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“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale.” The mainstream public is barely aware that these networks exist.
by StacyC 8y ago
“The mainstream public is aware that these networks don’t scale.”
The mainstream public is barely aware that these networks exist.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoMore importantly I don't see any reason why VISA couldn't scale arbitrarily to accommodate however many transactions.
- ceejayoz 8y agoExactly. They've presumably already had to do so a number of times as ecommerce took off and we've moved quite a bit towards a cashless society.
- cle 8y agoIn distributed systems, there are almost always bottlenecks hiding right behind the system's empirical limit.
- sonnyblarney 8y agoMy point is that scale and speed of transaction doesn't seem to be VISA's problem. VISA et. al. have scaled massively over the last 20 years, in ways that would have been unimaginable before. Given that a VISA is just a 'number' with some 'info' on it, I don't see what any existential bottlenecks might be. Maybe some things were centralized, but now are distributed ... But given that each VISA is issued by a financial entity like a bank, which can manage it like any other account ... I just don't see the problem here. I don't want to trounce creative thinking but most of this blockchains stuff is just academic for now.
- dontreact 8y agoI don’t think this is true anymore. This poll claims 80% of Americans are aware of Bitcoin. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ccn.com/80-of-americans-are-aware-of-bitcoin-study-reveals/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.ccn.com/80-of-americans-are...
- blunte 8y agoPeople may know the name bitcoin, but trust me - they know less than nothing about it (because the sum of what they know correctly and what they know incorrectly is on the negative side).
- blotter_paper 8y agoFrom what I can tell the general public thinks Bitcoin is internet money, a bubble, a Ponzi scheme, and something people buy drugs with, in that order of frequency. Outside of tech circles, I haven't met anyone who had the slightest clue about what's going on under the hood.
- dontreact 8y agoThis is always true for complicated technical things. How many people can really accurately explain what “The Cloud” is? Wouldn’t you say the mainstream public is aware of “the cloud”. I guess my original post doesn’t really discredit the main point being made which is that people aren’t aware of Butcoin’s scaling issues. I agree with that. I do think it’s interesting that the bubble crashed once Bitcoin as a general concept was no longer really new for anyone.
- vernie 8y agoHow many of them understand that Bitcoin refers to such a network?