How is this expected to work with 7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction? I don't think it can.
I have owned BTC for 5 years and I am enjoying the rally, but with the high transaction fees, back log, and long transaction times, I wonder how well it can really work as a replacement for banks.
Am I wrong?
You're suggesting Bitcoin just proved it can't scale, but it actually just proved it did--just not with transaction volume. The network continued to process transactions averaging one block every ten minutes exactly as it was built to do, despite the heavy load.
To put it differently: A different online payment system could have stopped accepting transactions, or run out of resources, allow transactions it shouldn't have, disallow ones it should, or something else terrible. But Bitcoin didn't. If you wanted into the next block, you'd need to pay more, but that's (from a technical perspective) entirely by design.
What Bitcoin is proving is that it has clear and well-understood limits and continues to work well within them, and that's incredibly important for public perception. IMO, if Bitcoin's transaction capacity never scales, it'll still be a huge technological success. Other cryptocurrencies can try their hand at scaling, but Bitcoin needs to be rock solid to the extent possible for all cryptocurrencies' sake.
We already know at least 2 obvious ways to improve the transaction flow rate of bitcoin in trustless ways, and many others are being proposed that do not also create energy arms races.
Please don't redefine success.
If we can improve the transaction rate without risk, then let’s do it. It just gets tiring seeing post after post suggesting it’s a valueless failure if it can’t be used for coffee. Let’s just keep it in perspective. It doesn’t need to supplant Visa to be successful.
There is also FLP impossibility, which reduces to the halting problem in an asynchronous distributed system setting.
By this logic, Bitcoin can never “scale”.
Arbitrarily increasing blocksize without addressing propagation delay and centralization impacts is also irresponsible.
Bitcoin has been tirelessly working on the scaling problem in a responsible way. SegWit will allow up to 12t/s. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr Signatures will further compress transaction size and increase t/s to roughly 20t/s. All this without increasing propagation delay (increasing blocksize).
Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary.
Rootstock adds ethereum compatible smart contracts to bitcoin as a side chain.
All these technologies responsibly scale Bitcoin. Your comment implies Bitcoin is stagnant which to me implies you don't know what you're talking about.
Seriously. And I'm not trying to be cheeky. If Bitcoin ends up only being a settlement layer, it'll still be a colossal success just being a decentralized, supply-limited, uncensorable, world-accessible payment system and store of value.
If someone else solves the scaling debacle better, I'll be the first to recommend that normal people switch to it. But it's not easy, and the world is watching Bitcoin. Governments are starting to accept its existence, big financial institutions are starting (just this month) to allow options trading, etc. That stuff is far more important even for other cryptocurrencies than low fees.
After six months of no issues with Bitcoin options trading, it's only a matter of time before other cryptocurrencies get the same treatment. That's why we need Bitcoin to be rock steady and predictable, while others can try to solve these tough problems.
It literally stopped accepting transactions.
After 72 hours your transaction is dropped.
Without further notice. Until then you must guess if it was processed or not.
Use https://estimatefee.com/. Not paying enough to win the fee auction is not the same as no transactions getting through at all. You seem a bit misinformed to be using the "Dude" prologue.
There are hard physical transaction limits which cannot be surpassed without seriously compromising decentralization... To the point that what would be left of the network would essentially no longer be 'Bitcoin'. Any attempt to abstract away from the blockchain through some kind of batching or delayed settlement would completely undermine the trustless nature of Bitcoin... What would be left would be no better than the current banking system.
The whole point of a cryptocurrency is that you can have your own wallet from which you can spend without going through any intermediaries... All potential Bitcoin scalability solutions that I've heard of rely on exchanges being given more power/trust in order to abstract away from the Blockchain.
It was the first. It was the genesis idea. But good lord, do we think it's the actual solution? What would be the odds?
I imagine that Bitcoin will play its part as the public face of the blockchain revolution, but something else - or many other somethings - will be the successors that we actually use in the future. (Pick your own alt-coin as the successor; good luck.)
If I had a large holding in Bitcoin now I would be cashing out or I'd be nervous. I'm not saying it won't go higher, I'm saying that at some point its demise is inevitable. Might be quick, might be slow, but it'll happen because Bitcoin is not the technically best solution in this incredibly exciting field. It's not even close.
Not only that, but it's shown that it doesn't have the ability to make the changes necessary to innovate and stay current.
So taking this into account, when the shackles of Bitcoin's simplicity and limitations become unbearable, the network will evolve through protocol upgrades or through a contentious fork where the hash power and development resources will move to. In either case your coins and value are retained.
Linux vs Windows allover, in fintech infrastructure and protocolls.
That is the reason why anyone can't just create a new coin and expect everyone else to value it, but that doesn't mean there can't be any viable competitors. And if a competitor with a sufficient advantage got popular enough, it could take the lead.
For example, the hack Bitcoin used to become popular was to be deflationary, which encourages speculation. That got the value up before it was cool, but it stays deflationary -- even gets more so -- once it's popular, and the consequent speculation causes high volatility. Once you're popular, being deflationary becomes a liability instead of an asset.
It's possible for a coin not to be deflationary and have the supply set by computing costs. If the value of the coin falls below the energy cost of creating them, people stop creating more of them and the value stabilizes there (so it doesn't keep going down). But as demand for the coin increases the value rises above the threshold and people start mining again (so it doesn't keep going up).
That stability would be a huge advantage. But it's not possible to convert Bitcoin to that because its deflationary nature is priced into its value. Making it non-deflationary would make it worthless to speculators, which would eliminate most of its current valuation.
So all it would take is for a non-deflationary coin to become popular enough for people to trust it not to disappear overnight and the people using it for transactions rather than speculation would prefer it over Bitcoin.
My guess is that this is less of factor than you think. I don't think that HTML/CSS/JS is the best technical solution for creating websites, and yet that is what all browsers use and there are few signs that that is changing anytime soon.
Right now, the top 3 crypto-tokens are Ethereum-based, as are 89 of the Top 100:
https://coinmarketcap.com/tokens/
Word-find "token" here to see what the word means in this context:
There's what I call the "football" effect. The player jumps on the football after a fumble, and while he's the first to grab it, there's a handful of 250 pound guys about to jump on top of him.
Bitcoin is the first to the football, but over the long term I think it's going to get inevitably crushed.
Whatever technology replaces Bitcoin is likely something you can buy with Bitcoin. That's why people rush to buy something which obviously isn't "ready" (but maybe "good enough"). It's speculative, but do not think that people who invested a lot in this didn't think this through at least as much as you have.
Yeah, it's not like I can go on to /r/bitcoin and read multiple dedicated screeds along the lines of "I'm recommending my friends to invest savings in BTC for retirement". Whereupon someone replies "They should keep something in a Roth IRA for diversity", and the OP comments, "What's a Roth IRA?"
Yes, there are sophisticated investors.
But in a lot of cases, the only thoughts going through peoples heads is "Get Rich Quick". There's more discussion of "what color Lamborghini am I buying?" than anything else on those forums right now than anything else. Well, beside 'HODL! HODL! Even if the market corrects $10,000 tomorrow, HODL!'.
Now THAT is the speculation to end all speculations.
If superior technology comes along, what will prevent Bitcoin from adopting this, and using its network effect to outmaneuver a competing blockchain?
A couple of months ago, the Bitcoin network adopted the SegWit protocol change, which could be considered a minor fix (no major improvements to scalability). If the Bitcoin network can agree to adopt a minor fix, why wouldn’t it be able to agree to adopt a major scalability improvement as well?
Just curious here: What would you say are technically better solutions than bitcoin?
Why didn't these technologies succeed? Because none of those properties have any business advantage over boring, simple, centralized credit-card processing and back then everything was sealed up in patents until it missed the boat.
We need to figure out a way to solve this issue, especially if cryptocurrency utilization is to increase, in particular through Bitcoin:
Bitcoin uses about 32 terawatts of energy every year, enough to power about three million U.S. households, according to the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index published by Digiconomist, a website focused on digital currencies.
By comparison, processing the billions of Visa (V) transactions that take place each year consumes the same amount of power as just 50,000 American homes, according to Digiconomist.
terawatt is a unit of power, not energy. You probably meant 32 terrawatt-hours every year.
Instead of converting to energy per year, I would just say that bitcoin consumes a few (between 1 and 10) gigawatts of power. That way you can compare to power plant output to get a sense of what that means.
1) Is this wallet going to have any spendable money in it one second after creation, or do you have to wait for the network to process your transaction like everyone else?
2) How often is it useful to create a wallet in one second?
It could be worse. Bitcoin mining is centralized in mining centers running custom ASICs, mostly located in cold areas with cheap hydroelectric power. That wasn't the original plan. If Bitcoin mining was widely distributed, we could have a billion laptops mining in the background. Laptops running 24/7, wearing out their ICs through electromigration, and consuming power from all sources at retail rates.
https://qz.com/1054805/what-its-like-working-at-a-sprawling-...
Bitcoin was ALWAYS going to be inefficient. It was assumed that hardware would scale to keep up with demand, but that hasn't proven true in the advent of ad hoc mining pools.
Each post uses as little electricity as is feasible. Efficiency improvements lower the amount of electricity used. Reducing the use 90% would mean 90% fewer posts and ruin the posting experience.
Bitcoin doesn't try to minimize electrical use. Efficiency improvements increase the amount used. Reducing the use 90% would lower the transaction rate 0% and ruin nothing, but we can't do that because it's set up as a competition.
There have been multiple attempts at scaling Bitcoin on-chain by raising the blocksize. They have all been unsuccessful because they have been blocked by the Core developers and their supporters using censorship, troll campaigns, ddos and abuse. It's not due to technical reasons but because they want to redirect scaling off-chain, using technology they coveniently develop. The very same developers actually supported bigger blocks a couple of years ago but changed their tone to support the scaling approach their company favors. After the last attempt (Segwit2x) it's clear Bitcoin won't scale on-chain.
However the technical limits of the technology ha never been reached, tested or even been fully researched. Bitcoin Cash is for example a fork which aims to scale on-chain by increasing the block size. If all transactions from Bitcoin would be done on Bitcoin Cash the network would work fine today.
Where the actual limit is we don't know. It's probably not possible to support every financial transaction for everyone. For that we do need off-chain scaling in addition to many other improvements.
For reference this is a year-old article from Gregory Maxwell, a prominent Bitcoin Core developer, explaining his view: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/438hx0/a_trip_to_t...
I think Greg is right. And at least this scaling situation puts a lot of pressure on Bitcoin blockchain and accelerates whole ecosystem to quickly develop and deploy layer-2 solutions like Lighting Networks or parallel 2-way-pegged solutions like sidechains. Which is in my opinion a good thing even for the price of hampering Bitcoin growth in short-term.
And from technical point it is beneficial that Bitcoin Cash folks forked the chain and will experiment with their own scaling solutions. It will be interesting to watch future technical developments on both sides.
For reference here's a paper by Peter R, a prominent Bitcoin Unlimited developer, arguing that a blocksize limit is unnecessary: https://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/resources/feemarket.pdf
Who's right I do not know. But even if Greg is right he's worrying about a potential problem decades from now. We have very real problems right now we should solve first.
I would also be wary of any claims Greg makes as he has clear conflict of interests against raising the blocksize. He's one of the founders of Blockstream whose goal is to earn money developing 2nd layer solutions. With working on-chain transactions what use would their 2nd layer solutions have?
But how does that benefit them? Lightning network is open source, so it's not like they can make money on transaction fees.
Good reason to believe the entire thing was simply the old system attempting to hijack bitcoin.
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7fsbw5/divorcing_the_s...
Does being unsuitable as a currency mean it's also unsuitable as a 'store of value'? The answer to that isn't obvious to me.
The value of the US dollar comes in part from our ability to pay taxes with it (and perhaps ultimately from the US military). Cryptocurrency has no central authority to enforce its value via taxes or military, and isn't particularly suitable for day-to-day transactions. Without either of those properties, I have a hard to imagining it being a particularly good store of value. But we'll see. I think we're all watching an interesting experiment unfold in real time.
I don't think the current price of btc has anything to do with whatever utility it may or may not have as a currency or store of value. The price is entirely informed by speculators hoping to sell it the following day for 100% ROI. I think a collapse is inevitable.
The other way around: If you can't buy most stuff with it (the case right now) and can't convert it into your everyday currency (maybe happens if the exchanges suddenly go down for some reason, even only temporarily), what's the value of Bitcoin?
Selling it to someone else for more than you paid next week.
It doesn't come from either of those things. It only has value because people believe it does, otherwise they would all try to get rid of it as quickly as possible.
Yes it does. You have to pay your taxes in U.S. dollars, so people have to use it. That's one of the purposes of taxes: so that the government-issued currency is used.
Have you ever asked yourself why they believe that? It's because they can pay their taxes with it, but also, as it says right on the front, "this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private." As long as the US government is still a thing, this phrase means what it says. I haven't seen anything so far to convince me that BTC has more stability or longevity than the US or EU (or Britain...).
Does this have something to do with aftermath of Vietnam War in 1970s? US got broke, to recover, they made a pact with Saudis, ditched gold and use USD instead for reference currency, and oil transactions are in USD (i.e. 'petrodollars')
Then things went downhill globally.
a. Block size - This was increased in bitcoin cash. What many people are not aware of is the paper 'Information propagation in the bitcoin network' by Decker and Wattenhofer in 2013. The average time for a block to be seen by a node is ~13 secs. As per the paper:
"For blocks, whose size is larger than 20kB, each kilobyte costs an additional 80ms delay until a majority knows about the block." -'Information propagation in the bitcoin network.
So, increasing the block without increasing the block time actually increases chances of double spending. But, increasing block time is well simply delaying the payments.
b. Lightning network - Off-chain transactions. Fascinating idea. The problem is it goes to a form of centralization. And if things hold the companies running these channels will invariably meddle in some transactions. But the stated goal of bitcoin was -
Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for nonreversible services. With the possibility of reversal, the need for trust spreads. Merchants must be wary of their customers, hassling them for more information than they would otherwise need. A certain percentage of fraud is accepted as unavoidable. These costs and payment uncertainties can be avoided in person by using physical currency, but no mechanism exists to make payments over a communications channel without a trusted party
It's not like PayPal where if you want to pay using PayPal you have to use PayPal-the-company. With Lightning, if you want to pay using Lightning you can use any route you like over the Lightning Network to reach the recipient of the payment.
tl;dr: a network of off-chain, transitive payment channels. two on-chain transactions (to fund and settle channel) allow for ~unlimited, ~free, ~instant transactions across a p2p network of nodes off-chain
To this critique, some reply that merchants will just start trading unsettled (off-chain) LN transactions to pay their suppliers, but no one has presented any model of how this would work in a real economy, with merchants needing to pay suppliers, who need to pay their suppliers, who need to pay their employees.
Things like sidechains, cross-chain atomic swaps, various block space usage improvements (eg. Schnorr signatures) are also in the pipeline right now, all of which could further improve throughput.
So while LN may not be the silver bullet, it makes me hopeful that at least from a technical perspective, Bitcoin will be able to scale to become a global currency.
https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/716b955c130e6c703fac336ea17b...
I don't see why you think that means Bitcoin _can't_ scale though. In order to convincingly make that claim, you'd need to be able to prove that all existing proposed solutions for scaling the network (lightning, block size increases, etc) cannot possibly work.
Bitcoin Cash isn't having these problems and won't have these problems in the future. Many people aren't aware of the underlying issues driving the transaction backlog in part because the historically important forums where Bitcoin is discussed have suppressed any discussion of this issue for a couple years now.
https://www.yours.org/content/a-roadmap-for-scaling-bitcoin-...
It would be like if there were two auto makers one claimed that you can't make a car that holds more than two people and refused to do so. Along comes another auto maker and builds a bus off the same concept. Doesn't mean that automobile tech is bad it means the team insisting it can't / won't scale is incompetent.
We'll just ignore the issues associated with increasing full-node storage requirements even faster than they're already increasing. And lower transaction fees lead to lower block rewards which lowers mining profitability. Both of these things result in more centralization.
While we're at it we'll forget the post-fork difficulty adjustment faisco brought to us by the Bitcoin cash devs. We'll just trust their competancy and good will.
Also we won't think about the legitimate off-chain solutions for transaction rate scaling, or how the side-chain concept dates back to early Satoshi emails.
There are better alt coins for cheap and fast transactions. Besides, recommending something based entirely on those two factors is a massive oversimplification.
Naturally, the blockchain will have to be hierarchical, or find ways to compact it.
I brought this up with some ethereum devs at one point in a forum a year or two ago, and they addressed the questions pretty openly and graciously, but I still wonder about it. Essentially, they talked about the presumption of branches, subchains, etc. When that happens it seems the system would be a little more complicated than the classic crypto-libertarian currency model.
These chains get pretty large, and the overhead in terms of time and storage space seems well beyond what most people are used to now. Maybe people just have to get used to 15 minute payments, and having an extra drive or computer for financial transactions, as the cost of decentralized finance and economics, but from the current vantage point it seems burdensome to me, and only more so as adoption would grow.
Unless I'm missing something something pretty big about how Bitcoin's blockchain works.
"Full nodes are the most secure way to use Bitcoin, they do not suffer from many attacks that affect lightweight wallets...[a]s explained previously, full nodes enforce the consensus rules no matter what. However, lightweight nodes do not do this."
Root node back others networks (think top level domains and delegated subdomains). IMO, it needs to be _very_ expensive to keep minimal blockchain size and avoid spam.
On the flipside, you have Ethereum with more or less unbounded block sizes having issues with Cryptokitties congesting the entire network. Numerous entities using Ethereum are unable to do business due to the equivalent of Beanie Babies clogging the network [0][1].
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/ethereums-cryptokitties-blockchain-...
[1] https://twitter.com/myetherwallet/status/874285733707526145
For about $0.40 you can get an ETH transfer into a block in a couple of minutes. https://ethgasstation.info/
I was a disbeliever but now I am a true believer. Bitcoin is here to stay. The only danger is that countries will make it illegal. It really is a danger to the way countries manages their economies. But only time will tell. Keep the coins and enjoy the ride. You won't be sorry. Lucky you.
Some people are getting a little tired of the pony show.
In upcoming Bitcoin technology, the lightning network is really exciting. It's a layer that runs on top of Bitcoin which allows thousands or possibly millions of transactions per second, performed instantly, with almost zero fees. It may have bottlenecks of its own, but I'm sure we can overcome them.
The other camp that wants to use Bitcoin for small transactions is either in the illusory lightning network camp, or more realisticly investing in bitcoin cash. In my opinion, bitcoin has proven itself to be a great store of value but a poor medium of exchange, so just treat it as such.
Some sites even built "order status" page that gave direct feedback of the transaction e.g. confirmations. I thought that was really cool.
Maybe it's more proof that no one cares?
The block size hasn't increased. Instead, a new chain forked out with an 8MB block size, it's called Bitcoin cash.
Lightning network hasn't launched yet. A few people are testing alpha on the main net and that's it. (Btw I'm a skeptic of lightning network so i'm not advocating lightning network here).
And Lightning, yup. I tried to use two Lightning implementations on the test net and neither worked, but they have been declared "ready!" by fans.
And Lightning deserves skepticism. Releasing software 1.0 means nothing: it requires a totally new infrastructure, with new wallets (again) which have to be online to receive money, hubs which don't exist at all today, liquidity providers willing to leave money locked in channels, (but hey, at least we didn't have to upgrade full nodes) and has completely different failure modes than the blockchain on top of the failure modes that are already there. As far as I understand it isn't even possible to receive more money than you already have with Lightning, and any part you open a channel with can block your funds for as long as the channel timeout has been set (and you don't want short/underfunded channels or you may end up paying more in transactions than you would have with a pure blockchain).
Also the opening and closing of channels means that if Lightning is actually successful the current block sizes won't be sufficient. It's at least one transaction to open the channel and another to close it, and because you want to keep a warm channel so you can buy coffee, you will want to do that whether you end up using the channel or not, but you also don't want it very long otherwise your money will be stuck if the channel goes down. So essentially you need to pay subscription fees to the blockchain for using the channels as well as well as commission to the channels for providing liquidity to you.
Maybe some super-centralized thing will come out of it and we'll all connect to the Coinbase Channel or something to do trustless centralized off-chain transactions (as opposed to trusted centralized off-chain transactions that they provide now) but even that has a host of problems when you think about it.
It's... a complicated system. It's cool and very interesting but it won't happen overnight and it's not guaranteed to actually work.
Lightning works. You can go download the repo and make apps with it today.
LN is years from being actually usable by the masses. This is from their developers themselves.
> Maybe it's more proof that no one cares?
That's a pretty idiotic thing to say. The technology isn't ready yet despite the developers being aware of the problem for, as you say, years.
But what about the new problems it would introduce? I run a full node and even now it eats a significant portion of my bandwidth. With even larger blocks I would probably drop off the network altogether. And I'm sure I'm not the only one out there in this situation. Therefore, I don't think Core developers are exaggerating in their concerns about the centralization pressure caused by overly large blocks.
Moreover, wouldn't increasing the block size simply kick the can down the road? One advantage of the current fee pressure is that it strongly encourages the development of 2nd layer solutions. There are right now at least three independent teams working on Lightning Network implementations and they seem to be making quick progress...
That's as if there was a frenzy to buy a new brand of car and no-one cared that the cars' engines actually break down after 50 meters.
That being said, I think it's true - but it's a hint that the current "mass adoption" is mainly fueled by speculators and not by people who genuinely believe in it's purpose as a currency.
humans trade on credit not by exchange. Always have done.
COinbase shot through the roof, but other notable exchanges were sometimes $5k out for a number of hours. This proves that either people couldn't cross trade (i.e. buy cheap on one market and sell high on the other) or didn't know how to (which is suspect)
this could be because the transaction speed stalled trades, meaning that effectively each exchange became its own global market, either way, having large disparities between exchanges is problematic.
I love BTC, I think it's great. I think other cryptocoins innovate where BTC can't. But the BTC zealots who act like BTC will displace general purpose banking (or zanier still, the entire financial industry) make this conversation so frustrating.
BTC can be a success without this all-or-nothing campaign. In fact, it is a success because it will continue to exist/store value, and operate as a medium of exchange. It will have hiccups and scaling challenges and we will entertain proposals like segwit and LN which don't radically alter the coin's design.
Unfortunately they alter enough of the design to disturb the economics/incentives for the different roles. Those different roles have had well-aligned incentives for a long time and hopefully they don't continue to drift apart. This is the greatest risk facing Bitcoin IMO. For a long time I was worried about a weakness in the signature hash. But the bounty for that has been so enormous for so long that I'm doubtful one will ever be discovered. So Bitcoin is truly a robust coin, and it can continue to serve us well. If the 15000USD value is based on "7 billion people using it for every tiny financial transaction" then people should probably start shorting BTC (maybe tomorrow evening w/CBOE/Gemini).
Clearly it has scaled well, it is now one of the more successful means of gambling extant. The fact that it is becoming unusable for any other purpose could have implications, but it's self evident that this use case has scaled considerably.
If you want scale, you have to look to Bitcoin Cash (which carries on Bitcoin's original vision of being a massively scalable peer-to-peer electronic cash) or Ethereum.
https://us.teamblind.com/article/update-from-block---btc-fut...
It's not meant to. It stores wealth. Nothing more.
#shorsalgorithm
There never was a "scaling problem." The only problem is "people that don't want Bitcoin to scale."
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoincash/comments/7gmn8t/there_n...
Simplified a little bit I know you can pack segwit transactions into 1.7mb blocks on BTC.
That sir is a first world problem!
As long as the value of newly minted bitcoins makes it profitable to buy mining hardware and burn off power to earn them, the amount of power used by bitcoin miners will increase.
So, way before Bitcoin miners consume all of the world’s energy, either energy prices or mining hardware prices will increase, or the bitcoin price will fall, to make mining unprofitable.
No. Bitcoin could work exactly the same even without any more hash power, or energy consumption, ever being added.
This is because mining is only a competition to produce a block and defines the security of Bitcoin. But it has no bearing on how many transactions the network can process.
Any scaling that happens is completely orthogonal.
For a bitcoin that has scaled see Bitcoin Cash.
that's demonstrably false. there's plenty room of you're willing to pay enough in transaction fees. if you don't want to pay $5 in transaction fees to cash out $5000, that's your problem. either that or you don't want to pay $5 to cash out $10, but in that case that has no appreciable impact on trading volume.
>For a bitcoin that has scaled see Bitcoin Cash.
if you mean bitcoin with block size limit lifted, then yes. but right now it's handling less transactions than bitcoin so it's not fair to say it has scaled.
It's a mistake to look at recent news, because this has been known since the very beginning.
> A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
A peer-to-peer network without going through a financial institution. The design was certainly intended to scale up to large numbers of small transactions.
Give it ~30 years, for the cost of CPU time/storage space/internet speed to cost 0.1% of what it does today, and — in combination with off-chain clearing — this becomes feasible.
For Bitcoin to even work as money in the first place, people need to store their savings in bitcoins. This transition will take at least ~30 years anyway, which leaves ample time for computing costs to fall to a level where 1GB blocks are realistic. Combined with an off-chain clearing protocol (like Stroem[1]) for consumer-to-merchant payments, this should allow Bitcoin to scale to ~10bn people.
Credit payments may seem instantaneous but they are not. Research the gold standard and who actually stores the gold not the paper receipts for it.
The endgame for bitcoin...Transaction fees? Popup currencies ala private currency?
I hope we are solving some fun math problems with all this distributed hash power.
