What's the current thoughts on Tether, and how its speculated potential collapse will affect the rest of the ecosystem?
Also, what's the latest on scaling? The last time I looked into it, Lightening was a thing, but I don't follow it closely.
Also, what's the latest on scaling? The last time I looked into it, Lightening was a thing, but I don't follow it closely.
As for lightning, it adds a layer of trust into a system whose reason for existence is trustlessness.
If you don't care about trustlessness, you can already have fast and scalable transactions through normal banking.
If an intermediary is not behaving, the worst that can happen is that your found are blocked for a small amount of time.
What would happen if there was collusion between nodes?
And while it is true that you are still limited by the Blockchain speed if the nodes don't cooperate, all the incentives are made so they do cooperate and that transactions happen near instantly.
But businesses have to follow the law. If a regulation were imposed, people would feel a need to comply. If they said to block transactions from Iran, on penalty of imprisonment, then they would do so. Etc. Avoiding all of that was the exact motivation for bitcoin. Adding all of the features and drawbacks of existing systems into bitcoin would undermine bitcoin's reason for existence.
Centralization at every layer of bitcoin has been the rule. Mining, exchanges, etc. Their dominance is so complete that if only a few of the primary exchanges were to blacklist an individual, they would have a very difficult time. In the same way that Mastercard and VISA banning PornHub is a major harm to that website.
Censorship-resistance is thus out the window, and there really isn't that many benefits left for bitcoin after that.
That's not true. That's the beauty of lightning, it manages to add a layer without needing to trust any of the intermediate party
I see this repeated a lot. I think you're saying bitcoin is no better than normal banking for moving value.
Do you really believe this? Yes, in the US I can immediately wire money somewhere as long as:
1) I do it within east coast business hours. Weekend? Sorry, wait til Monday 2) I have the correct information for the receiving institution, some of which require a small transfer up front to confirm the setup. 3) My bank actually supports wiring (Wealthfront, for example, only supports ACH transfers which take a few days) 4) I'm sending within the US, otherwise there are a bunch of other complications and requirements
I also need to trust that the bank actually has my money.
With cryptocurrency you can confirm that your stored value exists and is stilled owned by you, and transfer it to anywhere else within 30 minutes, in a provably secure and verifiable way.
Plus the incredible annoyance of having to go through the KYC/AML procedures everywhere to do any kind of meaningful transactions. And still risk getting flagged for fraudulent transactions and possibly having your funds locked/confiscated.
On top of that, you'd also have all the additional risk and liability of dealing with potential fraud and uninsured institutions.
This means transactions have to go unverified and that you have to trust the person you transact with by design.
It hasn't grown much in the last year and a half. Personally I don't see Lightning Network winning the battle for high-bandwidth, low-cost transactions against all the other protocols.
* This only shows public channels. Most wallet apps that people install on their phone, etc open private channels
* This shows capacity, it doesn't show throughput. I work at a company that accepts payments over lightning, and our volume has grown a lot over the past year, but our channel capacity really hasn't had to grow all that much (since we withdraw funds to layer 1 regularly)
Lightning cannot scale on it's own as Bitcoin will be the bottleneck, and when fees rise Lightning will stop being efficient for small transactions (since you need to pay an expensive Bitcoin fee to open a channel). Even the Lightning Network whitepaper says it needs much larger blocks.
Yet the Bitcoin devs are focusing on Segwit and Schnorr, which are woefully inadequate for any sort of scale. At this point it seems clear if you're looking for Bitcoin scaling, best look at other cryptocurrencies.
They still have the risk of the government clamping down on them but I could hardly see it affecting bitcoin. Maybe a 5-10% price suppression at most.
For example, Okex froze withdrawals a month ago on its exchange. I had a 5 figures there that I was able to move by mirror trading on another exchange. If many people mirror traded (which they probably did), the prices will start to diverge. The prices very slightly diverged, which means a well capitalized third-party had strong conviction/guarantees that Okex is good for the coins/money, and played the reverse trade by injecting even more capital into Okex (they still allowed deposits).
If you are trading and notice these patterns, this gives you an idea about the probability that the exchange is going back to business. Same thing for Tether, their liquidity and price stability is even better than USDC.
I've been in the Bitcoin/crypto space since 2009 and been through it all. My opinion now is that Bitcoin is an accidental Ponzi scheme - it started out with good intentions but got hijacked by tw*ts. Most of the discourse in the crypto community now looks like a carbon copy of any spread betting / gambling / day trading community. However, instead of a centralised market, there is a Rube Goldberg machine that provides the market infrastructure.