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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?

#451

Post by ethftw »

1ris wrote: post #436
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.

I can take my maple leave or krugerrand and change that in any crash for gold/western union/money exchange shed for almost market rate in minutes. There are plenty of them. Even I take a cap that is its faster and cheaper than bitcoin.

I can take my seed words inside my brain through airport security.

Let's not get started on verification of the asset!

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

#452

Post by stealthcat »

ericsoderstrom wrote: post #45

People 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…

>perhaps ultimately from the US military

Does this have something to do with aftermath of Vietnam War in 1970s? US got broke, to recover, they made a pact with Saudis, ditched gold and use USD instead for reference currency, and oil transactions are in USD (i.e. 'petrodollars')

Then things went downhill globally.

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

#453

Post by CryptoPunk »

Of course it can't scale. Blocks can't grow larger than 1 MB, which means no more than three transactions per second.

If you want scale, you have to look to Bitcoin Cash (which carries on Bitcoin's original vision of being a massively scalable peer-to-peer electronic cash) or Ethereum.

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

#454

Post by CryptoPunk »

etr-strike wrote: post #414
lawn wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which does not take into account xthin/compact blocks which cuts down propagation time a lot. In the future graphene will further reduce the time necessary. How you can conclude a 9min propagation delay for 8MB blocks is beyond me as miners are basically directly connected to each other. This is the only thing that matters decentralization wise. Bitcoin Unlimited are successfully testing 1GB blocks: https://news.bitc…

Your link is a news article and not actual research. The details of their specific test are barely provided. Please provide actual research as I have provided you.

This overcautious, "let's test everything for 10 years before trying it" approach is exactly what Bitcoin doesn't need when it has 0.001% of world transaction throughput.

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

#455

Post by [deleted] »

gruez wrote: post #316
taysic wrote: post #264

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.

>The rally is partly because it can’t scale and people are unable to get their bitcoin to an exchange to sell it. that's demonstrably false. there's plenty room of you're willing to pay enough in transaction fees. if you don't want to pay $5 in transaction fees to cash out $5000, that's your problem. either that or you don't want to pay $5 to cash out $10, but in that case that has no appreciable impact on trading vo…

[deleted]

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

#456

Post by jpamata »

scotty79 wrote: post #241
pmorici wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You are right although I don't fully understand your analogy but bitcoin never guaranteed all transactions will go through because it couldn't because noone could make a system with infinite capacity. 20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers. Is the limit too strict? Probably. Miners still get a lot from mining rewards and don't need to be incentiv…

> 20$ transaction fee is an incentive for the users to restrain themselves to smaller number of larger transfers.

In my country (the Philippines) everyone is buying from high school kids to office workers.

The current minimum transaction fee is around $40. To exchange your bitcoin to Philippine Peso (PHP), the fixed conversion fee is 5%. If those don't seem a lot, get this: 83% of Filipinos earn below $400 a month. Most of whom I know are HODLing their bitcoin because it's too expensive to move their money. They would rather wait for their investment to reap huge gains before they cash out.

Bitcoin here is branded as a "get rich quick" investment scheme, and that's understandable, bitcoin doesn't have a valuable use case here. You can't buy anything here with bitcoin.

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

#457

Post by pmorici »

grubles wrote: post #448
pmorici wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is about 60 days ahead at most and it doesn't matter because the hard cap of 21 million coins is till the same. This has gotta be the dumbest argument I've ever heard.

The hard cap is the same until it isn't -- when Bcash has to hard fork to infinite inflation in order to incentivize mining because fees won't supplant the mining reward.

Not gonna happen.

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

#458

Post by CodeWriter23 »

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…

12 or 20 transactions per second? Let me regale you with a story from my youth... Once upon a time, it was 1985 and I worked at a company that developed a “Transaction Processor”. A multiprocessor CP/M system, with a “4th Generation” integrated app development language, a data store with an mathematician-optimized b-tree indexing system, paired with the fastest 120MB drives we could find through a series of phone calls and sample evaluations. It would be considered a proto-server by today’s standards. We were so proud at Comdex, bragging about 60 t/s to anyone passing by.

We had a gentleman visit our booth from one of the big 4 airlines. He asked us what we were going to do to get to 1800 t/s, because that was the load requirement for the reservation system he and his division were tasked with creating, deploying and maintaining.

I’m fairly certain a currency system needs to scale beyond what a single airline needs in terms of transactions per second.

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

#459

Post by Spivak »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #306
moduspol wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is certifiable.

I mean from an end user perspective maybe but it's always been an auction where you can buy yourself priority. Nothing has really changed except now there are more people bidding higher.

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

#460

Post by etr-strike »

ben_w wrote: post #434
etr-strike wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never heard of it. I suspect their claim is either bogus or their coin is a database.

There are far too many cryptocurrencies to keep track of, bit even if the claim is false, Bitcoin is still absurdly slow compared to existing normal systems.

What existing “normal” systems?
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