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In all fairness the Bitcoin, BTC, is currently close to unusable and scales very bad. It quickly gets oversaturated with transaction and transaction fees rise q

In all fairness the Bitcoin, BTC, is currently close to unusable and scales very bad. It quickly gets oversaturated with transaction and transaction fees rise quick. I think the conspiracy has come full circle. Those who slowly "threw sand in its engine" has done a great job. Why are transaction fees low today? Because no one, or a lot less, is using BTC. I know some will label me as a conspiracist. I've been following this project since early 2011 and it has derailed badly. The community is a toxic mess. On both sides to some extent. I'm interested in how they will do this trading. Off-chain or on-chain. Bitcoin Cash, BCH, though is very interesting. It conforms to the original idea (whitepaper) much better in my opnion. No second layer nonsense "solutions". A simple block size limit increase (again) and enablement of Op-Codes (again). All coming 15th of May. The very reason to why Ethereum was created by Vitalik was because Op-Codes usage was too limited on BTC. This changes with BCH; Op-Codes will be back and open for smart contracts. Lots of merchants and people are beginning to use BCH. Because it is fast (0-conf works again) and has close to zero transaction fees. It's the project I began following early 2011.

lrvick 8y ago
Bitcoin fees were cut in half on a technical level by those that chose to adopt segwit which made transactions roughly half as big. Schnoor signatures can further compress transactions to get even more in a block. If in spite of these innovations blocks end up full, a block size increase is still a tool kept in reserve. In reality BCH did not make any hard won technical innovations and simply reached for the bigger blocks knob. If BCH did become the globally adopted winner its blocks would fill and create a fee market eventually too driving it to seek the same sorts of transaction size optimizations bitcoin has made. These roads might well converge in a similar place eventually. I strongly suspect Layer 2 solutions are going to be needed regardless of the knobs fiddled on an expensive but immutable Layer 1 so we might as well all buckle up for that. Plus, atomic swaps in Lightning pave the way for decentralized exchanges which means even better anonymization and censorship resistance. Everyone wins with a stable Layer 2 most major coins are compatible with.
- tobiaswk 8y ago
  That's my point. BCH did not include some technical innovations like you stated. It simply increased hardcoded block size limit. Simple as that. Even Satoshi himself mentions this in his whitepaper. Other stuff has also changed. The difficulty adjustment (DAA) algorithm has changed to allow are more stable difficulty for miners. Segwit just changed what parts of a transaction counted as size in a block. In reality we're talking about 200KB or thereabouts extra space in blocks. Lightning network is based on a mesh-network. Furthermore it completely changes the bitcoins fundamental clockwork. Suddenly you can't receive payments if you don't hold any coins yourself. Even more detrimental; you can't receive payments if you are not online on the lightning network. It has several other flaws that are very hard to fix; 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-.... I suggest you see this presentation on 1GB blocks (tested on test-net) by Peter Rizun; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M And his talk at "Satoshi's Vision" (here he talks about what is called "weak blocks" and how it can improve scaling and wasted PoW; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ It's totally feasible and does not require super computers albeit a Raspberry Pi won't do no more. Scaling to VISA level of transactions is possible. I don't think it's really going to change too much in computing power with bigger blocks. The size of the merkle root won't change just because blocks are larger which means the block header size won't change. Why do you suspect a second-layer is needed?
  - brandonsometig 8y ago
    You need a second layer(and possibly more on-top of that) for several reasons. How do you expect to propagate and store 1GB blocks (hell, even 100MB blocks) every 10 minutes for the foreseeable future. I understand that the cost of storage and bandwidth has been falling for some time however if you want this system to gain 'mainstream' adaption it cannot everyone's coffee purchases for the rest of time. How do you keep a system like that decentralised if you aren't even paying people to run these nodes? There certainly wouldn't be as many as there are currently. In a world of 1GB blocks and ultra cheap transactions it means people can simply use it as online storage. You could upload your movie collection and have it propagated to all of the nodes on the network. The internet would not have scaled if we still broadcasted every single packet to all of the nodes on the network, it had to be split up and routed and the very same will happen to Bitcoin.
tuesdayrain 8y ago
Not really a fan of BCH due to their takeover of Bitcoin.com and other internet handles. I wish they could just own the Bitcoin Cash brand instead of resorting to shady tactics.
solean 8y ago
I find it hilarious that you claim no one is using BTC but lots of people are using BCH. Dogecoin does more transactions than BCH.

lrvick 8y ago

Bitcoin fees were cut in half on a technical level by those that chose to adopt segwit which made transactions roughly half as big. Schnoor signatures can further compress transactions to get even more in a block. If in spite of these innovations blocks end up full, a block size increase is still a tool kept in reserve. In reality BCH did not make any hard won technical innovations and simply reached for the bigger blocks knob. If BCH did become the globally adopted winner its blocks would fill and create a fee market eventually too driving it to seek the same sorts of transaction size optimizations bitcoin has made. These roads might well converge in a similar place eventually. I strongly suspect Layer 2 solutions are going to be needed regardless of the knobs fiddled on an expensive but immutable Layer 1 so we might as well all buckle up for that. Plus, atomic swaps in Lightning pave the way for decentralized exchanges which means even better anonymization and censorship resistance. Everyone wins with a stable Layer 2 most major coins are compatible with.

tobiaswk 8y ago
That's my point. BCH did not include some technical innovations like you stated. It simply increased hardcoded block size limit. Simple as that. Even Satoshi himself mentions this in his whitepaper. Other stuff has also changed. The difficulty adjustment (DAA) algorithm has changed to allow are more stable difficulty for miners. Segwit just changed what parts of a transaction counted as size in a block. In reality we're talking about 200KB or thereabouts extra space in blocks. Lightning network is based on a mesh-network. Furthermore it completely changes the bitcoins fundamental clockwork. Suddenly you can't receive payments if you don't hold any coins yourself. Even more detrimental; you can't receive payments if you are not online on the lightning network. It has several other flaws that are very hard to fix; 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-.... I suggest you see this presentation on 1GB blocks (tested on test-net) by Peter Rizun; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M And his talk at "Satoshi's Vision" (here he talks about what is called "weak blocks" and how it can improve scaling and wasted PoW; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ It's totally feasible and does not require super computers albeit a Raspberry Pi won't do no more. Scaling to VISA level of transactions is possible. I don't think it's really going to change too much in computing power with bigger blocks. The size of the merkle root won't change just because blocks are larger which means the block header size won't change. Why do you suspect a second-layer is needed?
- brandonsometig 8y ago
  You need a second layer(and possibly more on-top of that) for several reasons. How do you expect to propagate and store 1GB blocks (hell, even 100MB blocks) every 10 minutes for the foreseeable future. I understand that the cost of storage and bandwidth has been falling for some time however if you want this system to gain 'mainstream' adaption it cannot everyone's coffee purchases for the rest of time. How do you keep a system like that decentralised if you aren't even paying people to run these nodes? There certainly wouldn't be as many as there are currently. In a world of 1GB blocks and ultra cheap transactions it means people can simply use it as online storage. You could upload your movie collection and have it propagated to all of the nodes on the network. The internet would not have scaled if we still broadcasted every single packet to all of the nodes on the network, it had to be split up and routed and the very same will happen to Bitcoin.

tuesdayrain 8y ago

Not really a fan of BCH due to their takeover of Bitcoin.com and other internet handles. I wish they could just own the Bitcoin Cash brand instead of resorting to shady tactics.

solean 8y ago

I find it hilarious that you claim no one is using BTC but lots of people are using BCH. Dogecoin does more transactions than BCH.