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LAMike

> We saw how it reacted when people did want to use it.

The number of transactions today are as high as January 2018, but the fees never been any lower.

If that isn't progress, what is?

https://preview.redd.it/khdi0m4pq3f21.png?width=960&crop=sma...

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Can’t tell if this is sarcasm to be honest. SegWit added a small amount of breathing room without changing block sizes. Not increasing block sizes lead to the split into BCH, then further into BCHABC and BCHSV. The core decided to switch to lightning as the scaling strategy which is still capped at 7 tx/s which still requires 68 years to open and close a single channel for everyone on earth, net new births of course.

I probably shouldn't let myself get dragged into this discussion, but I think BCH splitters didn't want lightning and used the excuse of not increasing block sizes to fork. SegWit's initial purpose was to fix the bugs that were stopping lightning. Block size was not increased because BTC devs want people to go towards lightning. They specifically indicated that block size might increase in the future. The fact that current transaction speeds do will not accommodate the entire planet is a bit of a strawman. Nobody needs that capacity right now and I think it remains to be seen if there will ever be the need. Not everybody who thinks BTC is potentially useful thinks that it must be used by the entire planet in order to be useful.

Just to be clear, I think it's great to call out the scammers and educate the deluded. I just think that taking a binary stance of either it will work the way the scammers say it will or it's a useless pile of garbage is not a reasonable position. I think there are lots of serious problems with BTC, but as a proof of concept decentralised payment processing system it's actually pretty interesting. I wish the scammers would go away and let people work on it earnestly, though. In that way, I really thought that having the BCH guys go their separate ways was a true blessing.

Thanks for the clarity around the fork. IMO the split was, to your point, largely political. One camp made the argument that increasing the block size would prevent people from being able to store the entire chain locally in support of decentralization, the other was arguing it was time to let go in favor of pragmatically maximizing transaction count and that those who cared would buy the storage necessary. I'm sure there was much more to it than that -- this felt like a power grab by Ver et al. I addressed the basics as I saw them of SegWit vs block size growth because the post I was replying to originally cited them, then edited them out after my reply.

As you say, it's probably a straw man to say that LN should accommodate everyone now. That said, bitcoin operates on a principal of anti-efficiency; the more we ask of it the worse it does. We can't apply the same standard that "of course it will get faster/better/stronger/more efficient" over time because it's designed to go the opposite way. We need active plans to scale, to move forward, to grow it. That's why I ask more of them -- not because they should know but they should have some conceptually cohesive idea to justify their $100B market cap -- exceeding Visas's at peak -- a decade into this experiment.

It's fair that my position could be more nuanced. I've yet to find a way to untangle decentralized (in as much as BTC hashpower is over 50% in Beijing's purview) from lawless.

In some ways that's the root of the issue. Aren't they synonymous? Without authority, whose to judge? Who's to say a transaction was legitimate? So what if it wasn't, it can't be reversed anyways. The scammers are, in my opinion, part and parcel. You can't have decentralized, trustless and permissionless without letting people do as they will with it. By definition, nobody in cryptocurrency is a scammer, the code is the law and they've found some loopholes. Or are they as intended? Who's to say?

51% attacks are part and parcel too. The longest chain wins. You've got more hash power, you've got the longest chain, you are truth. Beijing writes a strongly worded memo to the miners in China, and that happens immediately.

Without appealing to authority and the status quo there's a reason humans tend to organize hierarchically. Hierarchy is an abstraction and an optimization. Humans are messy, we make messy code, messy systems and as such we have to appeal to each other to undo them, and with this system, we can't.

I do wish you and the others forging ahead luck, of course.

Just to be clear, I've not got a horse in the race :-) I've have some bit pennies that I mined when you could still do that with a CPU, but just for fun. I haven't really intended to use them for anything.

I would like a decentralised payment system to emerge. I don't think it will be BTC in its present form, but I'm happy that they are working on the problem and demonstrating issues. I don't have enough time to argue effectively for why we need such systems (in first world countries, it is much less of an issue), so I'll just leave it at that :-)

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