Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale? • Hacker News Board

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#221

Post by thatcat » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

eterm wrote: post #104

thatcat wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say stop storing your spending money as btc, it's an asset not cash. Can you liquidate your 30$ peice of gold in < 4 hours for market value? Probably not.

"Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" Peer to peer cash. Not "Gold", not "asset", but "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash".

The IRS classifies and taxes it as an asset because functionally it is an asset. The design is speculated to be based off of hashcash and maybe it was suppose to be used as cash and in a way it is still useful as "electronic cash" for online orders since wait times are less relevant.

http://www.hashcash.org/papers/hashcash.pdf

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#222

Post by ComputerGuru » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:34 PM UTC

goialoq wrote: post #148

polock wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're wasting energy for posting comments too. If we think a way like this, we can't no anything.

The dose makes the poison.

Except Bitcoin is inefficient by design (it’s what proof of work is) and the dosage is the market cap and transaction load. So what you’re really saying is bitcoin at the scale it was meant to operate at is poison.

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#223

Post by pmorici » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:36 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #219

Bombthecat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, It literally stopped accepting transactions. After 72 hours your transaction is dropped. Without further notice. Until then you must guess if it was processed or not.

Dropping low-fee unconfirmed transactions is not the same as not accepting transactions.

What is low fee to you? Because there are people paying several bucks to do a transaction right now that are being dropped.

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#224

Post by ComputerGuru » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:36 PM UTC

xorcist wrote: post #199

jen729w wrote: post #4

IMHO (because to claim to "know" anything about how this is all going to turn out is to be a fraud), Bitcoin is the proof of concept for this whole crypto thing. It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds? I imagine that Bitcoin will play its part as the public face of the blockchain revolution, but something else - or many other somethings -…

Somebody who feels compelled to sell their Bitcoins because the technology is not ready has probably not acquired any in the first place. Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin. That's why people rush to buy something which obviously isn't "ready" (but maybe "good enough"). It's speculative, but do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at…

Moving from bitcoin to another crypto currency is still chasing out, unless I misssed your point.

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#225

Post by grubles » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:37 PM UTC

Have you seen any announcements from merchants, businesses, exchanges regarding downtime due to congestion? Probably not, because the spam-prevention mechanism built into Bitcoin by Satoshi themselves is working as intended.

On the flipside, you have Ethereum with more or less unbounded block sizes having issues with Cryptokitties congesting the entire network. Numerous entities using Ethereum are unable to do business due to the equivalent of Beanie Babies clogging the network [0][1].

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-cryptokitties-blockchain-...

[1] https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/874285733707526145

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#226

Post by pmorici » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

scotty79 wrote: post #194

Bombthecat wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dude, It literally stopped accepting transactions. After 72 hours your transaction is dropped. Without further notice. Until then you must guess if it was processed or not.

If you give a recommended fee it can go as fast as ever.

This is such a silly comment. This is like saying that you have a Bus with 20 seats and 40 people that want to ride. Your advice isn't get a bigger bus it is get to the bus stop earlier. It doesn't matter how early everyone gets there in the end there are only 20 seats.

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#227

Post by ComputerGuru » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:38 PM UTC

solotronics wrote: post #91

kybernetikos wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.

It has evolved to be a store of value and it's doing an amazing job at that. Thinking from the perspective of the developers (many of whom have very large amounts of BTC) a slow and deliberate rate of changes is a very good thing. Making a mistake here would mean hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost. I am all for other cryptos moving quickly and breaking things to test out new ideas. Who in their right mind…

Bitcoin is absolutely not a good store of value. A good store of value is a reliable store of value: one where you can place your assets and go back and get them at any later time.

As a deflationary currency, bitcoin would be a hypothetically good store of value if a bitcoin actually had any intrinsic or even just de facto value. But it clearly doesn’t: it’s only the conversion to and from USD (and others) that has given it any value at all as an investment vehicle to some. And _that_ value isn’t guaranteed preserved one bit.

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#228

Post by jwatte » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

rspeer wrote: post #202

etr-strike wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. Migrating a 200 billion dollar network to an untested PoW proposal would be irresponsible. Arbitrarily increasing blocksize without addressing propagation delay and centralization impacts is also irresponsible. Bitcoin has been tirelessly working on the scaling problem in a responsible way. SegWit will allow up to 12t/s. Mimble Wimble and Schnor…

20 entire transactions per second? Amazing! Who has ever heard of software that could do 20 things in a second?

What it does is not just arbitration things, but establish global consensus and an unalterable log of that consensus.

If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world.

(Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#229

Post by pmorici » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:39 PM UTC

moduspol wrote: post #89

mchristen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of blocks is not core to the algorithm of Bitcoin though. What would you say to the person trying to send $30 only to have $20 of it eaten up in fees? Come back later when you can afford to use Bitcoin?

Use a different cryptocurrency. Seriously. And I'm not trying to be cheeky. If Bitcoin ends up only being a settlement layer, it'll still be a colossal success just being a decentralized, supply-limited, uncensorable, world-accessible payment system and store of value. If someone else solves the scaling debacle better, I'll be the first to recommend that normal people switch to it. But it's not easy, and the world is…

"Use a different cryptocurrency."

I started using Bitcoin Cash instead and I'm loving it. All the good parts about Bitcoin Core w/o the brain dead approach to scaling.

Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

#230

Post by grubles » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 6:41 PM UTC

pmorici wrote: post #220

The piece you are missing is that this problem is a direct result of the Core dev teams deliberate choice not to scale. They have a strangle hold on development and vehemently opposed any proposal to scale through block size increases as was the original intent. Bitcoin Cash isn't having these problems and won't have these problems in the future. Many people aren't aware of the underlying issues driving the transacti…

There was an instance of SatoshiDice taking up half of a Bcash block consolidating UTXOs the other day. Congestion will happen on Bcash, as will a hard fork to infinite inflation due to lack of transaction fees to supplant block rewards.