I wholeheartedly agree with this. Let's look at some Reddit /r/bitcoin posts in January 2014:
https://redditsearch.io/?term=&dataviz=false&aggs=false&subr...
People were discussing bitcoin being used as a digital currency. There was talk of bitcoin being accepted on Overstock.com, TigerDirect, and using bitcoin apps on phones as a digital wallet. I would argue the majority of people in the bitcoin community at the time were genuinely interested in the technology and its use as an everyday currency.
Now let's look at some Reddit /r/bitcoin posts in January 2020. I picked this date because there weren't any recent significant price fluctuations.
https://redditsearch.io/?term=&dataviz=false&aggs=false&subr...
There was practically zero discussion on using bitcoin as a currency. People were only interested in the price and treated it as a commodity, just like a digital gold.
> EDIT: downvote me if you want but you are flat wrong
Do people treat bitcoin as a currency or a commodity today?
I don't think we need to get into whether or not gold is a currency or a commodity but you are fooling yourself if you think that the price of gold is driven by jewelers and PCB fabs.
Long term the price is driven by the mining cost.
Bitcoin lightning could change this, instant transactions with almost no fees, but it's still in early days.
Reading about the Lightning Network gives me a headache in general, but Phoenix manages to hide all the tech stuff. I think my old parents would be able to use it.
And it solves one LN problem of having to have bitcoin for opening a payment channel, you can simply install the wallet and start receiving bitcoin.
This is a very amateurish attempt at analyzing what "Bitcoin community" (which you haven't even really defined properly either) are thinking or are interested in. Bitcoin reddit is a bunch of kids who like memes and hating on the FED. I know a lot of serious investors who would never be seen posting or commenting there. It is just not a place for a lot of people.
All the original Bitcoin adopters from the beginning moved discussion there.
It was expected (again, as stated in the whitepaper) that truncating transactions (in order to shrink blocks that are "old enough") would be able to manage block size well enough to stay reasonable.
In my experience (circa ~2011,) this expectation seemed to be generally accepted without much question by anyone talking about bitcoin. If it was acknowledged as a flaw it was usually hand-waved as only likely to be a problem 10+ in the the future.
edit: Or that a new network would learn from the bitcoin experiment and implement a protocol that works better at large scale.
It's also more secure than Bitcoin due to a higher decentralization coefficient.
In the original bitcoin software a node would receive every transaction made while it was online twice: once when the transaction was first relayed, once when it was placed into blocks. This was obviously wasteful, so we created and deployed a reconciliation scheme that exploits the fact that normally all, or almost all the included transactions are already known. https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawi...
But because Bitcoin developers are not dishonest scammers they didn't run around putting out (no kidding) press releases claiming "98.6% compression"-- though that's what you get if you compare the size of the BIP152 message to the size of the block. In reality, since it depends on the transaction being known in advance the unachievable limit for this class of approaches is a 50% bandwidth reduction for a node compared to the original behaviour. BIP152 achieves 49.3% out of that 50%, as measured on the latest block.
Even before compact blocks was created back in December 2015, we knew even smaller could be achieved. E.g. we published a scheme that requires asymptotically 0 bytes per transaction, only requiring data proportional to size of the difference between the block and the recipients guess at the next block. But what we found is that the simpler scheme actually propagated blocks much faster because once the block is down to just a few thousand bytes other factors (like CPU time) dominate. Expending a lot of additional code and cpu time to take 49.3% closer to 50% isn't a win in actual usage.
[And for considerations other than block propagation, saving a few extra bytes per block is extremely irrelevant.]
It's also the case that some of these dishonestly hyped supposed improvements beyond what Bitcoin has done for years are actually totally brain-damaged and wouldn't work in practice because they're not robust against attack-- but there isn't much reason to dive into technical minutia because what they _claim to achieve_, once you strip off the dishonest marketing, isn't all that interesting.
Thanks for this.
The only explanation I can think of is that they are relying on a sidechannel to communicate the actual transactions, which makes sense in the miner case (the utxo pool) but not in the general node case.
Beyond that, I run a BTC node occasionally and the bottleneck is validating blocks, not downloading them. Transactions are complicated enough right now that I'm only able to catch up at about 350x real-time (that is, it takes around a full cpu-day to validate a year of blocks/transactions).
Can you provide links to these discussions? I searched around on google and all the results are relating to bitcoin cash. I also searched the usual places that bitcoin (non cash) people congregate and turned up nothing.
Stop with the storage space nonsense. The only people even storing the entire chain are enthusiasts, servers and miners. Saying "what if it gets a thousand times as many transactions" is ridiculous, but it still wouldn't be a problem. A few gigabytes a day? A $300 dollar hard drive would still take a decade to fill up. I think the few that sync the entire chain handle that.
Aside from that, people figured Moore's Law would continue at its historical pace, and Bitcoin could grow indefinitely at the same pace.
In fact the whitepaper even opens with describing Bitcoin's usage for commerce. The very first paragraph in the introduction!
The narrative has indeed changed to "digital gold" after it's made abundantly clear that Bitcoin is no longer suitable for commerce.
The emission of new bit coins following the "mining" of new blocks is like the minting of new gold coins following the mining of raw gold.
Because bitcoins are like gold coins.
I agree that neither gold nor bitcoin are suitable for commerce. But the narrative around and apparent intent behind bitcoin from in the beginning was "It is digital currency. It works like gold".
In the olden days, gold was actually a currency. The supply of coins you could produce was limited by the precious metals you had. The amount of paper money you could issue was limited by the amount of gold bars you had. In this system, gold is still acting like a currency; but a currency with very real limitations on the ability of any institution to manage it. [0]. This was the original meaning of digital gold.
In contrast, modern gold is not used as a currency. It is used as a commodity and store of value; and a hedge against inflation.
[0] Unlike gold though; bitcoin actually has a predictable issuance schedule. There is no sudden spike in Bitcoin supplies because prospective suddenly discovered a rich vein.
The same issue would arise if the USA started printing dollars and buying physical gold with it. Is that right?
It has not been that for years. It failed miserably as a currency, and the current narrative is that it is a "store of value".
The narrative around bitcoin has always been "It is digital currency. It works like gold". Hence the notion of "mining".
EDIT: downvote me if you want but you are flat wrong
Section 6 in the bitcoin whitepaper explicitly likens bitcoin to gold [0]
>The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation
[0]: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf