Average BCH fee: $0.0063
Average BTC fee: $4.12
So... increasing the block size worked?? I'm trying to understand why we built a whole complicated Layer 2 Lightning Network, with a basically impossible user experience and worse centralization issues, instead of just tweaking a configuration value?
Have you read [The Blocksize War](https://amzn.to/3vXF0CR)? (I haven't yet.)
From Ammous' book: Increased block sizes means more storage space needed for plebs to run nodes, leading to fewer nodes, leading to increased centralization, thus increasing possibility of a 51% attack. So the smaller blocksize is meant to improve decentralization of nodes, thus securing the network.
That's true, but only part of the story of the blocksize wars. Remember the winning side ("small blockers") also increased block size with segwit. This was much more a story of who controls the chain and what its purpose was than literally "should we tweak some config"
Make Alex Gleason a bitcoiner 2024 I’m here for this.
Increasing block size makes it more restrictive to run a full node and use bitcoin non-custodially. Lightning isn’t perfect but it does greatly increase transaction efficiency while keeping the ability for users to run nodes on the base layer
💯
I contest impossible user experience, have you tried phoenix or mutiny yet? Not perfect, but always improving and iterating towards something better
Centralization on L2+ is not ideal but sometimes can be acceptable. Centralization on the base layer, which larger block size will gradually do, is a no-go.
Help us make L2s better
The block size debate is more than just fees. We are already at 500-600 gbs of data at the current block size. If the block size is increased, like BCH, normal everyday people will eventually be priced out of contributing to the network due to the large amount of data storage required.
There's a lot of ground to cover to fully answer this question but here's a rough treatment of the major topics. I'm probably missing some stuff.
Increasing the block size sacrifices decentralization. It increases the cost to run a node, which (the thinking goes) will necessarily push some node runners to stop running a node and make the network as a whole more vulnerable to attacks. The bigger problem, IMO, is that it's a slippery slope. More on that later.
Bcashers thought keeping fees low to incentivize cheap payments was more important than keeping it easy to run a node. Bitcoin devs and users thought otherwise. Bcash forked off the chain and steadily increased the block size in subsequent forks. Today, bcash is more or less dead. Nobody uses it.
Another big issue is that coordinating a hard fork is very difficult. Bitcoin has an implicit guarantee to never hard fork if it can be avoided. (We'll have to hard fork within the next 100 years or so to fix an int overflow bug but there is no rush.) If we hard fork when fees get high this sets a very low bar. Next time fees go up again people will start clamoring for another block size increase, which weakens the network further by pushing more node runners out. We can see a variation of this dynamic at play on bitcoin twitter today with the folks who want to filter ordinals out of the mempool. Mempool filters are not a consensus change, so it wouldn't lead of a chain fork but it's a similar situation. If we change the bitcoin node software every time someone discovers a novel spam attack we will end up playing whack a mole forever and people will just stop using the mempool, which leads to centralization and eventually network capture.
Bitcoin must be antifragile in order to succeed in the long run. Making permanent changes in the face of temporary problems is the opposite of antifragile. Instead, we should be extremely cautious any time we introduce changes that might impact the carefully balanced incentives that make the whole system work.
fee price reflects demand.
At first i thought this was a joke... then i read it again... is this a serious question and you are not being sarcastic?
BCH has no one using it
BCH doesn’t actually give a fuck about decentralization
So yea you can go move pet rock BCH around if you want. Go all in on BCH and lmk how it goes.
Apples and oranges. You need to compare xaction costs in sats/vbyte for btc and shitsats/vbyte for bch
Been a very long debate that I cannot do justice by summarizing. Eventually things will need to be tweaked but BTC is not a quick adopter of changes.
Because of scaling. Increasing the block size to 10x gives use only a 10x scale, which is not very much in the great scheme. We need to go 10_000x and beyond, that's not achievable with block size only.
Block size increases kill the fee economy, if there isn't a similar increase in user transactions.
Can you elaborate on the impossible UX of lightning
