I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second:
> Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second.
The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less useful as a currency and more useful as an investiment. Perhaps it was made this way by design.
Note to commenters: In this context "Bitcoin production" is not mining; they're talking about the development of the protocol being centralized.
This is exactly why decentralized currency is no better than regular currency. Bitcoin is centralized in the hands of a few shady, anonymous exchange owners funding the development. At least in a capitalist democracy we get to elect the criminals who rob us blind.
Actually the federal reserve is a partially private institution whose head is selected by the president. The common folk never make that decision.
Every time a block is mined, miners are paid in transaction fees + newly generated coins. After 21 million coins have been generated, miners will only be rewarded transaction fees => it doesn't mean blocks will stop being mined; blocks will keep being mined, but without generating new coins out of nowhere.
How is the amount of a transaction fee determined?
It’s offered by those wishing to include their transaction in the next block. Miners look at all the pending transactions and select the most lucrative ones.
Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/…
Comparing the lightning network with a bank is totally incorrect. Your funds cannot be seized and the middlemen privacy aspect is very similar to the Tor network. I don't think there is a better way of solving a decentralized payment system.
Tor is a privacy nightmare; not sure what the situation is currently but at one point the US government ran something like 10% of the exit nodes. This is how a lot of the "dark web" operators got caught until folks caught on and switched up their opsec.
I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan... > Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less…
I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
For comparison, Visa claims it can handle more than 65 thousand transaction messages per second: https://usa.visa.com/dam/VCOM/download/corporate/media/visan... > Our advanced global processing network, VisaNet, provides secure and reliable payments around the world, and is capable of handling more than 65,000 transaction messages a second. The small scale of bitcoin increases the cost of transactions, making it less…
The creator actually suggested that it could scale fine if they increased the block size and mentioned future miner farms in 2010.
However, it would make sense that exchanges and credit-card-like institutions would want to keep bitcoin unscalable for the foreseeable future and stall scalable development.
I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)
No it does not. LN is terrible for all kinds of reasons and nobody uses it.
The mining is also pretty centralised these days: https://www.buybitcoinworldwide.com/mining/pools/ And the Chinese company that produces the most asic miners (Bitmain)... also runs a mining pool. Gambling. In a Casino. Shocking.
Yes, true, and as the paper points out they are related. But the mining centralisation story is basically "water is wet" in 2020 for people interested in this. And as a many commenters here show, the mining centralisation problem is being thought about in technological ways ($BUZZWORD)... The paper seems to focus more about the political/organisational problem, which to me seem more inherent and harder to solve.
Exactly. Bitcoin governance can still be called decentralized but there are still certain degrees of centralized control in decentralized systems (just look at the Internet). The political/organizational problem is hard to solve because humans have to coordinate to make decisions and often this is done from (centralized) points of authority (Lead Developers, Mining pools, Bitcoin wallets/exchanges). This is not a direct democracy but a represantative one because not everyone in the network is equal: 1) Core developers elect the Lead Developer to make decisions on protocol rule upgrades, 2) miners increase the likelihood of coin rewards by using mining pools and in the process elect mining pool operators to make voting decisions on their behalf, and 3) users use Bitcoin wallets to take on technical procedures associated with accessing bitcoins and in the process elect them to make lobbying decisions on their behalf (instead of running their own Bitcoin node). This creates a type of decentralised structure with centralised pieces. "The cost for collective action is [some form of] hierachy" (481).
This is exactly why decentralized currency is no better than regular currency. Bitcoin is centralized in the hands of a few shady, anonymous exchange owners funding the development. At least in a capitalist democracy we get to elect the criminals who rob us blind.
Actually the federal reserve is a partially private institution whose head is selected by the president. The common folk never make that decision.
I still hope that they listen to reason and increase bitcoin’s ability to scale. We are all held hostage by a tiny cabal of developers that think they know what is best and want bitcoin to have a perversely small block size and pitiful 7 transactions per second top speed.
Big blocks are probably easier to censor and harder to use for people who only have low-spec equipment/networks.
Vulnerability to censorship vs limited on-chain scaling -- pick your poison. Censorship-resistance and on-chain scaling are both good things, but one picks a priority.
You or someone else can always go BCH if you like big blocks and the BTC devs are not going to stop you.