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Bitcoin was co-opted by a censorious minority - Theymos and Blockstream - who have maintained an artificially low block size, ostensibly in order to keep a hig
by TimeBearingDown 3y ago
Bitcoin was co-opted by a censorious minority - Theymos and Blockstream - who have maintained an artificially low block size, ostensibly in order to keep a high number of non-mining but full-history nodes.
Bitcoin’s competitors such as Ethereum and Monero did not allow a software or discussion forum monoculture and instead have scaling block sizes, and still hard fork to add new scaling features (https://ethresear.ch https://ethresear.ch).
- mort96 3y agoBlock size puts a limit on the rate of transactions, but increasing the block size wouldn't help the time it takes to spin up new nodes. In fact, increasing the block size would make spinning up new nodes significantly less feasible, since the chain would grow at a faster rate.
- TimeBearingDown 3y agoHaving a large number of independent non-mining full-history nodes is good, but it’s ultimately far less important than the distribution of mining (voting) nodes, and it’s one of many factors that must be considered while working to increase throughput, which is an absolute imperative. Under 10 tx/sec is glacial, it makes Bitcoin useless for the people with the least access to financial services, and it seems starkly in opposition to Satoshi’s written comments about scaling when adding the 1MB block size. I do think Bitcoin should be considered a failure if it becomes purely an exercise in hoarding. I will say!I’ve been too happy with Ethereum and Monero to test Lightning, but I should. I had misgivings with its interface and availability requirements while reading of it in the past years.