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> Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight. Higher velocity of money would lead to zero value? That's

> Imagine BTC was actually used for any scale of economic transactions. It would collapse overnight. Higher velocity of money would lead to zero value? That's not commonly what basic economy dictates. This being 2022, let's try to keep our concepts clear as to not rehash the debate from ten years ago. BTC is a currency, a blockchain, a programmable transaction language, a piece of software, and a protocol. It is good to suggest which one of these we imagine in use, and how that use is done. Otherwise we risk saying that imagine if the physical $100 bill was used for all McDonald's transactions, clearly that wouldn't work, they are too hard to subdivide and even if they weren't there simply aren't enough of them, and therefore it is unusable as a currency. Clearly McDonald's couldn't operate each and every economical transaction by settling them publicly on the BTC block chain, that much is obvious. But just as clearly there's nothing stopping Visa from denominating transactions in BTC, or utilizing that type of transactions internally, or utilizing the public Lightning network, or whatever it is McDonald's use in El Salvador. That much we probably agree on so let's leave that discussion in the past decade.

lrvick 4y ago
I appreciate that we both replied with the same points at almost the same time.
kevstev 4y ago
> Higher velocity of money would lead to zero value? That's not commonly what basic economy dictates. I think you missed his actual point, which to be fair wasn't explicitly stated and I don't think is widely known. The bitcoin network can not handle large transaction volumes, like at all- its absurdly low. Somewhere around 10/second is where I understood it to stand, and I recall reading a paper that talked about changes that could theoretically get that to 40/s. A quick googling on the state of the art of this has it reporting 7/second: https://www.google.com/search?q=max+transactions+per+second+bitcoin&oq=max+transactions+per+second+bitcoin https://www.google.com/search?q=max+transactions+per+second+... I know this because this came up around 2016ish during one of the booms, and while I was previously crypto-curious and even a bit enthusiastic about the possibilities, once I saw that, I immediately lost all interest and got out. Other coins like Bitcoin Cash tried to address this, but the numbers were still absurdly low for what was supposed to be a completely decentralized currency to replace all others. Which is actually why Coinbase, FTX and the like rose so quickly and became so important- they enable transfers off chain.

lrvick 4y ago

I appreciate that we both replied with the same points at almost the same time.

kevstev 4y ago

> Higher velocity of money would lead to zero value? That's not commonly what basic economy dictates. I think you missed his actual point, which to be fair wasn't explicitly stated and I don't think is widely known. The bitcoin network can not handle large transaction volumes, like at all- its absurdly low. Somewhere around 10/second is where I understood it to stand, and I recall reading a paper that talked about changes that could theoretically get that to 40/s. A quick googling on the state of the art of this has it reporting 7/second: https://www.google.com/search?q=max+transactions+per+second+bitcoin&oq=max+transactions+per+second+bitcoin https://www.google.com/search?q=max+transactions+per+second+... I know this because this came up around 2016ish during one of the booms, and while I was previously crypto-curious and even a bit enthusiastic about the possibilities, once I saw that, I immediately lost all interest and got out. Other coins like Bitcoin Cash tried to address this, but the numbers were still absurdly low for what was supposed to be a completely decentralized currency to replace all others. Which is actually why Coinbase, FTX and the like rose so quickly and became so important- they enable transfers off chain.