| It's falling apart even more than anyone cares to admit: * Blocks are now so full that transactions have stopped flowing and there's no solutions that will address any of this without forcing any of the thousands of systems already built on top of Bitcoin to migrate = slow confirmations = massively higher fees * Slow confirmations for every day payments = credit card use-case somewhat ruled out * Double-spending is now a feature of Bitcoin = 0 confirms are now less secure (I understand the logic but its black and white. Instant payments should be possible but obviously zero confirms aren’t the way to do it.) * Horrible black and white thinking for seemingly everything in Bitcoin -- especially security -- whereby nobody can imagine a fail-safe system and the community blames anyone who loses their coins even though the Bitcoin protocol is inherently unsuitable for building fail-safe wallets. * Terrible user-experience on the protocol, infrastructure, and application levels. So much so that Bitcoin will likely never experience mainstream adoption for this reason. * Community has become a toxic circle jerk of investors who ignore any of Bitcoin's problems in favor of its myopic benefits in the hope that they can still ride the blockchain to the bank (somewhat literally.) * A hostile dev community that is so utterly clueless when it comes to real world business that their choices have managed to cripple the entire system. * Community is an echo chamber of ignorance that blindly believes that all advances outside of Bitcoin are traitorous, incorrect, and not worth knowing about; Outright hostile towards new users with an air of technology snobbery that makes the Linux community seem like a welcoming party at an Apple store. * The technology is inherently unscalable -- in fact, the only currently good plans for scaling Bitcoin involve not using it (No, I'm really not joking, that's literally what “off-chain” means) But the real problem here is really the fact that the development team have refused to increase the block size even though this was always intended in the design of Bitcoin by Satoashi and even though there are plenty of resources to do it. * Bitcoin is now more centralized than any dictatorship -- the development team have become controlled largely by a single corporation (meaning a single CEO -- we all know who) and mining pools have become so large that at any time the miners can collude to reverse recent transactions. Bitcoin has failed at every goal that it set for itself and the biggest issue out of all of this is the fact that the system can be so easily controlled by standard social engineering. If a decentralized system can be circumvented through moronic human and political means then it loses any advantage that it might have had by being decentralized. So philosophically and practically – Bitcoin has failed as both a consensus system and as an idea. In fact -- probably the biggest advance that Bitcoin made was in the use of smart contracts to enforce agreements which actually already existed prior to Bitcoin. So I think going forward banks will end up using Bitcoin-inspired technology but they will ignore its consensus system completely (which frankly sucks) and instead use what is now being referred to as "smart signatures" (or programmable signatures) as a way of enforcing complex agreements between institutions. Tl; dr; Bitcoin was an experiment that proved that certain things could be done better but it failed at a lot of things. It turns out that Bitcoin probably won't be the next Internet but it did make for quite an interesting ARPANET ... |
You understand that there's more data in the world than is practical for all of us to store... The solution is to pick and choose which pieces need to be globally visible (ie, on-chain) and which do not. When I play poker I don't wire-transfer the result of each hand, that's what the chips are for.
> Blocks are now so full that transactions have stopped flowing
You mean, near-zero fee transactions... Because blocks are being published, and they're full of transactions.
Nobody ever said it was going to be free, it's just been small enough to tolerate the odd free-rider. That phase is coming to an end.
> But the real problem here is really the fact that the development team have refused to increase the block size even though this was always intended in the design of Bitcoin by Satoashi and even though there are plenty of resources to do it.
If transactions were free why wouldn't I backup my photos into the blockchain?
If we expand the blocks now we'll just end up with the same amount of waste and the same whining. If we let the fee rise first, then expand the blocks to balance both fee and network cost, we'll end up with something stable.
Also, Satoshi was wrong about some things. Why are you trying to treat "him" like a god?
> A hostile dev community that is so utterly clueless when it comes to real world business that their choices have managed to cripple the entire system.
No, that's exactly backwards. Bitcoin is an open system, not a startup incubator. It's not bitcoin's responsibility to support your business, it's your business' responsibility to function on the infrastructure available. Going to large blocks would benefit some companies who don't like paying for infrastructure. It'd keep their free-ride going longer, but at the cost of all the other players.
> Community is an echo chamber of ignorance that blindly believes that all advances outside of Bitcoin are traitorous, incorrect, and not worth knowing about; Outright hostile towards new users with an air of technology snobbery that makes the Linux community seem like a welcoming party at an Apple store.
Well, if you're judging by the response you've gotten, there may be confounding factors your analysis has missed... What reaction should an anti-vaxxer receive at a medical-policy conference when they stand up and declare that science has failed, etc?