[npoc]

The comments to that article (especially the one from dooglus) make a decent rebuttal to the idea that full nodes are a "terrible idea".

If you're convinced a block chain can scale to 50k transactions / sec and also remain decentralised and offer enough privacy, then keep at it, but I'm afraid I'm unconvinced.

Even if it were theoretically possible, the solution would likely be so complex, or based on a long chain of "hopefully unlikely" events that I wouldn't have enough confidence in it to store large amounts of value.

The slowness and simplicity of the Bitcoin network is what gives it robustness, and if I'm storing large amounts of money, that's what I want even if it means I can't buy a cup of coffee on the same network.

[hggh]

There's also a rebuttal to that comment: https://medium.com/@olivierjanss/first-of-all-i-want-to-appl...

> The slowness and simplicity of the Bitcoin network is what gives it robustness, and if I'm storing large amounts of money, that's what I want even if it means I can't buy a cup of coffee on the same network.

Then why not just use gold? It is slow, simple, and you can't use it to buy coffee.

[npoc]

Because it's not as liquid, it's not as easily verified, the supply doubles every 40 years, it's not as easily protected (compared to multi-sig bitcoin), I can't send it around the world in 10 minutes, and I can't take it across borders in my head. It doesn't form the basis for the entire world's future reserve asset and monetary unit, and the market is mature/saturated whereas bitcoin is completely misunderstood by almost everyone and so is wildly undervalued.

Bitcoin is demonetising gold.

[hggh]

You are describing Bitcoin Cash too, with the difference that with BCH in that 10-minute window the transaction is irreversible (like the original Bitcoin), so a 0-conf tx. And extremely low fees, of course (also like the original Bitcoin).

[npoc]

back to the start we go :-)

Bitcoin transactions are also "irreversible" providing the fee paid is reasonable, but ultimately the clearing time for both networks is down to the likelihood of a 51% attack for which bitcoin is far more protected against due to the far larger amount of hash power. It's not comparable.

If I'm moving/storing $1 billion, do I care if the transaction costs $1 instead of $20? No - I care that I'm storing the money in the safest place to store value I can find.

[hggh]

If we're talking about amounts much bigger than the transaction fee, then I don't see any problem with BTC's layer 1, for now.

[npoc]

If we look simply at network growth in economic terms, Bitcoin is only going to attract larger and larger sums of money. This halving epoch we now have institutional investors (ETFs) and once it has proven itself at that level, the next stage will be nations openly buying it.

So even if fees increase in fiat terms, so will the size of the transactions. Enough to take the market cap far, far beyond that of gold. Once bitcoin has grown to the point that its value has stabilised, there will be substantial demand for transacting in it directly and there will naturally be a lot more work invested into higher-level payment networks/solutions. Right now though, Gresham's law sees to it that most people are happier to hoard than spend and that's likely to be case until bitcoin is at least $10M/BTC