3 ms·
Your post demonstrates a clear lack of understanding about how Bitcoin works. 1) The Lightning Network is fine and stronger than ever. That >2 year old outdate
by rufusroflpunch 4y ago
Your post demonstrates a clear lack of understanding about how Bitcoin works.
1) The Lightning Network is fine and stronger than ever. That >2 year old outdated post is meaningless. There are MANY more routing nodes than ever, and markets have sprung up that allow nodes to make profit around selling liquidity to other nodes. Lightning is bigger, better, easier and more private than ever, and it only continues to improve.
2) The Bitcoin developers do not control Bitcoin. The Bitcoin miners do not control Bitcoin. The nodes control Bitcoin. There are tens of thousands, at least, of full nodes. Bitcoin developers and miners have tried many times to change the consensus rules of Bitcoin, and have failed every time, because the node operators just wouldn't run the code.
That's because Bitcoin is actually decentralized. The Bitcoin community reached a social consensus that the protocol consensus rules were probably never going to change, and it was preferable that they not change. Instead, the majority of the effort for scaling Bitcoin has gone into building higher Bitcoin layers, such as the Lightning Network.
Also, if the Bitcoin developers cared about miner profits, they wouldn't have implemented something like SegWit which is a backward-compatible change which dramatically reduced transaction fees to miners.
The truth is, no amount of block size or block time changes will ever make a cryptocurrency scale enough to remain decentralized and be a network for ALL payments. Building in layers is a sound engineering decision, and it allows people to create a payment network like Lightning without making potentially deadly trade-offs in the base layer.