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Comment by vintageseltzer | Hacker News Reader

The Lightning Network is meant to address this: https://lightning.network/

Why bother attempting to patch on layers on top of BTC when it's already centralized with ASIC farms?

Start fresh.

Early adopters of BTC are trying to con new users into buying coins produced for minimal capital/computational work. The flaw in BTC is inherent to the malicious minting algorithm designed to harm new users.

There's other cryptocurrencies who are far out pacing the BTC core team.

Which currencies do you see as addressing these problems in a technically proven way?

Vertcoin is the probably the most Bitcoin-like one that addresses the mining centralization issue.

Ethereum (which definitely has its own fair share of issues) recently hit its all time high in daily transactions, which incidentally is more transactions than all other existing decentralized blockchains put together--a set containing Bitcoin.

Ha because then that would devalue bitcoin and everyone's dream of selling to a greater fool would collapse!

I agree: we need a faster settlement layer independent of how much the currency itself is worth; but let’s say we have have that network? How do taxes work? Everytime you transfer or pay for anything? That’s not going to work.

Lightning ultimately has to come into contact with Bitcoin at some point, unfortunately. Even if you just have one Bitcoin transaction a month, I'm paying $20/month at the current tx prices just to be able to use Bitcoin. $240/year. Does that sound anywhere near reasonable to you?

The goal is that there will be fewer BTC transactions once LN becomes widespread, especially if people or institutions open long-lived channels between each other (active for months, years, or even indefinitely). Then you'd only have to hit the BTC blockchain a few times a year, at most, and that's a level of transactions which the BTC blockchain can easily handle, even if the whole world population uses it for everyday trading.

However I also expect that fees will go down once this craze is over (in a few days hopefully). They have tripled in the past three days (see https://fork.lol/tx/fee).

Let's say "a few times a year" is once every two and a half months. Everyone who wanted to use Bitcoin would then have to pay about $100 a year to use it at today's rates. That's still ridiculous. And fees have increased mostly because the price increased. If people actually started using Bitcoin, the price would skyrocket and fees would rise even higher.

The fees have increased because there's not enough space in the blocks. The price increase would be irrelevant if there was enough space in blocks.

The fees have also increased because of the large number of unconfirmed transactions (we currently have over 160k transactions in the mempool). Once that decreases to more reasonable levels the tx cost will decrease, too.

Some premium credit cards come with annual fees and benefits. $100 a year for the ability to use a censorship resistant, semi-anonymous payment system doesn't sound like a bad deal.

Lightning network is the biggest pile of vaporware in be whole mess. It’s been “just around the corner” for years now.

Recent updates with video demos (looks great):

https://medium.com/@lightning_network/lightning-protocol-1-0...

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