Why We're Updating the Minimum BitPay Payment Amount to $100

By that logic, I could say: "Those who have truly drunk the koolaid call the high price of gold a feature not a bug."

Turns out much of the world revolves around drinking some kinda koolaid.

Isn't that what "off-chain transactions" and the "Lightning Network" are?

You don't need to store Terabytes per day for 1B daily transactions. BC does it differently, but you could get away with 4 byte time-stamp, 4 byte amount, 32 byte source public key, 32 byte destination public key = unique transaction + 32 byte signature demonstrating sender with correct private key signed that transaction. Now, 1 billion of those = 100GB per day = 36 TB per year which sounds like a lot but most nodes don't need the full amount just current state + verifiable hash + new transactions.

But even that's not needed, suppose every node includes a subset of the account amounts so every K nodes allows you to recover the state of all accounts. That way you don't need a full database just the most recent K nodes and they have complete state. Some people can keep a historic archive, but the system operates even if that information was lost. (You would want some GC as well so accounts must either be larger than A or have a transaction within the last Z steps.)

Granted, managing pending transactions increases bandwidth needs, but nodes can manage reputations based on only forwarding valid transactions. Some metrics so their is some statistical chance of conformation and you end up with ~2x overhead for unconfirmed but likely transactions.

PS: You can also have the protocol grow so if the 11 of the last 20 nodes where full the new node is 1% larger.

The minimum fee for me yesterday was 0.004btc (about $55), the suggested fee was 0.008btc (about $112), and the priority fee was prohibitively high. My hd wallet had 3 inputs though which increases the fee. When I sent with the minimum fee, it stayed unconfirmed for a little over a day before it flat fell off the network. When I resent it with the suggested fee ($112), it stayed unconfirmed for several hours until the early morning when it started getting confirmations finally.

How? Anyone can run a lighting node

> And now that we've reach a critical mass of transactions this lightning network is nowhere to be found

That conflicts with the other statement.

Please tell me where you are stuck: https://medium.com/@JimmyMow/announcing-zap-a-lightning-netw...

Maybe we can do much better international trade with it tho.

There's no need for rhetoric comparing BTC to gold. It's not gold, it isn't like gold, and we dont need another form of gold. Let Bitcoin be its own thing.

As long as cryptocoins aren't accepted as much as fiat currency (and they're not even _remotely_ near 1:1), they'll be in lower demand during less glorious times. Practically nobody (less than now) will accept cryptocoins then because you can't use them to buy anything worthwhile. A man's gotta eat, and keep the chin above the tide.