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Thought experiment.

If #BTC gets to 1 millie a coin. It will become more of an elite, high net worth protocol. It is too expensive for normal people.

The first best alternative is the same protocol, but with bigger blocks.

#BCH

Bare with me. A lot of smart people left BTC for BCH during the war. Maybe in future, the two can coexist. Maybe #BCH is the silver to #BTC's gold. Maybe... those smart people, who were/are true bitcoiners, did have a point to run the same protocol, but with a bigger block. Not as competition, but as addition.

What do you think? Is BCH bullish or is BCH bullshit.

mike 1y ago

Bitcoin has 100,000,000 Sats per coin and in Lightning you have millisatoshis, so there is no issue with price.

Layer 2's like lightning allow almost fee free instant payments and other L2's and sidechains solve lots of scaling issues.

BCH is not decentralised and only scales slightly greater than BTC.

Also, do you really need to keep every single transaction on a blockchain. i.e. does a coffee seller in Perth, Australia really need to keep a copy of a pizza seller selling a pizza in Rome 15 years earlier?

Fast payments have different needs to settlement layers.

I would suggest researching the banking RTGS (Real Time Gross Settlement System). It is the layer banks use for settlement between themselves and has a capacity of around 9 TPS. This is what I believe Bitcoin Layer is becoming with Layer 2's and sidechains providing faster payment solutions.

Personally, I see more of a case for Bitcoiners supporting a privacy coin such as Monero. Privacy is extremely important as we move forward and while Bitcoin has adopted several priavacy features during its evolution, Monero has priavacy baked in.

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Discussion

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

I agree with some of your points especially about privacy. Things like Client-side Validation, STARK proofs, Rollups, and MimbleWimble are interesting to me because they're much smaller, don't require storing all data forever, or even on-chain at all

But LN does comes with a lot of unique baggage that L1s don't have:

-requires funded channels to even receive or send to begin with (very inconvenient, unintuitive, and annoying)

-limited in the amount you can send without your transaction failing

-no static addresses or offline receiving

-can be force closed onto the base chain against your will (losing money and time)

-can be rugged if your node is offline (or the LSPs node that you are using)

You can use 0-confs for 99.9% of transactions on BCH for instant payments. It's much safer than 0-conf on BTC because they don't have Replace-By-Fee and stuck with first seen rule. BCH also has Double-Spend Proofs that make it much more difficult to double spend. I think BTC really fucked up going full RBF.

Decentralization is not a binary. Something can be decentralized enough to evade capture. There is also the question of diminishing returns. Does every single user really have to run a node? Most BTC users right now don't run nodes and I'm sure you consider nodes distributed enough. Where is the goldilocks zone? Small world network topologies are probably the best bang for buck

There's also different aspects of decentralization. For example, node software and consensus process for BCH is less centralized than BTC. There are 5 major node softwares that are used for BCH. While 99.9% of BTC nodes run Bitcoin Core and Core acts very much as defacto gatekeepers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network

https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/bitcoin/files/charts/software.html

mike 1y ago

Lightning is a shit show, but have you seen a banks mainframe COBOL code recently?

The difference between a bank and Lightning or any L2’s is a bank is trying to maintain a legacy system, whereas we are building a new paradigm.

While Bitcoin’s L1 poses a threat to all central authorities, then yes, the more individuals and companies that run a full node the better, same with mining.

Once we move from acceptance to adoption, then this can be scaled down, but maintaining strong decentralisation for the protocol, hardware, interested parties and the network remains important to prevent the protocol, which is all it is, being subverted by separate interested parties.

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

But I wasn't arguing that banking legacy systems are better than Lightning. I was comparing Lightning to L1s.

There is a range where node count is strongly decentralized and enough to escape any capture. Every additional node going beyond this range brings quickly diminishing returns. The number is not 1 node, but it's not every single user running a node either.

Was Bitcoin not decentralized a few years ago because it had less nodes? Is it not decentralized now because it will have more nodes in a few years?

mike 1y ago

I don't think you appreciated that I knew that you weren't arguing that banking legacy systems are better than Lightning and that you were comparing Lightning to L1s.

I don't think you appreciated that I agreed with all your points or that I still do.

I was making different points.

You are trying to argue in a consensus. This is a nuance of the byzantine generals problem that Satoshi solved.

I don't want to replace the whisper protocol with a shout protocol.

We are the same.

Saberhagen The Nameless 1y ago

Ok, maybe it was I who misunderstood what you were saying. My bad!