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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

I've said this elsewhere, but it bears repeating. Bitcoin is capable of handling high transaction volume with low fees. The BCH fork was created to support this case. The BTC chain's devs mostly work for Blockstream, who's business model is to create layer 2 payment solutions, so it's in their interest to choke off the main chain. And it looks like they are succeeding.

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All BCH did was increase the block size limit from 1mb to 8mb. It solves the scalability problems in the short term, but will run into exactly the same issues a year or two from now. Then it'll be 32mb blocks, then 128mb, then 1Gb. An O(n) approach won't work in the long term.

Yet nobody quantifies what long term is.

Forgoing a solution that works temporarily, even if only for a year or two, isn't very bright if the alternative is this. Bitcoin is quickly loosing the network effect, the only thing it has going for it vs other altcoins.

120 years.

Cryptocurrencies can be scaled to VISA levels on chain with today's hardware. And probably much further with future hardware advances. Is that "enough"?

The only argument that is ever presented is that huge blocks harm "decentralisation" - not that it cannot be done.

Don't worry - scaling solutions won't matter when Tether bubble pops and takes crypto market down for two years. BTC and BCH both are going to suffer equally.

A minority of core devs work for blockstream. There are routinely dozens of devs every months comitting to github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin and only half a dozen work for blockstream. Chaincode labs commit more code than Blockstream.

Bitcoin is sound money like gold was a long time ago. MOE is going to happen as a use case, it's just far from being the most important use case.

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