[Robotbeat]

Well, this is baked into the limited number of transactions per second. At 10 transactions per second max, the usefulness as a day to day currency is inversely proportional to its popularity. Our favorite joke coin, DogeCoin, does 10 times better at 100/sec with faster blocks, but it’s still too slow. Visa is like 2000-100,000 transactions per second depending on if you use average or theoretical maximum. Anything which wants to be usable as a day to day currency of the future should shoot for either niche uses or should shoot for 10,000-100,000 transactions per second as a minimum. 1 million to be on the safe side.

Otherwise, the more popular it is, the less usable it is as a real currency. (As the transaction fees get bid up to higher levels if transaction throughput is limited.)

(Oh, and without a custodian, the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this. Maybe something like that will someday be usable but it sucks right now.... and it’s not obvious how these problems will be solved in a way that doesn’t introduce a whole bunch more game theory and/or technical/resource/usability constraints.)

[saalweachter]

> the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this.

I believe we have now reached the point where more time has passed since the Lightning whitepaper than between the Bitcoin and Lightning whitepapers.

[moralestapia]

>1 million to be on the safe side

This + micropayments, (i.e. negligible fees so it makes sense to send 0.01USD to someone, every day, or w/e.

[buffalobuffalo]

It's not just the speed, it's also the fees. You ideally want something that has really minimal fees, so that you can send $.0001 without paying 10x that in fees. The ability to process micro-transactions cheaply and at scale could actually have the transforming affect that bitcoin was originally after.

[Robotbeat]

Right. That’s what Satoshi wrote in their paper.

But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.

[saalweachter]

Hmmm, working the other way, if your goal is to process 100k transactions / second, with each transaction being 1/100th of a cent and your transaction fees being 1/100th of that, your budget for operating your network would be, what, $3M / year?

[Robotbeat]

True centi-cent microtransactions like that is going to need probably tens of millions (or even billions) of transactions per second.

[alwillis]

Bitcoin is Not Too Slow: https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-not-too-slow/

[eli]

Not sure if you meant that as a rebuttal but it concedes the point: “The bitcoin blockchain will never be a layer for mass payments”

[alwillis]

The base layer of bitcoin is more of a settlement layer; Lightning Network and other layer 2 features allow for super fast and super cheap bitcoin payments.

http://lightning.network

    Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments
    without worrying about block confirmation times. Security
    is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating
    a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments.
    Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.

    Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of
    transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows
    away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude.
    Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without
    custodians.

    Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the
    Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which
    allows for emerging use cases such as instant
    micropayments.

[eli]

Yeah but those are not Bitcoin and very close to nobody uses them for payments anyway

[alwillis]

1. Nothing could be more wrong; bitcoin is bitcoin whether it’s on the base layer or Lightning Network. Full stop.

2. There are over 10,000 lightning nodes with nearly $70 million in liquidity where payments occur everyday: https://1ml.com/

[eli]

You cannot argue that “Bitcoin is money” if, in order to do any of the money stuff, you need to add something that is explicitly “off chain.” Bitcoin itself plainly can’t do it and LN could just as well be a layer on top of anything else. It’s main purpose is to make Bitcoin seem like it could be useful some day.

And yet we’re years in and virtually no one uses LN as money despite lots of people having a vested interest in making it seem viable. I’m sure some people trade it back and forth but nobody is buying goods and services with it outside of as a gimmick.