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Users don't care about scaling at all. They care about capacity only indirectly. Scaling is something developers care about, but in the nascent field of crypto
by xorcist 9y ago
Users don't care about scaling at all. They care about capacity only indirectly.
Scaling is something developers care about, but in the nascent field of cryptocurrencies there probably no single solution.
It should be noted that with your credit card example, however, that credit card networks charge a percentage of the funds transferred while in the case of Bitcoin it is instead a fixed fee. Should you instead have said that it costs $5 to send $5000 it would have been equally true but sounded quite different.
That Bitcoin as it is described in the whitepaper doesn't scale to even a single US credit card network should be obvious to any reasonably informed reader. That every participant in the network store everyone else's transactions forever has its limitations. Does that mean the technology is useless? No, it means the use case is different from credit cards.
It seems possible to build payment systems on top of Bitcoin that fills those use cases, and sidechains and payment channels are research along those lines. But just as crypocurrencies were a theoretical possibility twenty years ago, one should not expect working products too soon. It's not like there is a shortage of payment solutions in the meantime. For end users, credit cards offer a negative cost, so even then we should not expect the use cases to be identical.