[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.