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Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

news.ycombinator.com

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

#261

Post by crispytx »

wmnwmn wrote: post #145

Not only is BTC epicly badly designed (energy consumption=Denmark) but it doesn't solve a problem that anyone actually has (and neither do any of the other cryptos). Nobody uses them to pay for things, and nobody has any incentive to start doing so, because paying for things is not currently a problem. Compare with the Internet boom: along with the stock bubble, millions of people began using this new tool which chan…

This whole bitcoin bubble has taught me that people are much dumber than I had previously believed. Warren Buffett said it best, "Be fearful when others are greedy, be greedy when others are fearful."

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

#262

Post by spookthesunset »

jwatte wrote: post #228
rspeer wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 audita…

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

That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun.

So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?

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

#264

Post by taysic »

The rally is partly because it can’t scale and people are unable to get their bitcoin to an exchange to sell it. Instead it is stuck in the mempool... and there is an increasing amount of bitcoin that can’t be moved because fees surpass its value.

For a bitcoin that has scaled see Bitcoin Cash.

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

#265

Post by endlessvoid94 »

pmorici wrote: post #226
scotty79 wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OP saying that it was designed that way. We can disagree about whether or not the intended design is practical or not, but it's "technically" successful because it's operating exactly as it was designed.

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

#266

Post by spookthesunset »

wildmusings wrote: post #259
KirinDave wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is a lot of things, and many of them interesting, but suggesting that ~4 t/s is impressive or "scaling" is an insult to kids in high school writing rails apps that can do 100x the volume. We already know at least 2 obvious ways to improve the transaction flow rate of bitcoin in trustless ways, and many others are being proposed that do not also create energy arms races. Please don't redefine success.

I’m not sold on Bitcoin but I don’t agree with your definition of what it needs to be successful. There is no reason that actual bitcoin end-users need to deal directly in bitcoin. If Bitcoin were to ever become a major currency, a big if, there would be financial institutions (banks) issuing instruments (physical or digital notes) backed by real bitcoins held by those institutions. Real bitcoin transactions would be…

Bitcoin and The Blockchain are only useful when you absolutely can't trust anybody but yourself. Why would financial institutions need Bitcoin and its immense overhead when they all can use the law as a tool to ensure adequate trust? If they can trust each other at that level, all they need is a simple database.

In other words, "financial institutions" have no need for the blockchain.

Want proof? You think the NASDAQ uses anything more than a (fancy, probably very high priced, extremely robust) database to store its stuff? They deal with all kinds of people who are actively trying to fuck them over every day and every second. They have no need for the blockchain. Neither does any other "financial institution".

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

#267

Post by Beejeepa »

etr-strike wrote: post #246
spookthesunset wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If proof of stake proves itself to actually work, Bitcoin will adopt it. I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize. One side effect of this whole deal is it shows that it is incredibly hard, if not possible, to change a decentralized system. By its very design, it will be all but impossible to make any breaking changes to bitcoin at this point. > Lightning…

Lightning isn’t vaporware. Follow the project on github, they are very active. Better yet, watch the first lightning transaction happen on mainnet which occurred just last week: https://youtu.be/a73Gz3Tvx3k With regards to blocksize, the only reason it’s not widely embraced is because it’s known to directly impact propagation delay. One side couldn’t care less about centralization, the other side cares dearly. SegWit…

It's not only vaporware, it's uneconomical. That demo doesn't withdraw Bitcoin - it locks it up. Two transactions for every channel. Lightning Network is just another bank, a third party with fees.

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

#268

Post by HereBeBeasties »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #227
solotronics wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

Most asset classes look like that, though. Gold has some intrinsic value as a good conductor/reflector of heat. But it's not really so very much superior to aluminium or copper or whatever to make it worth what it is worth. It is expensive because it is scarce. That's it. Bitcoin is the same. (They are obviously very different in other ways, but you get the point.) Things don't need to have intrinsic value to be valuable. They simply need to be desired by the market.

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

#269

Post by jondubois »

moduspol wrote: post #79

Others here are touching on Bitcoin being like the "1.0" of cryptocurrency, but it's actually a lot more than that. In the public eye, it's a symbol of what cryptocurrencies can be. You're suggesting Bitcoin just proved it can't scale, but it actually just proved it did--just not with transaction volume. The network continued to process transactions averaging one block every ten minutes exactly as it was built to do,…

Bitcoin could become a payment system for the rich but it will never be an all-purpose decentralized payment system.

There are hard physical transaction limits which cannot be surpassed without seriously compromising decentralization... To the point that what would be left of the network would essentially no longer be 'Bitcoin'. Any attempt to abstract away from the blockchain through some kind of batching or delayed settlement would completely undermine the trustless nature of Bitcoin... What would be left would be no better than the current banking system.

The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that you can have your own wallet from which you can spend without going through any intermediaries... All potential Bitcoin scalability solutions that I've heard of rely on exchanges being given more power/trust in order to abstract away from the Blockchain.

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

#270

Post by rabidrat »

rescripting wrote: post #142
noobermin wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds a hell lot like changing the goal posts.

Does that matter? If you're looking to develop a drug to treat hypertension but end up with Viagra by accident instead, do you throw it away because that wasn't the original goal?

If the production of Viagra at scale winds up causing global health problems, then yes, you throw it away.
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