4 ms·

That would be the idea, but the value of 1 bitcoin is still subject to heavy day-day fluctuation, so I'm unsure if deflation/inflation are relevant wrt. Bitcoin

That would be the idea, but the value of 1 bitcoin is still subject to heavy day-day fluctuation, so I'm unsure if deflation/inflation are relevant wrt. Bitcoin today (or in the next few years). Simply news that transactions are taking hours to confirm is probably enough to influence the price a significant amount.

alkonaut 10y ago
I realize there is a lot of politics etc involved - but would it be technically feasible to just drastically improve the performance? Could bitcoin be changed into a system that could e.g. handle the scale and throughput of some of the non-cryptocurrency money transfer systems (e.g. 10million transactions/day)? If not - is there something fundamental about cryptocurrencies that limits their throughput or could another system be scaling much better than Bitcoin? E.g. does a cryptocurrency always need proof-of-work and does that always need to be time consmuing?
- Taek 10y ago
  Uh, I definitely don't mean to be offensive at all but your question is very naive. The short answer is that a lot of engineering effort has gone into improving performance and today's Bitcoin is already enjoying those benefits. The long answer is an entire field of research. There are fundamental things about cryptocurrency that means global throughput is very low and also high latency. The hard part is the decentralization. If you can delegate trust to a small handful of entities, it's much easier to get scaling.
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    No offense. My question was really e.g. are there newer "generations" of cryptocurrencies that have worked around some of the problems Bitcoin has with eg. scaling? mostly interesting wrt. whether Bitcoin will survive or be superceded by something else.
    - Taek 10y ago
      There are newer currencies that claim to have solved the problem. But the vast majority of them do not understand the problems that Bitcoin is trying to solve, and make security tradeoffs that would be considered unacceptable in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Those that show promise are yet-incomplete. Most don't provide practical scaling benefits greater than 5x, not a strong number considering the amount of scaling we'd like to see is closer to 10,000x.

alkonaut 10y ago

I realize there is a lot of politics etc involved - but would it be technically feasible to just drastically improve the performance? Could bitcoin be changed into a system that could e.g. handle the scale and throughput of some of the non-cryptocurrency money transfer systems (e.g. 10million transactions/day)? If not - is there something fundamental about cryptocurrencies that limits their throughput or could another system be scaling much better than Bitcoin? E.g. does a cryptocurrency always need proof-of-work and does that always need to be time consmuing?

Taek 10y ago
Uh, I definitely don't mean to be offensive at all but your question is very naive. The short answer is that a lot of engineering effort has gone into improving performance and today's Bitcoin is already enjoying those benefits. The long answer is an entire field of research. There are fundamental things about cryptocurrency that means global throughput is very low and also high latency. The hard part is the decentralization. If you can delegate trust to a small handful of entities, it's much easier to get scaling.
- alkonaut 10y ago
  No offense. My question was really e.g. are there newer "generations" of cryptocurrencies that have worked around some of the problems Bitcoin has with eg. scaling? mostly interesting wrt. whether Bitcoin will survive or be superceded by something else.
  - Taek 10y ago
    There are newer currencies that claim to have solved the problem. But the vast majority of them do not understand the problems that Bitcoin is trying to solve, and make security tradeoffs that would be considered unacceptable in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Those that show promise are yet-incomplete. Most don't provide practical scaling benefits greater than 5x, not a strong number considering the amount of scaling we'd like to see is closer to 10,000x.