[jamoes]

And likewise, BTC fees are also at a local maximum[1]. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to actually scale the BTC blockchain since the last bull run. Onchain transactional capacity is the same as it was 2 years ago (limited to ~400k tx/day globally). Major n^2 transaction validation bottlenecks still remain within the Bitcoin Core software. With no plans to address these bottlenecks and increase onchain capacity, the fundamentals of BTC scaling haven't changed at all since the last time the market went boom and then bust.

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

[vmception]

Plenty of criticisms to be had about bitcoin's scalability but what you said isn't true.

Quite a bit has changed with the prevalance of Segwit transactions, some-to-many Lightning transactions, a lot of Liquid transactions, and transaction bundling. Specifically in reaction to how the network convulsed last bull market and correction.

Yeah it still sucks and is hardly competitive especially on the layer-2 front, but lets at least be accurate about why it sucks lol.

Wrapped Bitcoin offerings are better than native Bitcoin. There is a lot of money being made in helping people wrap and unwrap their Bitcoin for use and trade (not for custody though). It will be very prevalent this cycle. There are a lot of options for people to be unburdened by Bitcoin's layer-1 while being able to manage risk and capture alpha with the market gyrations, in unlimited amounts. All comes down to if people want to learn, this time, but the landscape is extremely different.

The honest reality is that you will want to watch is if Ethereum's capacity can keep up fast enough. If mentioning the Ethereum Network caused a convulsion, then you really need to re-evaluate what is going on. It is acting as a trading portal and center that has almost nothing to do with the Ether cryptocurrency. It has robust Layer-1 trading systems, 10 competing Layer-2 offerings that already work right now which the Layer-1 systems will very quickly upgrade to (bitcoin has 1 Layer-2 system called Lightning, in incremental progress for 5 years and it doesn't work very well), while also being in the process of updating its own Layer-1 consensus layer to increase throughput by two-three orders of magnitude.

[lawn]

Yes things have been done, but nothing that's effective.

Any layer-2 solution is just a dead end as you still have to pay the high fees to enter and exit. And it's funny, and sad, that you bring up Liquid as a potential solution because it's a centralized solution and we might as well be content with PayPal if we're going that route.

[vmception]

I don't consider it a solution, I consider it a reality.

If you want to transact in unlimited amounts very quickly, there are extremely viable options. If you then want to pay a little bit more to custody your asset in the most secure way onchain, you can do that. Let's step back and look at the criticism: we are still talking about nearly instant on-chain settlement, and by instant I mean within an hour, at any time of day any day of the week.

We are talking about fees lower than what trading commissions were for decades, but being mad that it isn't simultaneously better than merchant processing fees or for poor people all the time.

There is just a parallel world here with plenty of options, completely accessible now with atomic swaps or bonded minting/burning in a way that wasn't available even just two years ago. The exchanges are mostly irrelevant except the largest fiat onramps, which have recently expanded too.

That's where we are. If the market really wants to get frothy this time, I think the capacity is quite ready. And for things that aren't ready due to programming or people just not using them, they incentivize is there to be a catalyst.

[sunshinerag]

what high fees to enter and exit. Lightning fees are very low (typically( about 0.00001 pence. Liquid is not needed for lightning. As an end user you can use a lightning wallet and enjoy fast lowest fee transactions.

[lawn]

You need to pay for an expensive on-chain Bitcoin transaction before you can use Lightning. You must also have enough money so you can pay for another on-chain transaction if the channel closes and you must issue a dispute to not lose your funds.

Did I mention that if you open a channel to the wrong hub, you must open yet another channel, with all associated costs?

It's ridiculous to even entertain Lightning as a viable option when there are other low-fee and fully functioning cryptocurrencies that aren't gimped by a tiny blocksize.

[sunshinerag]

I am sorry. As a lighting wallet user, none of that is true anymore. The underlying channel management is abstracted away from the user. The experience is pleasant. I won't jump to another cryptocurrency as BTC with lightning ticks all the marks for me.

The only thing missing in the BTC ecosystem is smart contracts, but I am happy for that to be a separate ecosystem (ETH or otherwise).