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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?

#371

Post by vasilipupkin »

oarsinsync wrote: post #365
vasilipupkin wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, but you can set the fee to 20 cents, if you are willing to wait for a confirm

This you may not be aware of, but there have been periods where the fee has remained in excess of over $1 for over 72 hours. A 20 cent fee will not cover you there. Looking at my transaction history, of my last 10 transactions, all had fees in excess of $1, one as high as $14. I'm not losing any sleep over it, but I'm also not going to call the fees reasonable.

I agree, bitcoin is not good for micropayments. But that's not the only use case that matters.

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

#372

Post by tr4cefl0w »

etr-strike wrote: post #182
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.

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…

Couldn’t have said better.

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

#373

Post by sgspace »

Check out Bitcoin Cash if you want a scalable on chain crypto currency. Bitcoin Cash has the same history as Bitcoin up until August 1st, 2017 when they forked off the majority chain. Bitcoin Cash allows you to send any amount of money to anyone in the world for about 1 penny per transaction.

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

#375

Post by rdiddly »

runeks wrote: post #59
rdiddly wrote: post #21

I don't think you're wrong and there are other problems too. Widespread Bitcoin adoption would require more energy for mining coins than the entire world can currently produce.

Bitcoin has no particular requirement for energy, it’s an arbitrage involving the prices of three components: 1) a bitcoin 2) a KWh of power 3) mining hardware. As long as the value of newly minted bitcoins makes it profitable to buy mining hardware and burn off power to earn them, the amount of power used by bitcoin miners will increase. So, way before Bitcoin miners consume all of the world’s energy, either energy…

If energy prices increase, indicating an energy shortage, mining does not increase, and Bitcoin can't scale past that point. I was not worried about Bitcoin eating all the world's energy.

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

#376

Post by statguy »

fooker wrote: post #255
matt4077 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, well.... It would seem "transactions" should be among the things that a currency does well.

Not necessarily. Bags of grain or N cows did not do transactions well. Yet they were successful as currencies for millennia.

times have changed since...

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

#377

Post by oarsinsync »

chakalakasp wrote: post #320
seppin wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what's the value of Bitcoin? Selling it to someone else for more than you paid next week.

You're evading the question. If you can't at some point in the chain trade your fancy bitcoin beads for services or goods, then how is it any different than monopoly money? Right now it is useful because it can be easily traded for currencies that can purchase those things.

Stores of value tend to have high liquidity. I hate the analogy, but a single exchange (or a series of exchanges) going down doesn't prevent you from selling your gold. Your preferred method of selling gold may be temporarily unavailable, but it'll be back.

Meanwhile, keeping with that analogy, actually selling gold takes quite a long time when you hold the physical asset yourself, and the fees are not small there either, as validation needs to be performed to confirm the gold you're supplying is authentic.

Truly, I hate the analogy, because digital assets like this are supposed to be better, not just as bad, as their physical counterparts.

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

#378

Post by KirinDave »

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.

Why?

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

#380

Post by sgspace »

_tulpa wrote: post #368
anonymous5133 wrote: post #333

That's why I tell you guys to just use bitcoin cash instead. Bitcoin cash uses bigger blocks that can accommodate more transactions per second. We are going to increase it as more people use it. Right now the transactions are nearly free.

Ok. We'll just ignore the issues associated with increasing full-node storage requirements even faster than they're already increasing. And lower transaction fees lead to lower block rewards which lowers mining profitability. Both of these things result in more centralization. While we're at it we'll forget the post-fork difficulty adjustment faisco brought to us by the Bitcoin cash devs. We'll just trust their compe…

Lower transaction fees leads to more volume of transactions. They’re going for the amazon approach of razor thin margins which should lead to more transactions overall. They plan to keep transaction fees around 1 penny by increasing the block size as it fills up. Next fork for Bitcoin Cash will give it 32mb blocks.
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