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Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is

Bitcoin (BTC) chain stakeholders (miners, etc.) have chosen to make the current level of transaction throughput be expensive and relatively slow. But there is no such binary tradeoff between "does scale" and "doesn't scale". It is a spectrum. It would be (technologically) trivial for bitcoin to support its current transaction rate with cheap, fast transactions - but the community has opted not to. There are alternative coins that have decided that cheap and fast transactions are important now - not at some undefined future time as will be satisfied by a working, adopted lightning network implementation. You are free to prefer one choice over the other, but I think it would be more accurate to say that regular on-chain bitcoin doesn't scale the way you want it to.

tfha 9y ago
Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum. At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users. Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now
- rwcarlsen 9y ago
  There is work underway pursuing GB sized blocks (https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-gigablock-testnet-initiative/ https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-gigablock-testnet-initiati...). I think it is a feasible path forward. And even if it turns out to be difficult to achieve with today's infrastructure and technology, cryptocurrencies won't suddenly have a billion people using it for daily transactions overnight. I think we could easily support 100 MB blocks now - which would be 100x what current bitcoin provides. In my opinion, that provides quite a bit of time to continue to investigate various scaling avenues.

tfha 9y ago

Uh, unless you've got some way to make a decentralized blockchain function at 2.5 GiB every 10 minutes, it's effectively not a spectrum. At 8mb block size we'd still have the same problem. Except instead of happening at 5 million weekly users it happens at 40 million weekly users. And at 100mb block size we might get to 100 million daily users. Still haven't scaled the thing. We'd need to support billions of daily users for people to be happy. It's an open question right now

rwcarlsen 9y ago
There is work underway pursuing GB sized blocks (https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-gigablock-testnet-initiative/ https://themerkle.com/what-is-the-gigablock-testnet-initiati...). I think it is a feasible path forward. And even if it turns out to be difficult to achieve with today's infrastructure and technology, cryptocurrencies won't suddenly have a billion people using it for daily transactions overnight. I think we could easily support 100 MB blocks now - which would be 100x what current bitcoin provides. In my opinion, that provides quite a bit of time to continue to investigate various scaling avenues.