Re:Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person
by faefox on Monday May 29, 2023 @11:04PM
(#36120697)
Did the original "digital cash" thesis ever make sense? It's my understanding that Bitcoin can never hope to scale to meet a fraction of daily real-world transaction volume outside of adopting a so-called L2 solution like Lightning Network, which would seem to defeat the point somewhat.
Re:Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person
by paulgb on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @05:32AM
(#36122868)
It certainly couldn’t have covered all of human commerce, but it could cover the sort of transactions where having an uncensorable, irreversible transaction is worth paying a premium for (silk road, etc.)
Re:Most Bitcoin Inscriptions belong to a single person
by RustyRussell on Tuesday May 30, 2023 @12:23AM
(#36121104)
Well, in practice the mining subsidy is highly variable, as most miners' costs are in local currency, so fees are already set by the market.
But I agree that the NFT thing is really a side-effect of fees being low (thus, cheap distributed storage) which probably at best provides a price floor, rather than a sustainable source of revenue.
Satoshi’s vision was for Bitcoin to be used as digital cash[1], so that transaction demand would be enough to sustain the security of the system. Since the “cash” use case has fallen away to the “store of value” use case, it seems a bit dubious.
Transaction costs have recently gone up because of ordinals and NFTs so we’ll see if that sticks.
[1] the Bitcoin paper was called “Bitcoin: a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”