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𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖

We should look to improve the tech. Are bigger blocks or spam removal better tech?

mike 4mo ago 💬 2

Spam is an opinion. My view is Bitcoin is money, that has nothing to do with cat JPEGs. Others have different opinions.

Blocksize determines transactions per second.

Currently Bitcoin runs at a maximum of around 7 TPS.

You can compare this to the banking system, who make settlements internally mostly using RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement), this has a max throughput of 9 TPS.

If you want Bitcoin to be the world’s settlement layer, then its current capacity is sufficient.

If you want the world to use it to settle any transaction size, then 7 TPS will not be enough.

Currently Lightning is good up to about 1M Sats.

RTGS generally operates at millions of dollars.

In the future it is unlikely this gap will reduce as BTC price increases.

I think this is going to be a problem.

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mike 4mo ago

* gap will increase

𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 4mo ago 💬 2

Is it a problem for now or later?

mike 4mo ago

Right now, the mempool is mostly empty, you have freedom of choice to use Lightning or mainchain.

Later, who knows.

I recently heard about the Ark protocol, which is an interesting development.

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𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 4mo ago 💬 2

Looks interesting. In its current form, there needs to be a lot of trust on lightning.

What's your thoughts on banks not advancing into the custodial space so slowly? Are they like the music industry and in denial of the future?

mike 4mo ago 💬 1

I think they are advancing.

My bank is Xapo, a Bitcoin bank.

My original bank is Barclays, which is to customers extremely hostile to Bitcoin despite buying it for its own balance sheet.

Game theory wins, you are obliged to play a game that disadvantages you, because not playing it disadvantages you further

mike 4mo ago

Also, everything goes in circles, we are re-fighting the encryption and privacy battles from the 1990's that PGP and Phil Zimmermann won, so many banks will continue to fight this and ultimately loose.

And the path to victory is never smooth.

𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 4mo ago 💬 2

Thanks for sharing your thoughts Mike. Game theory is a bitch. Haha.

I was thinking that stocks would need to adopt a bitcoin treasury, but it seems like it would really only be a temporary reprieve for stocks. The end game is they should get mostly demonetised and provide only benefits to owners/workers. What's your thoughts?

mike 4mo ago

Everything in the fiat system is going to collapse, Bitcoin is going to replace it, in the same way the Internet replaced fax machines.

Until a couple of years ago, Internet fax gateways still existed, however.

Most companies have tangible value and their share price should reflect this, as fiat becomes increasingly unable to do this, share prices will be shown in Sats.

In countries with hyper inflation, such as the Lebanon, people still use the currency on a day to day basis, but as soon as they received payment for their goods, they transfer that local currency into a more stable asset such as dollars, or in the Crypto world, Tether or Bitcoin.

What surprised me about observing these countries is that hyperinflation is no longer an end game, it simply enforces a different coping strategy.

𝕞𝕪𝕡𝕒𝕥𝕙𝕥𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕣𝕖 4mo ago 💬 1

Yes, I'm thinking Argentina will become the norm. Visiting the bank to swap pesos is fun apparently.

mike 4mo ago

Something to do at the weekend I suppose 😂

mike 4mo ago 💬 8

It's important to remember the original argument as it evolves over time.

In war, the winner takes it all and the looser is evil personified.

The blocksize wars, were not originally against large blocks. Small blockers (devs) were against making the requirements to run a node outside the scope of an enthusiast to run at home for a couple of hundred dollars.

Zooming out further, historians accurately corrected the "Blocksize wars" name to be the "Fork wars", whereby the small blockers prevented miners from activating a soft fork to allow larger blocks. If you could permit soft forks, then you can recover lost coins like Ethereum, or, worse still, increase the 21M Coin limit.

Zooming out further, as the smaller blockers won the war, while managing to increase the blocksize from 1 - 2MB, while increasing it further to 4MB of compressed storage using SegWit.

SegWit led to Taproot which led to the ability to create Ordinals, or Bitcoin NFTs, or as many people call it Spam.

Thus the blocksize war itself, had unintended consequences of creating the current OP_RETURN war which is trying to reclaim the small blocks for transactions, which have precious little space available as it is.

In the blocksize war, we made increasing the block size an act of pure evil. I suggest it isn't. I suggest that while we ensure that it is possible for most people to be able to run their own node, increasing the blocksize within that limit is perhaps desirable if you wish to close the gap between Lightning payments and on chain transactions.

Currently there is no apparent issue, but as Bitcoin adoption progresses, there is going to be a gap between the liquidity potential of Lightning and the minimum viable transaction value for the mainchain.

I have recently become aware of the Ark protocol, which appears an interesting option, but it is yet another attempt at making transaction space available.

But the real question is should we consider the ultimate heresy of increasing the blocksize?

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