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Comment by josephg | Hacker News Reader

People keep saying that, but the lightning network is in testing at the moment and when it gets widely deployed we should start seeing near zero transaction fees on the bitcoin network.

You can say what you want about the philosophy of that - the lightning network will add yet another group of people who collectively have an outsized control over the network. But if the scaling issues get addressed I don't see any reason why it couldn't work as a currency. And it looks like they are being (slowly) addressed.

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Any successful Lightning Network (at scale) would require a dramatic block size increase. The last (Lightning Network tech) I saw suggested it would need a 133MB blocksize.

Blockstream struck down a modest increase to 2MB in November. They have devs who want to reduce the blocksize. I'm not sure where you're finding hope in LN.

Bitcoin Cash forked off to get back to scaling, and it's doing great. Check out how well the mempool stress test went this past week.

And Bitcoin Cash will need GB or even TB sized blocks to scale to the size of Visa. If scaling the network was as easy as changing 1 variable it wouldn't be that hard to get consensus on a scaling solution.

GB blocks are basically ready with today's hardware though the need is years out. It won't be long before TB blocks can say the same, testing is underway.

Current prevailing theory in BCH land is the block size is an unnecessary hinderance, and will likely be gone in the next 18 months.

Exciting times!

> GB blocks are basically ready with today's hardware

What are you smoking? Even 1GB blocks would be 144GB per day of blockchain growth. You can't expect people to tolerate that kind of disk usage, let alone bandwidth.

It is possible today, thankfully not necessary.

By the time they're necessary, it'll be a lot less demanding, relatively speaking....

This breaks the HN guidelines. Commenters here aren't allowed to attack others no matter how wrong someone is. Please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again.

7000 transactions per second is a lot of of data. If you're keeping history then you cannot store 4200000 transactions per 10 minutes in less than a 1GB block. The problem isn't the blocksize. The problem is that traditional blockchains grow indefinitively and keep onchain data forever.

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