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BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

blog.bitpay.com

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Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#41

Post by lawn »

xorcist wrote: post #37
LyndsySimon wrote: post #3

It seems clear to me at this point that the cryptocurrency revolution is now bigger than Bitcoin itself. Years ago, I saw three long-term outcomes: Bitcoin being king and altcoins dying on the vine, Bitcoin being one of innumerable blockchains in use, and cryptocurrencies in general failing to gain adoption. I'm scratching the first outcome off the list, and my pen is hovering over the last outcome.

That's speculation on the level of Bitcoin taking over. There's no reason to value altcoins over sidechains, for example. We don't know what the future will bring, only that large economies can't take place wholesale on a blockchain. But whether transactions denominated in Bitcoins will be popular is anyone's guess. Surely some better technology will come along, but it won't be altcoins as you know them.

> There's no reason to value altcoins over sidechains, for example.

> Surely some better technology will come along, but it won't be altcoins as you know them.

There's no reason to value sidechains over other coins. Better technology will come, but it could come in the form of other coins.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#42

Post by VMG »

modeless wrote: post #7

This was foreseeable when Bitcoin Core rejected Segwit2x. BitPay's business model simply fails unless the blockchain can scale much more than Segwit alone achieves, very soon.

If the community didn't reject Segwit2x, it would have been much, much worse.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#43

Post by r1ch »

hrrsn wrote: post #28
davej wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.

This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when…

Some of the blocks appear larger on Bitcoin Cash even though they have a lower transaction count because they contain transactions that are consolidating unspent outputs (example: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/transaction/5254e22a6a5f...).

These kinds of transactions aren't feasible on the Bitcoin chain since the fees are prohibitive, so all those small unspent outputs remain in the UTXO set forever and are essentially unspendable.

I'd also argue that increasing the block size scales fine as long as network speeds and storage continue to scale as they have been over the past years.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#44

Post by modeless »

xorcist wrote: post #31
modeless wrote: post #7

This was foreseeable when Bitcoin Core rejected Segwit2x. BitPay's business model simply fails unless the blockchain can scale much more than Segwit alone achieves, very soon.

Segwit2x was an initiative to replace bitcoind with btc1. It is strange to describe it as being rejected by bitcoind. Bitpay's business model was always a bit of a special case. Undercut centralized services on fees? Not likely. It'll work as long as there are early adopters to spend their windfall, but in the long run they'll need to pivot. And not to the next altcoin.

Segwit2x was an initiative to increase the block size. It only required replacing Bitcoin Core because Bitcoin Core refused to merge a block size increase. If they had agreed to merge a block size increase, then btc1 would not have been necessary.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#45

Post by ericb »

VMG wrote: post #42
modeless wrote: post #7

This was foreseeable when Bitcoin Core rejected Segwit2x. BitPay's business model simply fails unless the blockchain can scale much more than Segwit alone achieves, very soon.

If the community didn't reject Segwit2x, it would have been much, much worse.

Not if the core devs had implemented it.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#46

Post by Frogolocalypse »

modeless wrote: post #44
xorcist wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Segwit2x was an initiative to replace bitcoind with btc1. It is strange to describe it as being rejected by bitcoind. Bitpay's business model was always a bit of a special case. Undercut centralized services on fees? Not likely. It'll work as long as there are early adopters to spend their windfall, but in the long run they'll need to pivot. And not to the next altcoin.

Segwit2x was an initiative to increase the block size. It only required replacing Bitcoin Core because Bitcoin Core refused to merge a block size increase. If they had agreed to merge a block size increase, then btc1 would not have been necessary.

160,000+ bitcoin nodes are not interested in your centralization schemes.

http://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/softwar...

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#47

Post by Frogolocalypse »

ericb wrote: post #45
VMG wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the community didn't reject Segwit2x, it would have been much, much worse.

Not if the core devs had implemented it.

The bitcoin open source development team doesn't control the node i run. If you want centralized chinese government controlled crypto, there's bcash. If you were actually interested in just cheap fees, you'd use litecoin. It has been around for years. It even has segwit, unlike bcash.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#48

Post by modeless »

hrrsn wrote: post #28
davej wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that Segwit2x would have been good for BTC, it ultimately only kicks the can down the road a little bit. If BTC (or BCH) is going to be used at Visa/Mastercard scale then the transactions need to happen off-chain. The Lightning Network is the answer here, a lot of work still needs to be done though, particularly on the software side.

This is the major (technical - plenty of political issues) problem I have with Bcash. It’s cheap and fast because transaction volumes, and price, are 10% of BTC, yet blocks are 1.5x the size (roughly, looking at a block explorer). As soon as they fill up, they’ll have the exact same problems down the line. Increasing the block size doesn’t scale long term and is a bandaid solution at best. BTC was fast and cheap when…

> they’ll have the exact same problems down the line

But it could be years later; years in which other scaling solutions can be researched. If you only accept scaling solutions that can scale to infinity today, you will never accept a single one.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#49

Post by Frogolocalypse »

lawn wrote: post #29
jncraton wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is the long term store of value for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. 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. 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…

> 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 li…

Most people who push the chinese government controlled bcash don't want to talk about lightning, and refuse to learn how it works, yes. It's probably why they forked bcash before the malleability fix of segwit. To ensure the privacy and decentralization enabled by lightning is never available for their government controlled implementation. Lightning is private by design, implementing onion routing natively. I can see how that would have been a problem for chinese government.

Re: BitPay Will Process Payments on Multiple Blockchains, Starting with Bitcoin Cash

#50

Post by ribosometronome »

Frogolocalypse wrote: post #20
ribosometronome wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you posting on the ARPANET?

I use email almost every day, yes. You realize the arpanet is the internet right? It wasn't replaced, it was expanded. Call it layers if that would make it easier to understand.

ARPANET refers to a specific network that was decommissioned in 1990. And for 13 years of it's 21 years in existence, it was using NCP rather than TCP/IP.
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