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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?

#301

Post by moduspol »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #294
moduspol wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Bitcoin does absolutely is impressive, just not in terms of transaction volume. Comparing it to a rails app is pointless. If we can improve the transaction rate without risk, then let’s do it. It just gets tiring seeing post after post suggesting it’s a valueless failure if it can’t be used for coffee. Let’s just keep it in perspective. It doesn’t need to supplant Visa to be successful.

The entire purpose is to replace fiat. It’s objectively a failure if you can’t buy coffee with it.

It provides a ton of value even if you can’t reasonably buy coffee with it. The path to replacing fiat is not adding risk or unpredictability to the figurehead cryptocurrency.

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

#303

Post by [deleted] »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #294
moduspol wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Bitcoin does absolutely is impressive, just not in terms of transaction volume. Comparing it to a rails app is pointless. If we can improve the transaction rate without risk, then let’s do it. It just gets tiring seeing post after post suggesting it’s a valueless failure if it can’t be used for coffee. Let’s just keep it in perspective. It doesn’t need to supplant Visa to be successful.

The entire purpose is to replace fiat. It’s objectively a failure if you can’t buy coffee with it.

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by mtremsal »

Beejeepa wrote: post #275
thatcat wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The IRS is wrong.

How so?

And obviously it doesn't matter if the law is wrong, it's still the law. But in this instance, why do you believe it to be wrong?

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

#305

Post by nly »

ignoramous wrote: post #116
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 -…

> Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close. Just curious here: What would you say are technically better solutions than bitcoin?

I'd argue some of the cryptocash ideas thrown around in the 90s were vastly superior on the technical front. We've had the schematics for instantanous, high transaction volume, offline, double-spend resistant, completely untraceable and anonymous, digital cash for 25 years... with no blockchain or energy crazy energy consumption requirements.

Why didn't these technologies succeed? Because none of those properties have any business advantage over boring, simple, centralized credit-card processing and back then everything was sealed up in patents until it missed the boat.

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

#306

Post by theWatcher37 »

moduspol wrote: post #236
pmorici wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sorry—-I meant low relative to the other pending transactions. They’re not low at all relative to other payment methods.

This is certifiable.

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

#307

Post by yonatano »

etr-strike wrote: post #248
KirinDave wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll believe any of that will work when people don't cite Satoshi's holy insight as a reason why the block size shouldn't increase.

It shouldn’t increase because simulations of increasing blocksize have demonstrated centralization. If we didn’t care about decentralization we’d just use a database.

Could you point me to some sources that discuss simulation of the blockchain network? I would be interested to learn more.

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

#308

Post by theWatcher37 »

always_good wrote: post #197
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.

Well, that's not accurate either. Miners sort transactions by fee and fill up a 1MB block. Use https://estimatefee.com/ . Not paying enough to win the fee auction is not the same as no transactions getting through at all. You seem a bit misinformed to be using the "Dude" prologue.

Incorrect. The fact is the network lacked the capacity to handle the requested number of transactions, and in turn auctioned off the tickets to the lifeboat to whoever paid the most.

You’re arguing “nobody died in the titanic that didn’t pay enough”, when the problem is clearly there aren’t enough lifeboats.

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

#309

Post by vasilipupkin »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #291
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…

The lighting network completely undermines the entire purpose of bitcoin, and blockstreams seeming desire to sabotage bitcoin for daily use coincides suspiciously with their outside “investment”. If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is be…

I am not sure why it matters what the original purpose was. It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. there may be other cryptocurrencies that act more like currencies

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

#310

Post by TheCoelacanth »

xorcist wrote: post #280
pmorici wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doge has unlimited inflation it is nothing like Bitcoin Cash.

That doesn't matter if you only use it for transactions. Step in, transact, step out.

Who is going to pay you for your Dogecoin if no one wants to hold them?
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