6 ms·

Just to be clear, 3 tx/sec is just incorrect and easily disproved by dividing the total transactions per day (readily available online) by the total seconds in

Just to be clear, 3 tx/sec is just incorrect and easily disproved by dividing the total transactions per day (readily available online) by the total seconds in a day. Also the btc main layer is a major settlement layer. It doesnt even compare to ACH or wires in frequency. The fees going up if its tried to be used in that way will force it, and that is a good thing. A chain cannot grow so fast with high tx so that it bloats and exceeds hard drive capabilities for distributed nodes or it becomes centralized. Its performing exactly the way it should. L2 solutions will take care of coffee transactions.

ahelwer 6y ago
Okay, so it isn't 3 tx/sec. It's a bit more than that. Not an order of magnitude more, or two orders of magnitude, or the five orders of magnitude more to have the throughput required for everyone on earth to be able to transact once per day, say to buy lunch. You talk about BTC as a settlement layer. A settlement layer for what? The lightning network? Laughable. BTC might have a future as a store of value like gold, and it deserves credit for establishing cryptocurrencies as an entirely novel asset class. But I think other, better protocols will be used for those coffee transactions instead of hacking on a secondary layer to BTC.
- trident5000 6y ago
  Just pointing out that you dont know what you're talking about and/or blatantly lying for an underlying bias/goal.
  - ahelwer 6y ago
    According to this chart BTC oscillates between 3 and 5 transactions per second: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-second https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-secon... What is my blatant lie?
    - trident5000 6y ago
      https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second The maximum is about 8. But who cares at the end of the day. Settlement will be a rare event and needs to be for the reasons I just mentioned. Its the only system that works for decentralization and to deal with the bloating issue.
- xur17 6y ago
  > Okay, so it isn't 3 tx/sec. It's a bit more than that. Not an order of magnitude more, or two orders of magnitude, or the five orders of magnitude more to have the throughput required for everyone on earth to be able to transact once per day, say to buy lunch. > You talk about BTC as a settlement layer. A settlement layer for what? The lightning network? Laughable. Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer. Remember that every transaction that occurs is stored in perpetuity on every node in the Bitcoin network. It should be expensive for a transaction like that to occur, and we should create incentives that limit the creation of these as much as possible. Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer? I think it's perfectly reasonable to have second and third layer networks that sit on top of Bitcoin acting as transaction networks, while the main BTC chain is used for larger transactions or to settle large batches of transactions from other layers.
  - lawn 6y ago
    > Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer. What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). > Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer? It's laughable because people will just use another crypto, so they don't have to pay the +2 large and expensive BTC on-chain fees.
    - xur17 6y ago
      > What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that technically only a very small subset of transactions should be settling on the base BTC layer, and hence that is how incentives should be (and are) setup.
      - bustin 6y ago
        Why would people prefer to use a paypal that settles on the bitcoin network vs a paypal that is based around USD?
- rawtxapp 6y ago
  > The lightning network? Laughable. Why is it laughable? The whole world doesn't need every little transaction to be permanently recorded on the public blockchain.
  - yunohn 6y ago
    Isn’t that the “advantage” purported by blockchain currencies?
- mr_woozy 6y ago
  I don't see how sidechains isn't doing exactly this.
bluecalm 6y ago
BTC supply is not flexible. It means it will never be usable as currency. Settlement layer, first layer, tenth layer. It can't work because by the nature of it it will go up when more people want to use it and thus rewarding rent seeking behavior of holding it. It's well understood basic economy. We had gold standard already, it wasn't workable. If the believers shove it down naive people throats we will just re-learn this lesson and it will be very costly.

ahelwer 6y ago

Okay, so it isn't 3 tx/sec. It's a bit more than that. Not an order of magnitude more, or two orders of magnitude, or the five orders of magnitude more to have the throughput required for everyone on earth to be able to transact once per day, say to buy lunch. You talk about BTC as a settlement layer. A settlement layer for what? The lightning network? Laughable. BTC might have a future as a store of value like gold, and it deserves credit for establishing cryptocurrencies as an entirely novel asset class. But I think other, better protocols will be used for those coffee transactions instead of hacking on a secondary layer to BTC.

trident5000 6y ago
Just pointing out that you dont know what you're talking about and/or blatantly lying for an underlying bias/goal.
- ahelwer 6y ago
  According to this chart BTC oscillates between 3 and 5 transactions per second: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-second https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/transactions-per-secon... What is my blatant lie?
  - trident5000 6y ago
    https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transactions-per-second The maximum is about 8. But who cares at the end of the day. Settlement will be a rare event and needs to be for the reasons I just mentioned. Its the only system that works for decentralization and to deal with the bloating issue.
xur17 6y ago
> Okay, so it isn't 3 tx/sec. It's a bit more than that. Not an order of magnitude more, or two orders of magnitude, or the five orders of magnitude more to have the throughput required for everyone on earth to be able to transact once per day, say to buy lunch. > You talk about BTC as a settlement layer. A settlement layer for what? The lightning network? Laughable. Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer. Remember that every transaction that occurs is stored in perpetuity on every node in the Bitcoin network. It should be expensive for a transaction like that to occur, and we should create incentives that limit the creation of these as much as possible. Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer? I think it's perfectly reasonable to have second and third layer networks that sit on top of Bitcoin acting as transaction networks, while the main BTC chain is used for larger transactions or to settle large batches of transactions from other layers.
- lawn 6y ago
  > Personal opinion: I think the part you are missing here is that lots of transactions shouldn't be occurring on the base layer. What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). > Why is it "laughable" for the lightning network to use BTC as a settlement layer? It's laughable because people will just use another crypto, so they don't have to pay the +2 large and expensive BTC on-chain fees.
  - xur17 6y ago
    > What you're really saying is that you don't think BTC should help banking the unbanked (because they often live in poor countries where their weekly salary is your cup of coffee). That is not at all what I am saying. I'm saying that technically only a very small subset of transactions should be settling on the base BTC layer, and hence that is how incentives should be (and are) setup.
    - bustin 6y ago
      Why would people prefer to use a paypal that settles on the bitcoin network vs a paypal that is based around USD?
rawtxapp 6y ago
> The lightning network? Laughable. Why is it laughable? The whole world doesn't need every little transaction to be permanently recorded on the public blockchain.
- yunohn 6y ago
  Isn’t that the “advantage” purported by blockchain currencies?
mr_woozy 6y ago
I don't see how sidechains isn't doing exactly this.

bluecalm 6y ago

BTC supply is not flexible. It means it will never be usable as currency. Settlement layer, first layer, tenth layer. It can't work because by the nature of it it will go up when more people want to use it and thus rewarding rent seeking behavior of holding it. It's well understood basic economy. We had gold standard already, it wasn't workable. If the believers shove it down naive people throats we will just re-learn this lesson and it will be very costly.