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The Lightning Network is meant to address this: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
by vintageseltzer 9y ago
The Lightning Network is meant to address this: https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/
- owenversteeg 9y agoLightning ultimately has to come into contact with Bitcoin at some point, unfortunately. Even if you just have one Bitcoin transaction a month, I'm paying $20/month at the current tx prices just to be able to use Bitcoin. $240/year. Does that sound anywhere near reasonable to you?
- wereHamster 9y agoThe goal is that there will be fewer BTC transactions once LN becomes widespread, especially if people or institutions open long-lived channels between each other (active for months, years, or even indefinitely). Then you'd only have to hit the BTC blockchain a few times a year, at most, and that's a level of transactions which the BTC blockchain can easily handle, even if the whole world population uses it for everyday trading. However I also expect that fees will go down once this craze is over (in a few days hopefully). They have tripled in the past three days (see https://fork.lol/tx/fee https://fork.lol/tx/fee).
- owenversteeg 9y agoLet's say "a few times a year" is once every two and a half months. Everyone who wanted to use Bitcoin would then have to pay about $100 a year to use it at today's rates. That's still ridiculous. And fees have increased mostly because the price increased. If people actually started using Bitcoin, the price would skyrocket and fees would rise even higher.
- SamPatt 9y agoThe fees have increased because there's not enough space in the blocks. The price increase would be irrelevant if there was enough space in blocks.
- wereHamster 9y agoThe fees have also increased because of the large number of unconfirmed transactions (we currently have over 160k transactions in the mempool). Once that decreases to more reasonable levels the tx cost will decrease, too.
- nrhk 9y agoSome premium credit cards come with annual fees and benefits. $100 a year for the ability to use a censorship resistant, semi-anonymous payment system doesn't sound like a bad deal.
- nickporter 9y agoRecent updates with video demos (looks great): https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0-compatibility-achieved-f9d22b7b19c4 https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0...
- cryptodogemoon 9y agoWhy bother attempting to patch on layers on top of BTC when it's already centralized with ASIC farms? Start fresh. Early adopters of BTC are trying to con new users into buying coins produced for minimal capital/computational work. The flaw in BTC is inherent to the malicious minting algorithm designed to harm new users. There's other cryptocurrencies who are far out pacing the BTC core team.
- ordinaryradical 9y agoWhich currencies do you see as addressing these problems in a technically proven way?
- oscilloscope 9y agoVertcoin is the probably the most Bitcoin-like one that addresses the mining centralization issue.
- 0xf8 9y agoEthereum (which definitely has its own fair share of issues) recently hit its all time high in daily transactions, which incidentally is more transactions than all other existing decentralized blockchains put together--a set containing Bitcoin.
- mentos 9y agoHa because then that would devalue bitcoin and everyone's dream of selling to a greater fool would collapse!
- QML 9y agoI agree: we need a faster settlement layer independent of how much the currency itself is worth; but let’s say we have have that network? How do taxes work? Everytime you transfer or pay for anything? That’s not going to work.
- spookthesunset 9y agoLightning network is the biggest pile of vaporware in be whole mess. It’s been “just around the corner” for years now.