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Bitcoin talk is basically propaganda for the lightning network since everything that goes against increasing throughput is deleted. Right now the average trans

Bitcoin talk is basically propaganda for the lightning network since everything that goes against increasing throughput is deleted. Right now the average transaction costs $25 and the throughput is about 1.5 KB/s (900KB block every 10 minutes on average). The entire blockchain over 11 years takes up about $6 of hard drive space. It is technically trivial for the few people who need to sync with the actual chain of any cryptocurrency to do it. There is no universe where people use bitcoin for normal transactions now or in the future. There is also no reason to use a complicated second layer that still has to go through the bitcoin chain when other cryptocurrencies can be used more easily, more directly and much more securely. People are not going to pay $25 fees for anything other than speculation, there is no utility for normal transaction and plenty of competition. Right now that only makes up 14% of the total mining reward. A year ago fees only made up 0.3% of the mining reward. For mining fees to ever take over, there needs to be a lot more transactions. Then there is the volatility of combining both the price and transaction fees. When the price goes down, the transaction fees dip even lower. Three months ago the average transaction was 1/20th the price. If the mining reward goes down rapidly to 1/20th of what it was before the block time can adjust, mining should go down to match. Then blocks will be created more slowly and the time to the block reward will be pushed into the future. This might make the average fee price go up since the transaction throughput will go down. I'm not sure what effect this will have on the network since it might mean miners monitor transactions and wait until there are enough out there to make their chance at finding a block worth turning their mining on.

tromp 6y ago
The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks. Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant, more private, and don't need the whole world to download and verify them (except for an open and close). It improves scalability by orders of magnitude
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  > The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks. The current throughput is 1.5KB/s. Regular users don't even need to sync with the blockchain. Anyone can rent a server for $10 a month that will download the entire chain of the last 11 years in a single hour. What math are you doing where you think the -current- max block size makes sense? > Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant No they aren't, they still have to make it to the main chain. > more private Anyone could make a new address and use VPN for each transaction if that's what they want. At least they could if they weren't in danger of transaction fees becoming larger than what is in their address, which essentially disables it until transaction fees go down. Other cryptocurrencies are already much more private if that is what people want. > don't need the whole world to download and verify them Very few people actually need to sync with the whole chain unless they want to. Exchanges, payment processors and of course miners. Most people never sync with the whole chain and few of those that do are doing it out of a neccesity. Even so, syncing with the blockchain was never a technical limitation. There is nothing that a second layer offers that simply using a non-crippled cryptocurrency doesn't already solve. Ethereum and bitcoin cash have already exceeded bitcoin's transaction volume over the last week. Ethereum has had far more transaction volume for a long time now. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bch.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...

tromp 6y ago

The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks. Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant, more private, and don't need the whole world to download and verify them (except for an open and close). It improves scalability by orders of magnitude

CyberDildonics 6y ago
> The cost of diskspace is not as limiting as the time needed to do an Initial Block Download, which would become too burdensome with huge blocks. The current throughput is 1.5KB/s. Regular users don't even need to sync with the blockchain. Anyone can rent a server for $10 a month that will download the entire chain of the last 11 years in a single hour. What math are you doing where you think the -current- max block size makes sense? > Transacting on 2nd layer makes a lot of sense as txs are instant No they aren't, they still have to make it to the main chain. > more private Anyone could make a new address and use VPN for each transaction if that's what they want. At least they could if they weren't in danger of transaction fees becoming larger than what is in their address, which essentially disables it until transaction fees go down. Other cryptocurrencies are already much more private if that is what people want. > don't need the whole world to download and verify them Very few people actually need to sync with the whole chain unless they want to. Exchanges, payment processors and of course miners. Most people never sync with the whole chain and few of those that do are doing it out of a neccesity. Even so, syncing with the blockchain was never a technical limitation. There is nothing that a second layer offers that simply using a non-crippled cryptocurrency doesn't already solve. Ethereum and bitcoin cash have already exceeded bitcoin's transaction volume over the last week. Ethereum has had far more transaction volume for a long time now. https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bch.html https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-eth-bc...