The question that has been on my mind lately is “is there any really reason why bitcoin have to be locked into the hardware and bandwidth standard of 2008 as we progress into the future if Moore’s law continues to compress storage and expand bandwidth exponentially?”
Or, put differently, can technology solve the “Blockchain Trilemma” at some point in the future?
In my opinion the blocksize can be increased over time, but by a small factor each time. And it should only increase if blocks are constantly full. We already had a blocksize increase with segwit and it was fine for the network.
what if the main issue is how utxo sets are handled rather than the size of the block?
There is a limit on the optimizations that can be made until we hit the limit wall again in the future. If you want to be completely sovereign, you must be able to own an utxo and move it onchain at some point, all other options requires permission, or break under onchain high fees.
I’ve also thought about this. But it’s important to also be as geographically distributed as possible as well, so a node running in a remote part of the world is just as important as one running in NYC.
The easier that is over time also helps distribute the network as it currently is over time as well.
So while possible, it may be decades down the road and multiple factors of adoption before that makes sense. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
True, spreading geographically is important, but people won't run nodes, if they can't use or own onchain funds, because of high fees, we will them them to trust in something like a fedimint, so why can't we tell them own your bitcoin onchain if you want and use a community owned node shared by many?
Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out, or how we’ll even view money 100 or 1000 years from now. Like, it’s a pure money that humans have never had.
In the meantime, it may turn into an uncle Jim model. Which I guess is still better than trusting your banker, visa/mc, the police, the justice system, the fed, the government, etc.
But bitcoin will reprice everything. So the more people adopt it, the more things like nodes will be cheaper to own and run by those that own bitcoin. Which eventually will be everyone. Like anytime I see how bitcoin is being used in Africa, I have this feeling they’re going to just leapfrog the world in so many ways if adoption and mining continues there.
I also have a different take on fees being “high”, as they’re just a reflection of the market at any given time. We also equate it with fiat relativity, yet they’re paid in sats. I think humans will adapt to the pure efficiency that is that fee market, and will be longer term thinkers.
Again, it’ll just be a giant psychological shift and no one really knows how it’ll play out.
