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.
Every attempt to date to improve transaction rates on BTC have been hampered by a small group of developers who have a vested interest in it not scaling for reasons explained here: https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/info...
Bitcoin won't get any of the improvements you hope it will because there is too much money vested in keeping it exactly how it is today.
If the vast majority of users and services decided to switch to PoS tomorrow there’s absolutely nothing miners could do about it.
That said, I’m not saying it would be easy to get consensus for such a major change. Futures markets might be useful for determining how much support for a change there is.
I understand big blockers are upset they didn’t get their way. They need to understand the reason big blocks don’t have consensus is that they increase propagation delays and propagation delays leads to centralization. Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues.
Also, miners don’t determine consensus rules. If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme. The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet.
> Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues.
Their strategy of stalling for the last couple of years is the least intelligent approach they could have taken.
> Core devs are pursuing many alternative and intelligent scaling avenues.
Yes they do, that's the point of Bitcoin.
> If PoS works, another UASF initiative will arise and everyone running a node can decide the new PoW scheme
You mean if PoS works they can fork and use their altcoin.
> The fact that you don’t understand this leads me to believe you don’t have a good understanding of the technology yet.
The fact that you don't understand this leads me to believe you're either a Core shill or you have been seduced by their pretty words. The whitepaper makes all this clear.
If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming “bank coin” aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you’re a speculator).
This has to change
No need to attack Bitcoin, just go all in on Bitcoin Cash , put your money where your mouth is, and move on.
Only made by the incompetent/corrupt developers. Regular users just don't want to pay outrageous fees.
I wouldn't hold my breath for that. Bitcoin still is having a holy war about increasing the blocksize.
One side effect of this whole deal is it shows that it is incredibly hard, if not possible, to change a decentralized system. By its very design, it will be all but impossible to make any breaking changes to bitcoin at this point.
> Lightning network further reduces the number of onchain transactions necessary.
Besides being complete vaporware, I do love how the solution to Bitcoin's scaling problems is to not use it...
With regards to blocksize, the only reason it’s not widely embraced is because it’s known to directly impact propagation delay. One side couldn’t care less about centralization, the other side cares dearly. SegWit was activated, which compresses transaction size and doubles transactions per second without impacting propagation delay. Mimble Wimble and Schnorr signatures are coming soon, which are also soft forks and compress transaction size even further. There’s plenty of change happening that are all very intelligent scaling solutions. Big blocks are not intelligent nor difficult to implement.
There have even been successful atomic Bitcoin<->Litecoin cross-chain transactions with Lightning last month.
It doesn't matter - it can fork. And if the fork offers something compelling, it will get used. Even Bitcoin Cash, which is not (very) compelling, is now tradable more than most altcoins.
If you've tried linking distributed Oracle databases between just a few different sites, you'd understand this has tons of failure cases and is, in fact, not a solved problem, even in the centralized world.
(Bigtable probably gets the closest these days, if you want proprietary and not globally auditable.)
That is nice. But can I, and everybody else in the USA successfully use Bitcoin on Black Friday? According to the National Retail Foundation, in 2016 over 101 million people went out on black friday to buy something. If Bitcoin could somehow 10x its transaction rate to even 40 transactions per second (which it can't and probably never will) it would take almost 30 days to process every order. At its current rate of 4tps, you are looking at about 292 days--during which, according to Wolfram Alpha, Venus will have made 1.3 trips around the sun.
So again, yeah, great job. Bitcoin solved some technical problem. Go team! But who gives a crap if some technical problem doesn't solve any real problem? Isn't that what we engineers exist to do? Solve real-world problems?
We had a gentleman visit our booth from one of the big 4 airlines. He asked us what we were going to do to get to 1800 t/s, because that was the load requirement for the reservation system he and his division were tasked with creating, deploying and maintaining.
I’m fairly certain a currency system needs to scale beyond what a single airline needs in terms of transactions per second.
