5 ms·

Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvemen

Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol. Bitcoin is currently not usable as currency, and is of course, not store of wealth - thing is not a liquid asset at all. Proposed scaling solutions were scientific research years ago, and research is still being done. The implementation obviously takes years to finetune and the scaling solution might not work as well as research predicted. All other coins are early stage tech and research too. People were enjoying the tech when it was less popular and seemed like magic, now when big numbers come into play it is obvious things where blown out of proportion way too early.

anonemouse145 9y ago
Speaking of quote unquote improvements, the community act like bad actors influencing the forks aren't an expected outcome. Somehow only the correct improvements will happen, because reasons. Nobody will subvert Bitcoin, and if they do, well they weren't true believers anyway so ignore that and HODL. ...Even though a lot of the community seem to agree the major figures who pushed for Bitcoin Cash were Judases trying to cash in so major subversion of the code/market has happened at least once already. There may be a way to make a real, usable currency out of these ideas. It doesn't exist yet in reality.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  Yes, but blockchain technology is being investigated by a bunch of the large banks. If the banks figure out that the technology is useless we should be able to see that within 1-2 years.
0wing 9y ago
Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. It's almost 10 years old, and they knew about blocksize bandwidth limitations early on. Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. Petty bickering and control of the main discussion forums by a very small group of people (owners of bitcointalk, moderators of /r/bitcoin and blockstream investors and marketing team) shifted the goal posts and gave talking points to divert the concerns over technical limitations and possible solutions with no real implementations for years. The proposed lightening network is based on an unsolved problem in computer science (routing optimization, LN thus maintains a map of all nodes be broadcast to all nodes), not to mention the LN design would rely heavily on centralized hubs of "liquidity providers" i.e. paypal style KYC payment processors - completely antithetical to the concept of "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". LN conveniently favors large centralized liquidity provider payment hubs as the siphon for fees, which only becomes palatable when the alternative is excessive fees to miners on the underlying network. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-... and they've been claiming it's just around the corner since 2015: https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol. This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. Bitcoin is suffering from a toxic cult like community, and questionable developer team. Other crypto-currencies are working on solving the issues while BTC is being sold off to fund LN investors.
- Karrot_Kream 9y ago
  > It's almost 10 years old In the world of science, that's nothing. > Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. "They"? Who is this mystical "they"? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy Satoshi added the limit early on and defended it as a deterrent to spamming the network. > The proposed lightening network is an unsolved problem in computer science Nobody brought up the Lightning Network, but it seems like you have an axe to grind here. > This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. I agree with this, I think Bitcoin governance has become overly political and increasingly territorial, with a cult-like worship of a sets of devs (and you belong in one cult or the other). That being said, I have great faith in the implementation of blockchain based contracts and currency overall, even if Bitcoin is just one step on the long chain of its evolution.
  - Jasper_ 9y ago
    > In the world of science, that's nothing. The Apple App Store came out in June 2008, 9 years ago. From the fart buttons topping the charts, entire companies and business models have been found and Bitcoin is still stuck. They're not making progress.
  - tptacek 9y ago
    In the world of computer science, 10 years is something like 3.3x the span of time between Altavista and Google. It's the span of time between the original spinning-hard-disk iPod and the iPhone 4S. It's approximately the time it took for AWS to go from zero to where it is today.
    - jstanley 9y ago
      But Bitcoin isn't a parallel to AWS. Bitcoin is a parallel to the first working implementation of virtualization.
ashelmire 9y ago
Bitcoin is not new or early stage in software terms. Node.js is just as old. Bitcoin cannot be saved. It's a commodity, and it was only a conceptual project from the very beginning. Blockchain and the concepts around it, on the other hand, are existing tech that can be used in many sustainable ways to create distributed ledgers and other things that do not have to share the same problems (although many people are on the get rich quick plan by requiring mining, ICOs, and other plans that only reward creators and early adopters).
- nlperguiy 9y ago
  Bitcoin is not just software. Research behind implementing Schnorr signatures, lightning network, confidential transactions, efficient confidential transactions (bulletproofs), is bleeding edge research in cryptography mixed with whole bunch of other fundamentals. Nodejs required practically no academic research while bitcoin needs it heavily today still. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf For example, you have papers like above being published in the context of bitcoin. 60 pages of untrivial math, and that's just one idea of how to scale bitcoin.
CryptoPunk 9y ago
>>Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit. Like you said, it's an experiment, and the experiment should have been allowed to play out along the original roadmap of large blocks. Hopefully the Bitcoin Cash fork will succeed where Bitcoin Core failed.
- nlperguiy 9y ago
  > It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit. Okay. The blocksize is raised and now people find new uses when the thing scales better. Streaming money is one such use case. Now you raise the blocksize to a level that needs to support streaming money, now it's so big that your ASICs cannot validate all the incoming blocks, blockchain grows faster than validation. How to fix the problem now? Blocksize is a temporary solution to a current popularity issue. Let's just let the hype die a little bit, so there's time to find a proper solution. If Internet issues were solved by meddling with topology or adding more cable we'd get no where near the current efficient protocols.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    If your definition of a solution is "infinite scale", then it will never solve the scaling problem. In the meantime, potentially huge improvements in scale from raising the block size limit to much higher but still sane values, that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted. In other words: even if raising the block size limit doesn't provide a solution for infinite scale, it could potentially still provide significant benefits, yet Bitcoin Core doesn't want to try it to find out.
    - nlperguiy 9y ago
      > that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase. As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions. People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.
skydv 9y ago
it is still very much usable for mostly everything, especially when the bubble pops finally and it will be used to buy stuff, not to trade

anonemouse145 9y ago

Speaking of quote unquote improvements, the community act like bad actors influencing the forks aren't an expected outcome. Somehow only the correct improvements will happen, because reasons. Nobody will subvert Bitcoin, and if they do, well they weren't true believers anyway so ignore that and HODL. ...Even though a lot of the community seem to agree the major figures who pushed for Bitcoin Cash were Judases trying to cash in so major subversion of the code/market has happened at least once already. There may be a way to make a real, usable currency out of these ideas. It doesn't exist yet in reality.

zitterbewegung 9y ago
Yes, but blockchain technology is being investigated by a bunch of the large banks. If the banks figure out that the technology is useless we should be able to see that within 1-2 years.

0wing 9y ago

Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. It's almost 10 years old, and they knew about blocksize bandwidth limitations early on. Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. Petty bickering and control of the main discussion forums by a very small group of people (owners of bitcointalk, moderators of /r/bitcoin and blockstream investors and marketing team) shifted the goal posts and gave talking points to divert the concerns over technical limitations and possible solutions with no real implementations for years. The proposed lightening network is based on an unsolved problem in computer science (routing optimization, LN thus maintains a map of all nodes be broadcast to all nodes), not to mention the LN design would rely heavily on centralized hubs of "liquidity providers" i.e. paypal style KYC payment processors - completely antithetical to the concept of "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash allowing online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution". LN conveniently favors large centralized liquidity provider payment hubs as the siphon for fees, which only becomes palatable when the alternative is excessive fees to miners on the underlying network. https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800 https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-... and they've been claiming it's just around the corner since 2015: https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 Bitcoin is also not governed as a product, so incremental scaling improvements are left for the user to use, and not to forced by protocol. This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. Bitcoin is suffering from a toxic cult like community, and questionable developer team. Other crypto-currencies are working on solving the issues while BTC is being sold off to fund LN investors.

Karrot_Kream 9y ago
> It's almost 10 years old In the world of science, that's nothing. > Bitcoin used to have a variable blocksize that would accommodate increased usage, but at a certain point they set a hard limit at 1MB. "They"? Who is this mystical "they"? https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Block_size_limit_controversy Satoshi added the limit early on and defended it as a deterrent to spamming the network. > The proposed lightening network is an unsolved problem in computer science Nobody brought up the Lightning Network, but it seems like you have an axe to grind here. > This is false. Users are subject to the developers, the moderated discussion forums, and the selfish incentive of miners/devs to extract financial value from users. I agree with this, I think Bitcoin governance has become overly political and increasingly territorial, with a cult-like worship of a sets of devs (and you belong in one cult or the other). That being said, I have great faith in the implementation of blockchain based contracts and currency overall, even if Bitcoin is just one step on the long chain of its evolution.
- Jasper_ 9y ago
  > In the world of science, that's nothing. The Apple App Store came out in June 2008, 9 years ago. From the fart buttons topping the charts, entire companies and business models have been found and Bitcoin is still stuck. They're not making progress.
- tptacek 9y ago
  In the world of computer science, 10 years is something like 3.3x the span of time between Altavista and Google. It's the span of time between the original spinning-hard-disk iPod and the iPhone 4S. It's approximately the time it took for AWS to go from zero to where it is today.
  - jstanley 9y ago
    But Bitcoin isn't a parallel to AWS. Bitcoin is a parallel to the first working implementation of virtualization.

ashelmire 9y ago

Bitcoin is not new or early stage in software terms. Node.js is just as old. Bitcoin cannot be saved. It's a commodity, and it was only a conceptual project from the very beginning. Blockchain and the concepts around it, on the other hand, are existing tech that can be used in many sustainable ways to create distributed ledgers and other things that do not have to share the same problems (although many people are on the get rich quick plan by requiring mining, ICOs, and other plans that only reward creators and early adopters).

nlperguiy 9y ago
Bitcoin is not just software. Research behind implementing Schnorr signatures, lightning network, confidential transactions, efficient confidential transactions (bulletproofs), is bleeding edge research in cryptography mixed with whole bunch of other fundamentals. Nodejs required practically no academic research while bitcoin needs it heavily today still. https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/1159.pdf For example, you have papers like above being published in the context of bitcoin. 60 pages of untrivial math, and that's just one idea of how to scale bitcoin.

CryptoPunk 9y ago

>>Bitcoin is an early stage technology that still hasn't solved its scaling problem. It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit. Like you said, it's an experiment, and the experiment should have been allowed to play out along the original roadmap of large blocks. Hopefully the Bitcoin Cash fork will succeed where Bitcoin Core failed.

nlperguiy 9y ago
> It isn't even trying to solve it through the most straightforward way: raising the block size limit. Okay. The blocksize is raised and now people find new uses when the thing scales better. Streaming money is one such use case. Now you raise the blocksize to a level that needs to support streaming money, now it's so big that your ASICs cannot validate all the incoming blocks, blockchain grows faster than validation. How to fix the problem now? Blocksize is a temporary solution to a current popularity issue. Let's just let the hype die a little bit, so there's time to find a proper solution. If Internet issues were solved by meddling with topology or adding more cable we'd get no where near the current efficient protocols.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  If your definition of a solution is "infinite scale", then it will never solve the scaling problem. In the meantime, potentially huge improvements in scale from raising the block size limit to much higher but still sane values, that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted. In other words: even if raising the block size limit doesn't provide a solution for infinite scale, it could potentially still provide significant benefits, yet Bitcoin Core doesn't want to try it to find out.
  - nlperguiy 9y ago
    > that would make Bitcoin accessible for everyday transactions for millions/billions of people, are not even being attempted I'm not sure if that's correct. There's absolutely no way bitcoin can support that many transactions with just sane blocksize increase. As I've said in my other comments, bitcoin is a research facility, not a product, so it's somewhat understandable people are going with their own research directions. People currently have huge expectations out of an immature technology. It's equivalent to expecting the Internet of the 80s to support MMORPGs with thousands of players, the protocols just weren't mature enough.

skydv 9y ago

it is still very much usable for mostly everything, especially when the bubble pops finally and it will be used to buy stuff, not to trade