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Comment by tiluha | Hacker News Reader

I think you are misinformed about how bitcoin works.

Bitcoin doesn't care how much of it you have, as it uses Proof-of-Work not Proof-of-Stake. The only thing that matters is you computational power. Now it is true that large banks could just buy lots of ASICs and try to beat the network, but that would mean a continued investment: As soon as they stop mining, the network would return to normal.

They can hurt bitcoin (not that cheap anymore) by making it unusable for a period of time, but unless they are willing to keep mining until everybody else stops, they won't be able to kill it.

As far as usability goes i don't think bitcoin is that hard: Download an app, scan a QR-code, send money. Not that complicated. The transaction rate is a problem, though.

I agree that some people are too enthusiastic about crypto, but I think it still has its place. It doesn't have to kill banks.

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I think the deadly attack on Bitcoin is not anyone gaining 51% of the network, but rather DoS'ing its ability to conduct real transactions. Bitcoin is not considered a threat right now but if that ever changes, just remember the US government "lost track of" $9bn while "reconstructing" Iraq and it didn't even seem to concern anyone. That kind of money could make transactions prohibitively expensive on the Bitcoin network for quite some time if the government's posture towards cryptocurrency ever hardens.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/feb/01/iraq.suzannego...

The transaction rate is deadly in my opinion, not just bad. A year or so ago the rates were running at ridiculous prices. It’s a black eye on the Bitcoin Core that they haven’t fixed this nor do they seem inclined to (the Bitcoin Cash Core seemed convinced they wanted nothing else but to control Bitcoin entirely).

It hasn't changed because the people who control the hard fork, the miners, benefit from the increased transaction fees that the low rate produces through competition to get in on the next (small) block. It's a textbook example of Tragedy of the Commons.

I do agree the transaction rate and fee are horrid. But there are other coins that solve this problem in a dectralized manner. Also there are some block chains that all cross chain atomic swaps. I've been working with a blockchain called Xaya and there is mentions of maybe implementing that as well. I might help on that front after my game is finished. More importantly though. Xaya implements merged mining and you can mine xaya( the coin is called chi) and bitcoin at the same time. So there are not so many problems as people claim or think with crypto.

How does that help reduce fees? Excuse my naivety, but can you share a bit more about cross-chain atomic swaps, what does that mean?

The atomic cross-chain swapping means I can have assets or a coin on one chain and transfer it to another. In this case maybe transfer coins from bitcoin to the xaya blockchain for chi. It wouldn't really get rid of the transaction fees for bitcoin, but what it would do is allow you to transfer some amount of bitcoin out if you know you are going to be doing high frequency transactions. You could just do it on a lower fee blockchain and then put it back in your bitcoin account when you have done what you wanted to do.

There is another possibility on Xaya and I believe Ethereum has implemented as well now. On Xaya they are called game channels. The idea is that you allow a side branching chain to develop between an arbitrary number of people, then when a game is over you inject the end of the side chain back into the main chain and verify it. They invented it for near realtime verification between consenting parties, then you only pay the main transaction fee when you get back on the main block instead of very every action. But that type of system doesn't have to be only done with games obviously, that could be applied to anything.

If you are interested more in it, you can check this video out. They have lots of documentation and tutorials for the network as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMd9mvc8pqA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw

No, it's a credit to Bitcoin Core that they understand the tradeoffs involved in increasing transaction rate via blocksize increase. Continuously growing resource usage is a centralizing force and thus an existential risk to Bitcoin. Core is rightly unwilling to trade a little short-term pain relief for increased long term risk of catastrophic failure. The difficulty is that just how much of a centralizing force is difficult to measure, so there's a lot of uncertainty around it, opening the door for the more reckless to complain about transaction prices.

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