Not sure if it will ever scale. Look into Iota.
Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
281–290 of 501 posts
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must not have any experience with international transfers or currencies other than euro and USD.
Trouble is it's still not mainstream enough for everyone to start accepting it as a form of payment but that will change with time. For instance visit amazonbitcoin.com and see what happens!
Sure, I can buy some btc and go buy something with it in some places. But where is my incentive to do that, rather than just go use my credit card or an ACH transfer? Btc is not more convenient, it's not cheaper, and whatever gain in privacy there currently is will not survive a transition to mainstream usage...although the first two problems ensure that there never will be mainstream usage.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#283IMHO (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…
> Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin.
Now THAT is the speculation to end all speculations.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#284Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 secon…
Do wire transfers solve no real problems? I do essentially all of my large transactions usinng bitcoin.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#285Others 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 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.
Proof of stake is still bound to CAP theorem though. Even CASPER can not guarantee full consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.
There is also FLP impossibility, which reduces to the halting problem in an asynchronous distributed system setting.
By this logic, Bitcoin can never “scale”.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#286Earlier 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…
The lightning network is not a decentralized solution. It gives more power/trust to a few large exchanges.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#287People now envision bitcoin as 'store of value', and less like an actual currency. I imagine there are many technical and financial reasons why it will never be suitable as a currency. (Deflationary by design, technical limitations on size of blocks leading to slowness of transactions) Does being unsuitable as a currency mean it's also unsuitable as a 'store of value'? The answer to that isn't obvious to me. The valu…
And the store of value vision is built on the idea that it'll be possible to convert BTC into any other currency at any time. The other way around: If you can't buy most stuff with it (the case right now) and can't convert it into your everyday currency (maybe happens if the exchanges suddenly go down for some reason, even only temporarily), what's the value of Bitcoin?
> what's the value of Bitcoin?
Selling it to someone else for more than you paid next week.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#288As engineers and technologists we must always be mindful of our impact on the planet. Bitcoin has been a disaster when it comes to environmental concerns. It is a shadow on techs efforts to lead the way toward a sustainable future. We need to figure out a way to solve this issue, especially if cryptocurrency utilization is to increase, in particular through Bitcoin: Bitcoin uses about 32 terawatts of energy every yea…
You're wasting energy for posting comments too. If we think a way like this, we can't no anything.
If commenting burned ten cents of electricity, no matter how efficient computers get, that would be a huge problem too.
Each post uses as little electricity as is feasible. Efficiency improvements lower the amount of electricity used. Reducing the use 90% would mean 90% fewer posts and ruin the posting experience.
Bitcoin doesn't try to minimize electrical use. Efficiency improvements increase the amount used. Reducing the use 90% would lower the transaction rate 0% and ruin nothing, but we can't do that because it's set up as a competition.
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#289People now envision bitcoin as 'store of value', and less like an actual currency. I imagine there are many technical and financial reasons why it will never be suitable as a currency. (Deflationary by design, technical limitations on size of blocks leading to slowness of transactions) Does being unsuitable as a currency mean it's also unsuitable as a 'store of value'? The answer to that isn't obvious to me. The valu…
> The value of the US dollar comes in part from our ability to pay taxes with it (and perhaps ultimately from the US military). It doesn't come from either of those things. It only has value because people believe it does, otherwise they would all try to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
How would they pay their taxes? Or how would two countries buy oil from each other (when USD was agreed upon)?
Re: Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?
#290IMHO (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…
> do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at least as much as you have.
Yeah, it's not like I can go on to /r/bitcoin and read multiple dedicated screeds along the lines of "I'm recommending my friends to invest savings in BTC for retirement". Whereupon someone replies "They should keep something in a Roth IRA for diversity", and the OP comments, "What's a Roth IRA?"
Yes, there are sophisticated investors.
But in a lot of cases, the only thoughts going through peoples heads is "Get Rich Quick". There's more discussion of "what color Lamborghini am I buying?" than anything else on those forums right now than anything else. Well, beside 'HODL! HODL! Even if the market corrects $10,000 tomorrow, HODL!'.