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

91–100 of 501 posts

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

#91

Post by solotronics »

kybernetikos wrote: post #11
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 -…

> it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.

It has evolved to be a store of value and it's doing an amazing job at that. Thinking from the perspective of the developers (many of whom have very large amounts of BTC) a slow and deliberate rate of changes is a very good thing. Making a mistake here would mean hundreds of billions of dollars would be lost. I am all for other cryptos moving quickly and breaking things to test out new ideas. Who in their right mind would take the same mentality on Bitcoin?

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

#92

Post by hbosch »

kybernetikos wrote: post #11
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 -…

> it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.

In fairness (I'm personally not a Bitcoin supporter) from the outside, it seemed more like the problem is no one can agree on who should be pushing changes and innovation: Core Dev or the coalition of miners?

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

#93

Post by zrm »

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…

> What is being missed by your analysis is that the value in a blockchain comes more from the network than the tech.

That is the reason why anyone can't just create a new coin and expect everyone else to value it, but that doesn't mean there can't be any viable competitors. And if a competitor with a sufficient advantage got popular enough, it could take the lead.

For example, the hack Bitcoin used to become popular was to be deflationary, which encourages speculation. That got the value up before it was cool, but it stays deflationary -- even gets more so -- once it's popular, and the consequent speculation causes high volatility. Once you're popular, being deflationary becomes a liability instead of an asset.

It's possible for a coin not to be deflationary and have the supply set by computing costs. If the value of the coin falls below the energy cost of creating them, people stop creating more of them and the value stabilizes there (so it doesn't keep going down). But as demand for the coin increases the value rises above the threshold and people start mining again (so it doesn't keep going up).

That stability would be a huge advantage. But it's not possible to convert Bitcoin to that because its deflationary nature is priced into its value. Making it non-deflationary would make it worthless to speculators, which would eliminate most of its current valuation.

So all it would take is for a non-deflationary coin to become popular enough for people to trust it not to disappear overnight and the people using it for transactions rather than speculation would prefer it over Bitcoin.

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

#94

Post by Shaanie »

thatcat wrote: post #85
mchristen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of blocks is not core to the algorithm of Bitcoin though. What would you say to the person trying to send $30 only to have $20 of it eaten up in fees? Come back later when you can afford to use Bitcoin?

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.

Indeed, what part of the name "cryptocurrency" would lead someone to believe it to be like cash?

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

#95

Post by solotronics »

magnat wrote: post #86
jstanley wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you run your own LN node, your channel is associated with your IP, and your transactions are associated with your channel. It is the same as reusing a single bitcoin address for all your transactions, with all the consequences [1], except this time you can tracked down to your physical location. In vanilla bitcoin you can at least generate addresses at will, while opening and closing payment channels every now and…

if you don't want your IP associated you can host anything on a cloud provider, run it through a tunnel, VPN, or TOR.

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

#96

Post by laurus »

jstanley wrote: post #77
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.

> It doesn't come from either of those things.

Yes it does. You have to pay your taxes in U.S. dollars, so people have to use it. That's one of the purposes of taxes: so that the government-issued currency is used.

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

#97

Post by lawn »

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.

> Widespread Bitcoin adoption would require more energy for mining coins than the entire world can currently produce.

No. Bitcoin could work exactly the same even without any more hash power, or energy consumption, ever being added.

This is because mining is only a competition to produce a block and defines the security of Bitcoin. But it has no bearing on how many transactions the network can process.

Any scaling that happens is completely orthogonal.

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

#98

Post by omg_ketchup »

Klinky wrote: post #90
tenaciousDaniel wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's also something called "first mover advantage", which kind of contradicts your "football effect". There have been a ton of altcoins created, none of which have crushed Bitcoin. Bitcoin is still holding on to the football quite handily.

Also, the first person to jump on the football does get possession of the ball for the team, so there's that.

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

#99

Post by lawn »

cwyers wrote: post #14
MichaelBurge wrote: post #5

It's not really designed to handle every little transaction. I would expect it to be used by exchanges and banks as a settlement layer, with most transactions happening off-chain. It's a mistake to look at recent news, because this has been known since the very beginning.

There is a thread on the site with the original Bitcoin paper right now. The first sentence of the abstract: > A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution. A peer-to-peer network without going through a financial institution. The design was certainly intended to scale up to large numbers of sma…

There is a group of people who want to alter the purpose of Bitcoin away from the original goal away from "p2p cash" to purely a "store of value".

The design can of course support more transactions than it currently does but that is being worked against by this group.

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

#100

Post by douglaswlance »

mchristen wrote: post #81
moduspol wrote: post #79

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,…

The size of blocks is not core to the algorithm of Bitcoin though. What would you say to the person trying to send $30 only to have $20 of it eaten up in fees? Come back later when you can afford to use Bitcoin?

Trade smaller amounts with a different token.

Bitcoin, as it stands now, is a value store, not an everyday currency.

You wouldn't buy your lunch with a sliver of gold. You'd use paper. Bitcoin is gold. Other tokens are paper currency.

Post reply on HN