Comment by tobiaswk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tobiaswk | Hacker News Reader

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In all fairness the Bitcoin, BTC, is currently close to unusable and scales very bad. It quickly gets oversaturated with transaction and transaction fees rise quick. I think the conspiracy has come full circle. Those who slowly "threw sand in its engine" has done a great job. Why are transaction fees low today? Because no one, or a lot less, is using BTC. I know some will label me as a conspiracist. I've been following this project since early 2011 and it has derailed badly. The community is a toxic mess. On both sides to some extent. I'm interested in how they will do this trading. Off-chain or on-chain.

Bitcoin Cash, BCH, though is very interesting. It conforms to the original idea (whitepaper) much better in my opnion. No second layer nonsense "solutions". A simple block size limit increase (again) and enablement of Op-Codes (again). All coming 15th of May. The very reason to why Ethereum was created by Vitalik was because Op-Codes usage was too limited on BTC. This changes with BCH; Op-Codes will be back and open for smart contracts. Lots of merchants and people are beginning to use BCH. Because it is fast (0-conf works again) and has close to zero transaction fees. It's the project I began following early 2011.

Bitcoin fees were cut in half on a technical level by those that chose to adopt segwit which made transactions roughly half as big. Schnoor signatures can further compress transactions to get even more in a block.

If in spite of these innovations blocks end up full, a block size increase is still a tool kept in reserve.

In reality BCH did not make any hard won technical innovations and simply reached for the bigger blocks knob. If BCH did become the globally adopted winner its blocks would fill and create a fee market eventually too driving it to seek the same sorts of transaction size optimizations bitcoin has made. These roads might well converge in a similar place eventually.

I strongly suspect Layer 2 solutions are going to be needed regardless of the knobs fiddled on an expensive but immutable Layer 1 so we might as well all buckle up for that. Plus, atomic swaps in Lightning pave the way for decentralized exchanges which means even better anonymization and censorship resistance. Everyone wins with a stable Layer 2 most major coins are compatible with.

That's my point. BCH did not include some technical innovations like you stated. It simply increased hardcoded block size limit. Simple as that. Even Satoshi himself mentions this in his whitepaper. Other stuff has also changed. The difficulty adjustment (DAA) algorithm has changed to allow are more stable difficulty for miners. Segwit just changed what parts of a transaction counted as size in a block. In reality we're talking about 200KB or thereabouts extra space in blocks. Lightning network is based on a mesh-network. Furthermore it completely changes the bitcoins fundamental clockwork. Suddenly you can't receive payments if you don't hold any coins yourself. Even more detrimental; you can't receive payments if you are not online on the lightning network. It has several other flaws that are very hard to fix; https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-....

I suggest you see this presentation on 1GB blocks (tested on test-net) by Peter Rizun; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SJm2ep3X_M And his talk at "Satoshi's Vision" (here he talks about what is called "weak blocks" and how it can improve scaling and wasted PoW; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXFuNkaYcPQ

It's totally feasible and does not require super computers albeit a Raspberry Pi won't do no more. Scaling to VISA level of transactions is possible. I don't think it's really going to change too much in computing power with bigger blocks. The size of the merkle root won't change just because blocks are larger which means the block header size won't change.

Why do you suspect a second-layer is needed?

You need a second layer(and possibly more on-top of that) for several reasons.

How do you expect to propagate and store 1GB blocks (hell, even 100MB blocks) every 10 minutes for the foreseeable future. I understand that the cost of storage and bandwidth has been falling for some time however if you want this system to gain 'mainstream' adaption it cannot everyone's coffee purchases for the rest of time. How do you keep a system like that decentralised if you aren't even paying people to run these nodes? There certainly wouldn't be as many as there are currently.

In a world of 1GB blocks and ultra cheap transactions it means people can simply use it as online storage. You could upload your movie collection and have it propagated to all of the nodes on the network.

The internet would not have scaled if we still broadcasted every single packet to all of the nodes on the network, it had to be split up and routed and the very same will happen to Bitcoin.

Extremely large blocks will require the big miners to all host their servers in a ULLDMA-like facility, because low latency block propagation gives them the advantage. Anyone not in the club will suffer high-latency block propagation which will put them at a disadvantage to the other players who are all hosted in the same physical location. The result is that a single-point of failure in the system will come not from the concentration of mining power, but the concentration of block-propagating servers accounting for the majority of mining power.

There are obvious questions like who will run such facility, who will be able to join, at what price, and under what jurisdiction will it be. If the club is run collectively by the largest miners, they would not be incentivized to let any new competition join the club as it would collectively harm the existing members who have the advantage.

Also, in existing trading markets, we've seen that there's an "outside club" that can pay to host servers in these facilities, but there's still an "inside club", who get the data earlier than the outside club. (https://www.cnbc.com/id/100809395)

At which point you may as well put the transactions in a SQL database and call it Paypal.

> Suddenly you can't receive payments if you don't hold any coins yourself.

This is completely untrue. The person who is sending you coins can open up a channel to you and load it with the money they're sending you. Sometimes they won't even need to open a channel because you already have one open, but just with no funds on your end of it. Eventually, exchanges will support loading up channels directly this way such that users never actually need to touch the base Bitcoin layer directly, and will deal purely in LN transactions except when they need to settle disputes.

And segwit and schnorr signatures would be "hard won technical innovations"?

Segwit is an overengineered solution forced into a soft fork unnecessarily. Schnorr is another overengineered solution which only helps the segwit transactions to a very small degree. It's a great disservice to call these scaling solutions since their purpose are different and they are so very bad at them.

> a block size increase is still a tool kept in reserve.

Until we see +$20 fees? That sure didn't stop some of the Core developers from celebrating the success (yes you read that right!).

Not really a fan of BCH due to their takeover of Bitcoin.com and other internet handles. I wish they could just own the Bitcoin Cash brand instead of resorting to shady tactics.

I find it hilarious that you claim no one is using BTC but lots of people are using BCH. Dogecoin does more transactions than BCH.

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