You do you - but I believe they’re required scaling solutions so that governments doesn’t create an L2 or synthetic US dollar and CBDC’s and suppress Bitcoin price through derivatives forever. Similar to gold.
The game is much bigger than most realize and this is an important part
of ensuring #Bitcoin wins.
I think the most important thing is decentralization. Everyone should have a #Bitcoin node (and maybe a mixer :)) and a solo miner. Keeps the network strong and transaction fees low. Just like the early computers were hand assembled and complicated in the 1980s, similar to the nodes and solo miners today, someone will create a beautiful device that’s simple to use. All integrated including as a payment capability. That’s where the future lies imho.
Fedimint and ecash will surely offer solution for certain cohorts but they require trust that is not acceptable to many bitcoiners. People are predictable - there will be rug pulls and until we figure out a way to validate and audit mints it is very foggy solution at best
shit just gets more and more complex and more and more trust in third parties is needed. Increasing the blocksize regularly and adapting to technological progress seems like such an easy and elegant solution in comparison...
We’ve been there already and no that is not the solution. No blocksize can put everybody on blockchain nor it should. It would only centralize everything and we’ll be at the same place rethinking scaling with just enormous remorse.
Money is layered system and that is the only proper thing to do. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Things have to get very complicated before they become simple 😉
Just take a look at what Satoshi did - he took couple of very complicated things and combined them in very simple way
Bitcoin is centralized already with only 12 entities controlling the mining and block templates. Lightning is terribly centralized as everybody uses custodial wallets. Not your keys, not your coins.
Start thinking for yourself instead of repeating the lines from 2017.
We did get to vote. Me selling BCH after the fork was a vote.
You need to understand the incentives better. No one ever promised 1 sat/vB fees and your equation does not take into account miners incentives. On the other hand 90% of the world can not afford couple hundred dollar equipment for a node.
But the most important thing to understand is that for blockchain to compete with traditional rails we need blocks to be larger than 1Gb and that is by current metric where half of the world is not banked so if you wanna bank everyone you need huge blocks and that fucks up everything. So back to my initial point - no blocksize can put everyone on the blockchain
It's not easy or elegant.
It's a hard fork that most of us aren't willing to support because we understand the long term costs. If you make it considerably more costly to run a node, say 10x, then you get significantly fewer nodes, more centralization, less resistance to future hostile changes, & you create a compounding risk of future network fragility if some significant portion of nodes get eliminated & have to resync from zero in order to secure the network. And for what?! 10x txn capacity does nothing in terms of the problem of putting everyone's coffee purchases on chain.
This debate has been had 1000 times & was already settled during the blocksize war. It's ridiculous how often these basic things have to be repeated.
Repeating things does not make them true though. Also nothing was settled, we never voted for a "forever 1 mb limit" in 2017. And a lot was promised in 2017 but very little was delivered.
The 1mb limit is ridiculous, a 12TB hdd costs around $100, if one wants to run a node and does not want to spend a few hundred bucks for that, he should not run one.
The result of that limit is that fewer people can afford onchain fees, self hosted lightning also gets unattractive due to high fees and most people are pushed into custodial lightning wallets, which offer zero privacy, zero sovereignty, full dependency from a third party and soon KYC and AML.
Without offering sovereignty and privacy, BTC gets integrated into the banking system and we win nothing
Transactions rarely cost more than a few dollars. We need better ways to trustlessly share UTXOs so that they can cost $1000+ because they probably will at some point.
The ~4mb limit has nothing to do with the cost of a harddrive.
It already costs a couple hundred dollars to buy the hardware needed to run a node. Storage & computational demands have grown & will continue to do so.
Lopp has written about past efforts to sync an ETH node from zero, which took weeks when everything went right & it repeatedly failed. Do you understand how fragile the network becomes if downloading & verifying everything takes that long & any significant number of nodes gets wiped out?
If only Google & Visa can run nodes then we have just recreated the Fed banks. They can change the rules & the supply however they see fit.
The cost of running a node gets exponentially larger as the number of nodes shrinks. Everyone who uses bitcoin has to connect to a node, what happens when the number of leechers massively outweighs the number of seeders? What does that do to the cost of seeding info?
When only BTC rich people can use it in a self sovereign way, we just recreated the banking system.
Why should everybody suffer high transaction fees, even for lighning onboarding, because some dude with a shitty internet connection wants to run a full node out of his moms basement on a raspberry pie?
What does that do to the cost of a transaction?
It's a provably honest court system for ownership of wealth. It's not for everyday transactions. The base layer offers millions of dollars worth of security with just a couple of confirmations. Nothing you do where you would throw away the receipt should ever be done onchain.
Pi hardware already isn't great for running a node. My node was $1500. How much do you think it should cost?
What happened to not your keys not your coins?
There will be keys at different layers with different risk/trust profiles. There is really no other way to solve the problem.
How do you know there is no other way? Which ways have we tested on a large scale already so we can be sure this is the only way? Serious question
Because every blockchain with meaningful adoption that has tried to do more txns on the base layer has still ended up with massive txn costs & because of their choices about base layer capacity they became centralized.
And the only reason it hasn't happened to bitcoin is that it is much harder to change. So how else are you going to add capacity if not in layers?
Even Hal suggested bitcoin banks would be necessary. But hopefully we will have something like shared UTXOs backing L2 blockchains which are networked via Lightning, so that everyone gets their own virtual UTXO & doesn't have to depend on trusting people too much.
That is just not true. Monero has adaptive block size and works very well. Even BCH works well and has low fees.
I am not proposing scaling on chain only, but sticking to the 1MB limit while technology progresses is just stupid and in the end, will make BTC a failed project.
The reason Monero & BCH work is because no one uses them. The more people do, the more centralized they become, just like we saw with ETH.
Bitcoin fairly regularly has blocks larger than 2mb. And the amount of transactions made in bitcoin is orders of magnitude larger than any shitcoin, most transactions just take place on Lightning & other layers.
Not necessarily true. All depends on rate of adoption and rate of consumer tech advancements/protocol improvements which is a risk for any crypto if the former surpasses the latter.
If Bitcoin ever has a steep enough rate of adoption it would fail too. We get glimpses of this every time transactions go crazy like a few months ago. Even Lightning barely works when that happens.
Last part definitely isn't true. Litecoin and Doge regularly surpasses Bitcoin in transactions and Ethereum is always way ahead.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-doge-ltc.html#1y
Except that I make 100x the number of txns on Lightning as I do onchain (as do most regular users & major businesses now) & that doesn't show on the chart you posted. Hedgehog channels are being added which will improve LN performance in all conditions. Eventually most transactions will be happening in fediments or arks that are networked via LN so onchain fee conditions won't matter for common use.
The interesting thing about that chart is that ETH has completely centralized even though they only process about double the number of transactions as base layer BTC. And in terms of the global txn capacity issue they haven't solved anything. That chart actually looks to me like proof that Bitcoiners are right.
Didn't you just mention Ecash as the solution in your last reply? Isnt ecash centralized and ruggable?
You guys are blinded by hate for other crypto without seeing trade offs (EXCEPT WHEN IT COMES TO BITCOIN LAYERS!!! THEN ITS OK!!!). If I slapped on the word "Bitcoin" onto anything piece of trash and started making the podcast rounds and spitting buzzwords yall would gobble it up whatever it was
Competitive ecash pools where no one needs to hold any money for any length of time & no one ever needs to put all of their money, are a great additional options. Why is it that you can't tell the difference between a weak foundation & some optional thing that makes reasonable tradeoffs?
Oh now trade offs are okay just not with an other crypto lmao
All your caveats sounds like this
Foundation vs an extra option that isn't required
Comments like this make it clear none of you are arguing in good faith. You aren't even trying to understand.
Yea, they even cheer for Liquid, a privately owned sidechain which is under full control of a federation and which earns all the fees..
Gigablockers: will centralize because few are willing or can afford to run a massive node
Microblockers: will centralize because why would anyone run a node for a network they can't afford to use?
Hal said a lot of things
Nonsense. If it's easy to run a node & doing so allows people to ensure that the rules of our monetary court system cannot be changed, then even if it costs $1000+ dollars to go to court people will run nodes.
If your vUTXOs or L2 txns depend on the validity of base layer UTXOs then it still makes sense to run a node which monitors the entire Bitcoin stack relevant to your money.
If you could run software that would audit the Fed or financial system today, you wouldn't?
Why tf is someone going to run a node for a network they can't afford to use?
Do you guys ever listen to yourself?
Not even most Bitcoiners run their own nodes and fees are relatively cheap right now (imagine if global adoption ever happens). There are only ~20,000 bitcoin nodes (or ~50,000 depending how you want to measure it). Unless you think there are only that many Bitcoin users in the world?
So you wouldn't run a node to audit the Fed right now?
The problem is that retards like you don't understand that bitcoin is trying to solve a $200trillion global money supply problem, not a fucking coffee txn problem. The coffee txns may be solved with other layers, but making coffee transactions better isn't going to set the world free if govts can still enslave everyone by printing trillions of dollars.
The higher value problem gets priority if we want to make the world better in the biggest way.
You don't have to call me a retard just because I don't agree with you
No I wouldn't run a node to audit the Fed because I wouldn't be using the US Dollar if every transaction was hundreds of dollars in fees to use it (Bitcoins future with more adoption as we see EVERY TIME USAGE INCREASES). No one would.
So do you think there are only 20,000-50,000 or so Bitcoin users in the world right now?
If no, then why isn't even a fraction of them running a node right now? Why is Bitcoin considered to still be decentralized right now even though hardly any of them run a node? Not anywhere close to all users wants or needs to run a node for a network to avoid capture and be decentralized.
Ironically the coffee txn is what 99% of the world cares about. How cheaply and easily they can use their money. That's why most of the global south is using USDT on cheap networks.
Not understanding that preventing monetary debasement is the whole point actually makes you literally retarded. Your ignorance seems to be so complete that you don't even know that you don't know enough to have an opinion.
Go read Meltdown by Tom Woods or The Creature From Jekyll Island or Layered Money or The Bitcoin Standard or The Fiat Standard or anything about Austrian Economics & money.
The genisis block message about Bitcoin being in response to bank bailouts wasn't some sort of random accident. Jfc.
The headline of the whitepaper says p2p digital currency, that wasn't some accident either...
If we rely on trusted third parties, we will have monetary debasement.
No one is saying we should rely on trusted 3rd parties
Insults are not arguments I thought Jeff Swann would know better than that
Yes, I know plenty about monetary debasement and austrian econ and I listen to Tom Woods regularly. You don't have some special esoteric knowledge. You can have decentralized, predictable, and PoW issuance that has none of those things in common with fiat.
Bitcoin is a global court system for proving ownership of wealth. Going to court may cost $1000+ but a court that cannot be cheated & provides a receipt with millions of dollars worth of protection almost immediately & billions pretty quickly is not for doing things where you would naturally just throw the receipt away.
You are not thinking about these things properly & you do not seem to understand the scope of the problem.
There will be as many more transactions in bitcoin as there are individual internet requests today vs phone calls in the 80s. So making blocks bigger CANNOT even begin to solve the problem. It's like standing in front of the ocean & I have a cup & you have a bucket & you are talking about how much more of the ocean yours holds. It makes no difference.
Bitcoin is a broadcast network. The overwhelming majority of payments MUST be done on a unicast layer. This is not up for debate. It's just basic reality. Whether you understand it or not is your problem.
You still havent answered the question either
"So do you think there are only 20,000-50,000 or so Bitcoin users in the world right now?
If no, then why isn't even a fraction of them running a node right now? Why is Bitcoin considered to still be decentralized right now even though hardly any of them run a node? Not anywhere close to all users wants or needs to run a node for a network to avoid capture and be decentralized."
I don't want everyone to run a node, I want most to be able to run a node so that the ratio of users to node runners improves rather than gets worse.
BTC number go up people think its necessary to run a node on a $50 raspberry pie while paying $80 for a transaction.
Also who cares much about nodes when 12 entities control BTC mining and transaction templates?
Or that people can not self custody their coins because of way too high fees? Without that, BTC is worthless.
Isn't ecash the synthetic bitcoin that is used to suppress the price forever?
they just have to spin up the most credible mint and normies will go for it.
particularly since non credible mints will rug people.
Fractional reserve will always find a way.
Be it through CEX, through ETFs, through mints...
Monero already mastered it. All other coins including Bitcoin are about to be exposed to it for the first time (not counting MT.Gox and FTX).
Protocol level privacy is the only solution.
as far as i understand it, ecash has nothing to do with bitcoin at all. you can say you back it with whatever you want as it is backed by nothing at all, you can create an endless amount of ecash.
There are some Proof of Reserve schemes that people have been kicking around for a while. That would be hard proof that the mint has the BTC (or whatever).
Also Calle has this Proof of Liabilities scheme.
https://gist.github.com/callebtc/ed5228d1d8cbaade0104db5d1cf63939
Ideas... none of them are implemented anywhere yet as far as I know.
LN is really the only promising L2 at the moment. It is also cryptographically bound to L1.
People should be very skeptical to everything else at the moment and be ready to reject even if promoted by the people they respect.
I am really interested in eCash (and by extension both Fedimint and Cashu), but even Calle is clear that eCash is not "scaling" in the true sense of the word since you are giving up custody.
Perhaps semantics to a degree.
Thanks Jeff
