[nlperguiy]

Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem.

Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol.

Bitcoin is currently not usable as currency, and is of course, not store of wealth - thing is not a liquid asset at all.

Proposed scaling solutions were scientific research years ago, and research is still being done. The implementation obviously takes years to finetune and the scaling solution might not work as well as research predicted.

All other coins are early stage tech and research too.

People were enjoying the tech when it was less popular and seemed like magic, now when big numbers come into play it is obvious things where blown out of proportion way too early.

[0wing]

  Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't 
  solved its scaling problem.

It's almost 10 years old, and they knew about blocksize bandwidth limitations early on. Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. Petty bickering and control of the main discussion forums by a very small group of people (owners of bitcointalk, moderators of /r/bitcoin and blockstream investors and marketing team) shifted the goal posts and gave talking points to divert the concerns over technical limitations and possible solutions with no real implementations for years.

The proposed lightening network is based on an unsolved problem in computer science (routing optimization, LN thus maintains a map of all nodes be broadcast to all nodes), not to mention the LN design would rely heavily on centralized hubs of "liquidity providers" i.e. paypal style KYC payment processors - completely antithetical to the concept of "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". LN conveniently favors large centralized liquidity provider payment hubs as the siphon for fees, which only becomes palatable when the alternative is excessive fees to miners on the underlying network.

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

and they've been claiming it's just around the corner since 2015: https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712

  Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental 
  scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not 
  to forced by protocol.

This is false.

Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users.

Bitcoin is suffering from a toxic cult like community, and questionable developer team.

Other crypto-currencies are working on solving the issues while BTC is being sold off to fund LN investors.

[gizmo686]

Lets say a bitcoin transaction takes 250 bytes on average. Visa processes 24,000 transactions per second. To scale to this level, the bitcoin blockchain would need to grow at a rate of about 5.7mb/s. This is a blocksize of about 3.3 gigabytes.

Growing the blocksize is not a sustainable way to scale bitcoin. This is why people are saying that Bitcoin is still not a mature technology; the problems associated with scaling it are still unsolved problems of computer science.

[CyberDildonics]

First, the 24,000 /s is the maximum throughput. The real number from visa themselves is about 2,000.

Second, the Bitcoin unlimited team has already tested and demonstrated gigabyte blocks. That would be about 1.6MB per second. This is already achievable with a $12 per month VPS, far less than a single btc transaction.

[gizmo686]

Cool project. I found this [0] talk on the matter.

I am still working through it, but it seems that with (somewhat optimized) current software they hit 10 minute propagation time at 1GB blocksize, with about 500tx/s (t=4549).

EDIT: This experient is also still young. As of the November 2017 talk I linked, they were using 4-6 miner nodes, and a UTXO pool simmilar to the current network (to the point where the presented would not even give numbers for memory and disk IO because he viewed them as not relevent to what would really be seen).

I submitted the linked talk to HN. Comments at [1]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDF8bOEqXt4&feature=youtu.be...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16012746

[anonymous5133]

Still, scaling by block size increase is still a legitimate way to scale. Right now we don't need visa level scaling. We simply need a little more room to keep transaction fees at a reasonable level. Luckily we have bitcoin cash that we can use that has higher capacity.

[notsrg]

Luckily you could use literally any other cryptocurrency that anyone isn't using to get fast tx's and low fees.

[monort]

6 MB/s is trivial for cheap servers and doable for a lot of personal connections (outside US) right now, you shouldn't even wait for Moore's law to catch up.

In 2016 Visa made 86 billion transactions, that is average of ~2600 per second, one magnitude less, than you expected.

[agorabinary]

1. LN works on testnet right now.

2. Bitcoin without LN isn't nearly worth its valuation, but bitcoin with LN is worth many times its current valuation so we're settled somewhere in the middle.

3. I'm inclined to trust Brahm Cohen more than your flawed analysis of LN routing: https://medium.com/@bramcohen/in-this-analysis-nodes-arent-b...

[0wing]

1. If LN works to scale, it should be deployed. It's not, and has not for years.

2. You have absolutely no way to accurately verify or anticipate that claim.

Feel free to provide a retort to my claim that Bitcoin is flawed from Satoshi's implementation and upon examination of the computer science and codebase behind BTC, the false equivalence to gold and store of value will fail as it becomes obsolete to something else.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15991762

3. Brahm Cohen is suggesting a prerequisite of 3 escrow deposits, which would require 6 transaction fees.

This is a bizarre answer to the article he was responding to, as it fails to avoid the gravitation towards payment processor style hubs.

  Also there’s nothing wrong with long routes. They settle 
  out in the middle just fine, despite the author’s 
  dismissiveness to the possibility that they can.

With Brahm's prerequisite, the LN will still be diverted towards the single large payment processor style hubs which can supply enough liquidity to open up routes and deposits with many other users.

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

[agorabinary]

1. LN is not deployed because it is conservatively developed like all development in a space with $500B on the line.

2. My claim is simply that Bitcoin is worth significantly more with LN than without? You then take a more preliminary argument that Bitcoin is worthless to begin with, which is laughable.

3. 6 on-chain transaction fees that support millions of off-chain payments. And your hub argument is a feature of a distributed network itself, not of LN in particular. Say a "hub" emerges and starts charging fees. Market competition paired with efficient routing solves this easily.

If you don't understand Brahm's argument, I suggest reading through it again. He's a pretty smart guy when it comes to distributed networks.

[nlperguiy]

> This is false.

What is false? Are you saying it is governed as a product? Incremental scaling improvements are research fun projects that are not being forced on developers (that are the users of bitcoin protocol). No one forced SegWit, I'm pretty sure Schnorr signatures will not be a hard fork too.

Any kind of rational organization making a good product would get out of an extreme situation as this one is with a hard fork.

Microsoft, probably the best example of how to do backwards compatibility, decided to force Win8 on everyone because, obviously, managing old software was an issue. Just like managing transactions with uncompressed keys is, yet there's still plenty of them being added to the chain today.

Bitcoin is obviously a vehicle for intellectual stimulation first, Bitcoin as a product is out of the view. I mean, you have core developers optimizing validation code on CPU (who needs that thing to be 4x faster now, anyway?) and doing heavy refactoring for segwit, braintickling over schnorr for months, coming up with ways to do confidential transactions, doing bulletproofs to reduce the size of confidential transactions, doing prototypes of that research etc.

There's obviously no long-term scaling solution in sight, this is all still very early research.

[Karrot_Kream]

> It's almost 10 years old

In the world of science, that's nothing.

> Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB.

"They"? Who is this mystical "they"? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy Satoshi added the limit early on and defended it as a deterrent to spamming the network.

> The proposed lightening network is an unsolved problem in computer science

Nobody brought up the Lightning Network, but it seems like you have an axe to grind here.

> This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users.

I agree with this, I think Bitcoin governance has become overly political and increasingly territorial, with a cult-like worship of a sets of devs (and you belong in one cult or the other).

That being said, I have great faith in the implementation of blockchain based contracts and currency overall, even if Bitcoin is just one step on the long chain of its evolution.

[0wing]

  Re: [PATCH] increase block size limit
  Satoshi
  October 04, 2010, 07:48:40 PM

  It can be phased in, like:


  if (blocknumber > 115000)
    maxblocksize = largerlimit


  It can start being in versions way ahead, so by the time 
  it reaches that block number and goes into effect, the 
  older versions that don't have it are already obsolete.


  When we're near the cutoff block number, I can put an 
  alert to old versions to make sure they know they have to 
  upgrade.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

[tptacek]

In the world of computer science, 10 years is something like 3.3x the span of time between Altavista and Google. It's the span of time between the original spinning-hard-disk iPod and the iPhone 4S. It's approximately the time it took for AWS to go from zero to where it is today.

[jstanley]

But Bitcoin isn't a parallel to AWS. Bitcoin is a parallel to the first working implementation of virtualization.

[0wing]

No, Bitcoin is a parallel to distributed computing and databases.

PoW blockchains like Bitcoin only work by attempting to increase the capital cost of write access to the database. PoW blockchains purposefully waste as much computing power as possible and the transaction speed remains limited just the same even as computing power is added.

[gizmo686]

The compute power wasted is unrelated to the number of transactions. The only point of wasting the compute power is to be able to say that "this block has X compute backing it". If you do that, the security of bitcoin does not care how much is contained within the block.

[Jasper_]

> In the world of science, that's nothing.

The Apple App Store came out in June 2008, 9 years ago. From the fart buttons topping the charts, entire companies and business models have been found and Bitcoin is still stuck. They're not making progress.

[ashelmire]

Bitcoin is not new or early stage in software terms. Node.js is just as old. Bitcoin cannot be saved. It's a commodity, and it was only a conceptual project from the very beginning.

Blockchain and the concepts around it, on the other hand, are existing tech that can be used in many sustainable ways to create distributed ledgers and other things that do not have to share the same problems (although many people are on the get rich quick plan by requiring mining, ICOs, and other plans that only reward creators and early adopters).

[nlperguiy]

Bitcoin is not just software.

Research behind implementing Schnorr signatures, lightning network, confidential transactions, efficient confidential transactions (bulletproofs), is bleeding edge research in cryptography mixed with whole bunch of other fundamentals.

Nodejs required practically no academic research while bitcoin needs it heavily today still.

https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf

For example, you have papers like above being published in the context of bitcoin. 60 pages of untrivial math, and that's just one idea of how to scale bitcoin.

[CryptoPunk]

>>Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem.

It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit.

Like you said, it's an experiment, and the experiment should have been allowed to play out along the original roadmap of large blocks. Hopefully the Bitcoin Cash fork will succeed where Bitcoin Core failed.

[nlperguiy]

> It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit.

Okay. The blocksize is raised and now people find new uses when the thing scales better. Streaming money is one such use case. Now you raise the blocksize to a level that needs to support streaming money, now it's so big that your ASICs cannot validate all the incoming blocks, blockchain grows faster than validation.

How to fix the problem now?

Blocksize is a temporary solution to a current popularity issue. Let's just let the hype die a little bit, so there's time to find a proper solution.

If Internet issues were solved by meddling with topology or adding more cable we'd get no where near the current efficient protocols.

[CryptoPunk]

If your definition of a solution is "infinite scale", then it will never solve the scaling problem. In the meantime, potentially huge improvements in scale from raising the block size limit to much higher but still sane values, that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted.

In other words: even if raising the block size limit doesn't provide a solution for infinite scale, it could potentially still provide significant benefits, yet Bitcoin Core doesn't want to try it to find out.

[nlperguiy]

> that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted

I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.

As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions.

People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.

[CryptoPunk]

>>There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase.

There's only one way to find out. This is what Satoshi said on the issue:

>“Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification (section 8) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.

>The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

>If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal."

Satoshi Nakamoto Sun, 02 Nov 2008 17:56:27 -0800 https://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg09...

Bitcoin is an experiment with many economic participants, and the parameters and goals of that experiment were changed mid-way through by key developers and forum moderators, without the agreement of all economic constituents.

[foobarchu]

>bitcoin is a research facility, not a product

So now it's not a currency, and it's not an store of value, it's just a research project.

It feels a tad bit irresponsible for the bitcoin community to have gone around advertising this as the currency (later store of value) of the future, while apparently not knowing if scaling to worldwide levels would even be possible.

[anonemouse145]

Speaking of quote unquote improvements, the community act like bad actors influencing the forks aren't an expected outcome. Somehow only the correct improvements will happen, because reasons. Nobody will subvert Bitcoin, and if they do, well they weren't true believers anyway so ignore that and HODL.

...Even though a lot of the community seem to agree the major figures who pushed for Bitcoin Cash were Judases trying to cash in so major subversion of the code/market has happened at least once already.

There may be a way to make a real, usable currency out of these ideas. It doesn't exist yet in reality.

[zitterbewegung]

Yes, but blockchain technology is being investigated by a bunch of the large banks. If the banks figure out that the technology is useless we should be able to see that within 1-2 years.

[skydv]

it is still very much usable for mostly everything, especially when the bubble pops finally and it will be used to buy stuff, not to trade