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Comment by mikeokner | Hacker News Reader

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mikeokner

Actually, Bitcoin is having some pretty serious problems at the moment. The stability is surprising.

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/block-size-halving-bitcoin-n...

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What problems?

...click the link.

I did, it's a massive distortion of non-issues. What are the _actual_ problems?

Basically, the current block size limit of 1MB isn't sufficient for the current volume of transactions. Some transactions aren't making it into blocks in real-time and have to sit waiting in a queue to be processed. This leads to delays in processing commercial payments, which in turn threatens Bitcoin's viability as a mainstream currency.

Some people argue the issue could be easily fixed by simply raising the block size limit, but others disagree and believe that would become too costly in bandwidth and processing capacity for miners, so AFAIK there's still no consensus on a resolution.

A couple other good explanations: http://rusty.ozlabs.org/?p=535 https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin...

However the two changes required for full lightning network, segwit and checksequenceverify, are either in the process of being merged or already released and waiting for mining activation. And lightning scales waaaaaay better than any block size increase that we'd reasonably see.

The scaling issue is settled. Bitcoin transactions will scale off-chain with payment channel solutions like lightning.

The reasoning "because we will scale it off-chain, on-chain scaling is a waste of time" must stop because it's so stupid. They are not mutually exclusive.

They are exclusive at this time. We have entirely exhausted the capacity for on chain scaling. There are technologies that might improve that situation, but until they are tested we cannot precommit to using the gained space.

Isn't this a fundamental change in the economic expectations as proposed by the system's creator, who planned to increase onchain capacity as far back as 2010?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg153...

I don't know the mind of the Satoshi I wouldn't care to. Bitcoin is an algorithm with empirical properties that are discovered, not created. It is what it is and we need to deal with that. (I would also be dubious of anyone's beliefs regarding bitcoin in 2010. There's a lot we didn't know then.)

I think LN will become highly centralized very quickly.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/4fj2m9/ill_predict_tha...

It's almost like it's being artificially propped to prevent panic selling.

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