You can make anything in the world but if you have transaction fees that high every single time that project will be guaranteed to fail.
Shopify and others are now using SolanaPay to do USDC transactions and they settle in under a second for under a cent. It takes a very beefy server to run a Solana validator, though, so many worry that it’s insufficiently decentralized.
I suspect that in the longer run, most of the value will be stored on Ethereum and compatible chains while most transactions will be done on Solana and newer chains.
eth mainnet is lindy as the most secure settlement/data availability layer, other layers for execution settling back to mainnet or other da layers potentially solve settlement fee/l1 data writing rent issues
But generally I agree with you, the fees are a big problem.
They're not yet production ready though. All use centralized coordinators and failsafes, as a precaution against catastrophic flaws in the smart contracts they have deployed on L1, that could lead billions of dollars worth of digital assets being stolen/lost.
I find those to be worthless usecases to society in general, but they are usecases.
From day one Satoshi had a road map to scale BTC to Visa-like levels while keeping TX fees around a penny. Just incrementally increase the block size over time.
Soon after Blockstream's Greg Maxwell and Adam Back hijacked the Bitcoin Core GitHub repo they locked down the block size to 1mb, something Satoshi and the original devs never imagined anyone being dumb enough to do let alone intended.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) stayed with the road map and has worked great with low fees for over a decade now. BTC twisted itself into a digital ponzi scheme for morons.
Doesn't this point to Bitcoin's decentralized nature being largely smoke and mirrors?
You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
They didn't just control the repo, but they somehow managed to convince the miners to support them. Exchanges and users simply defaulted to "the longest chain is Bitcoin", ensuring their victory. So they weren't alone.
But Bitcoin's truly decentralized nature allows for forks, where if you disagree with the development direction you can always go your own way. So the spirit of Bitcoin lives on in other projects (both via forks and via projects with no shared history with Bitcoin).
> You're claiming that just two individuals have had a significant negative impact on a project that was intended to be free from central control. That in itself seems like a failure of the project's goals.
Yes, it was (and is) still a major failure of the project's goals.
Similarly bitcoin is decentralized in that “anyone can fork it” but reality is without backing from major players, that will never gain any traction at all.
So no, functionally it is nothing approaching decentralized.
At the crucial point they did however convince the miners to support a Segwit + blocksize increase, which pulled away the support.
Of course, it's obvious that it was just a bait-and-switch and the blocksize increase is nowhere to be seen, and will probably never happen.
Ultimately, miners would only support a hard fork if a super majority went along with it and with the major forums being censored that was going to be impossible.
Without the censorship there would have been a super majority supporting the hard work given the sentiment on the forums at that time.
Blockstream was able to create the perception of an economic majority — thanks to forums like Bitcointalk and Reddit (moderated by one guy: Theymos / Michael Marquant).
In reality, a lot of people didn’t support blockstream, but through censorship and permanent bans, a few people were able to create the perception of economic majority.
Also in the end it doesn't matter what is in the Bitcoin Core github. It's a network and you can run any variant you want. Bitcoin Cash tried and failed, because in the end it is not what the users, the node operators, chose to adopt.
I believe most people call this bcash.
And those who are clueless and just follow the hivemind.
It still lives on as an uncensored subreddit where all forks of Bitcoin may be discussed.
And focusing so much on a subreddit that's not tied to the project no more than r/bitcoin is to Bitcoin, while dismissing it's existential reason as "irrelevant", is tiring.
Only counting "everybody" as people on your side is common in cults, but is rarely indicative of the real world.
The higher the transaction fees, the more validators earn. There is no incentive to build tech which will lower transaction fees, even though it would enable practical use cases. Ethereum community is not interested in value creation because they know that value creation doesn't pay. They can earn more money just monopolizing media attention, attracting new investors and lobbying (aka corrupting) politicians.
Having worked in the industry, I've witnessed how they literally suppress innovations which would result in more scalability and lower fees. They only embrace solutions that are flawed by design to create an illusion that they're trying. Billions of dollars are literally wasted just to maintain the illusion.
I don't know where all that money is coming from. The crypto folks are clearly right about one thing; the monetary system is broken... But they seem to be making more money keeping it broken than fixing it.
Not really. 95% of the gas fees get burned and do not go to the validators at all. Only the 'tip' or 'priority fee' goes to the validators and even that is barely anything. Most of the transaction related income validators get is from MEV - basically bribes to order transactions in the block in a particular manner allowing arbitrageurs to extract additional value. These bribes are somewhat correlated to the level of the gas fees, but not always.
Since supply of compute is inelastic, it means that demand for compute fully determines fees + MEV. Any effort to scale the network would result in supply elasticity and would therefore cause fees + MEV to drop which would go against the interests of those who provide the validation service and earn the fees + MEV.
False until proven with sources. I'm involved with ethstaker and follow core development closely and have never seen anything like this.
Haha no, the number one culprit is that 99% of blockchain projects are either scams, bullshit, not actually decentralized, or simply fail despite pulling in vast amounts of funding (sometimes more than one of the above!).
However, I do agree that most--if not all--problems in the cryptocurrency space arise from the "currency" aspect. Just not so directly as "transaction fees".