their money then they could lose faith in the whole system. Interop of 100+ currencies won’t matter if all have zero value.

I’m not saying this will happen, but suggesting it’s a worst case scenario.

>Who cares? Honestly, who cares if BTC is the one that wins?

Well, everyone who is long on BTC.

They should be diversified or else they deserve the pain.

There are already new players in town. Currently Raiblocks is gaining in popularity. It offers AFAIK the fastest transactions with NO FEES. This is the future.

>It offers AFAIK the fastest transactions with NO FEES.

Is it not obvious to you that no fees is a ridiculous proposition? Free transactions mean spam and that doesn't work in a distributed ledger.

Transactions have a small amount of PoW attached to them to deter spam, and are also very small (designed to fit in a UDP packet).

I'm sorry, but what's so good about raiblocks...? Aren't they just PoS based?

Sure. You'll just have to perpetually wait 18 months for the lightning network to get completed.

'I can't do anything with Bitcoin that I can't do more easily with my credit card.'

That's false as your credit card issuer controls who you can and cannot transact with. With BTC you control whom you transact with.

In other words: Bitcoin is mostly good for illegal transactions.

No, that’s a commonly held misconception likely tied to the fact that it was being used by people in conjunction with Silk Road. The public ledger system ties history to the transactions so you can trace the flow back in time. Law enforcement officials probably love that aspect.

Good old fashioned cash is much better for criminal activity.

A crypto like Zcash (another fairly large crypto) that utilizes zk snarks to encrypt transactions and then decouple coins from their history would be much better suited for illegal transactions.

Illegal transactions? On a public ledger system?

BTC was always about reducing control from a few centralized parties. I don't want my bank or paypal account being arbitrarily frozen.

Nowadays BTC is not very good at transactions due to exorbitant fees + very slow confirmation times, but things like ethereum, bitcoin cash, and altcoins offer options. ETH is very quick.

How does ETH compare to LTC in terms of T/s?

It can be an equalizer, no doubt about that. Probably the biggest reason I hope it works its way into our culture the way credit and bank card transactions have. That and privacy, which these exchanges have none of.

Primarily, with another use being those who lack a proper banking system.

I doubt it with the insane transaction fees and confirmation delays, they're better off using Western Union on both counts at this point

I wasn't going to say it... But somebody did

Well. That's true until the government gets involved regulates it, and starts to actually monitor all transactions.

For Bitcoin like technologies completely lack privacy.

In the absence of regulatory intervention. The biggest risk for Bitcoin is for a country like the USA to outlaw it.

Bitcoin truly does suck, for reasons mentioned and the wastefulness of PoW. However, saying that "blockchain sucks" is really short sighted and screams of ideological bias. We're not in the MySpace stage yet, but more like AOL. The internet in the early 90s sucked a whole lot too but the potential was pretty obvious, just like it is with crypto. And today there's a whole lot more to blockchain than just digital cash. That's just the most obvious and, by now, one of the least interesting applications.

Sure, all of this technology is nascent and scaling issues are yet to be solved. But it's far from useless in its current form. Not every application needs 10s of thousands of txs per second, for example ICOs. I know that this is another hot-button issue, but some of us feel strongly that people should not be protected from themselves. And that's the most important thing that blockchain offers: true freedom, and that's why it's so exciting. Especially at this junction, in the wake of the internet having been co-opted by big business and big government.