Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Did Bitcoin just prove it can't scale?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 501 posts

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

#71

Post by criddell »

barnacs wrote: post #36

> How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction? https://lightning.network/ tl;dr: a network of off-chain, transitive payment channels. two on-chain transactions (to fund and settle channel) allow for ~unlimited, ~free, ~instant transactions across a p2p network of nodes off-chain

I think people equate Bitcoin with the blockchain and by that understanding I think the parent poster is correct. The current blockchain doesn't scale and isn't suitable for every tiny transaction.

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

#72

Post by nmca »

barnacs wrote: post #36

> How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction? https://lightning.network/ tl;dr: a network of off-chain, transitive payment channels. two on-chain transactions (to fund and settle channel) allow for ~unlimited, ~free, ~instant transactions across a p2p network of nodes off-chain

Or https://raiden.network/micro.html

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

#73

Post by Pica_soO »

colordrops wrote: post #51
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 -…

What is being missed by your analysis is that the value in a blockchain comes more from the network than the tech. There are thousands upon thousands of blockchains of no value. You could fork bitcoin or some other chain right now and start it on your laptop. Doesn't mean anything - the network is the value. So taking this into account, when the shackles of Bitcoin's simplicity and limitations become unbearable, the…

If humanity decides to walk the path of the worser tech, you can build a metropolis from diamond and light elsewhere as much as you want- nobody is going to migrate. They are going to pay outrageous sums, to upgrade the path the group is already heading down, the will pay to bribe and cast aside tech that holds them back. Alternative standards, no matter how pure and clean from a technical point of perspective, will be ignored.

Linux vs Windows allover, in fintech infrastructure and protocolls.

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

#74

Post by jstanley »

thisisit wrote: post #61

Two popular refrains on scaling: a. Block size - This was increased in bitcoin cash. What many people are not aware of is the paper 'Information propagation in the bitcoin network' by Decker and Wattenhofer in 2013. The average time for a block to be seen by a node is ~13 secs. As per the paper: "For blocks, whose size is larger than 20kB, each kilobyte costs an additional 80ms delay until a majority knows about the…

Anybody can run a lightning node. I intend to do so.

It's not like PayPal where if you want to pay using PayPal you have to use PayPal-the-company. With Lightning, if you want to pay using Lightning you can use any route you like over the Lightning Network to reach the recipient of the payment.

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

#77

Post by jstanley »

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…

> 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.

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

#78

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

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 -…

This is my thought as well, and I don't understand why it isn't more commonly stated. The sheer chances that the very first implementation of this technology turns out to not only be viable for long-term success, but is actually adopted as such, seems extraordinarily low.

There's what I call the "football" effect. The player jumps on the football after a fumble, and while he's the first to grab it, there's a handful of 250 pound guys about to jump on top of him.

Bitcoin is the first to the football, but over the long term I think it's going to get inevitably crushed.

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

#79

Post by moduspol »

Others 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, despite the heavy load.

To put it differently: A different online payment system could have stopped accepting transactions, or run out of resources, allow transactions it shouldn't have, disallow ones it should, or something else terrible. But Bitcoin didn't. If you wanted into the next block, you'd need to pay more, but that's (from a technical perspective) entirely by design.

What Bitcoin is proving is that it has clear and well-understood limits and continues to work well within them, and that's incredibly important for public perception. IMO, if Bitcoin's transaction capacity never scales, it'll still be a huge technological success. Other cryptocurrencies can try their hand at scaling, but Bitcoin needs to be rock solid to the extent possible for all cryptocurrencies' sake.

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

#80

Post by gruez »

lawn wrote: post #65

You are both right and wrong. There have been multiple attempts at scaling Bitcoin on-chain by raising the blocksize. They have all been unsuccessful because they have been blocked by the Core developers and their supporters using censorship, troll campaigns, ddos and abuse. It's not due to technical reasons but because they want to redirect scaling off-chain, using technology they coveniently develop. The very same…

>It's not due to technical reasons but because they want to redirect scaling off-chain, using technology they coveniently develop.

But how does that benefit them? Lightning network is open source, so it's not like they can make money on transaction fees.

Post reply on HN