> better UX and lightning network will help with that.
Lightning appears to be a bit of a joke - routing payments is almost impossible, lots of attempts seem to fail, and there also appear to be requirements like keeping a node up constantly.
Lightning appears to be a bit of a joke - routing payments is almost impossible, lots of attempts seem to fail, and there also appear to be requirements like keeping a node up constantly.
they aren't fundamental flaws to the concept. just like with tcp/ip packets, routing will improve with robustness of the network. I saw a couple of work in progress efforts to address the full node requirements.
they'll be growing pains but bitcoin is interesting because the protocol doesn't go away, even as the payment processing companies themselves run out of money. so a different company or group of efforts will implement it with merchants when its better.
Moreover, even if LN worked as a full substitute for on-chain transactions (all indications point to only a very centralized hub and spoke LN model working efficiently), Bitcoin's three transactions per second limit makes the maximum proportion of the global population that could participate in a LN very limited.
Afterall, LN payment channels do still need on-chain transactions to set up, and do need to be replaced from the time to time. Given every user would need, at the very least, a few payment channels, the math for global adoption of the LN with a 3 tps limit doesn't work.
So although Bitcoin has a low transaction per second limitation, the database Transaction objects can contain hundreds of transactions between users. This is what batching does. Segwit further helps lower the size of Transaction objects. And further proposals also lower that further.
Can you elaborate or provide a link?
If you're referring to off-chain transactions through LN that are 'batched' on chain: these cannot set up payment channels. On-chain transactions for payment channel set up are the necessary minimum for the LN, and even to do just this, Bitcoin's block size limit doesn't come close to being adequate.
As for Segwit, it's a one time limit increase to something like 1.67 MB per 10 minutes (~2 KB/s). The limit needs a couple order of magnitude increase to make Bitcoin viable as a global currency.
I'm not referring to lightning. This is basic day-one functionality of bitcoin. I don't feel compelled to provide a link to this at this point. Many popular services' implementation of bitcoin wasn't doing this, and now they are, this is called batching.
ICOs are like this too. Billions of dollars are rallied for technologies that don't exist, for founders who don't exist (their headshots are usually pilfered from stock photos), for problems that don't exist. And yet, funding!
This insanity would never happen if cryptocurrency wasn't involved. The multilevel marketing energy of crypto turns off critical thinking.
There are also parallel scaling proposals.
All while on-chain transactions are extremely cheap and user experience improvements would help handle much more load than last year.
AFAICT your only response there is "It will get better". I personally don't believe it will or that it can, given factros like having to tie up BTC in the network to facilitate channels, and race conditions/contention on payments.
It's far from trustless and decentralised, and it appears to be far from functional.