"...Bitcoin is a living, breathing, developing code base that is moving forward with new features to continue to scale..."
There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years.
There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years.
Lol, literally this week: https://taproot.watch/
It also enables Schnorr, which produces smaller signatures than ECDSA.
It also contains features to further improve the efficiency of Lightning, which is a shockingly effective scaling mechanism.
And don't bother coming up with hand wavy explanations of how it could work, some day. People have been talking about Lightning for years, literally billions of dollars have been poured into the "tech", the fact that even bitcoin enthusiasts barely ever use it is all the proof I need.
I wonder how many more years of empty promises we'll have to suffer through before people accept that cryptocurrencies are a very good pyramid scheme with a thick layer of technobabble around it.
Seriously, investing money in a bubble is nothing to celebrate. That’s why it is called a bubble. It pops and many people loose their money.
The single question people in favor of crypto can’t answer is the value creation. Now crypto is a natural evolution of certain monetary services and techniques, but at the core it literally does nothing of value. In fact, one might argue that that is its prime feature in its current state.
All the problems with bitcoin are long long solved just not with bitcoin because its not possible to fix something when the majority (of hashpower) thinks its not broken or rather profit form its brokenness.
FBA coins exists since 2013 or so.
FBA is completely different form PoS. It does not work on incentives and penalties it works with a global final state, global rules and (federated) byzantine agreement (FBA) for progress (adding the next "block"). No way to re-org, no block/staking reward, no censorship. If someone doesn't act in everyone's interest other nodes simply wont listen to them anymore. Not following the rules its publicly visible for anyone. And since there is no reward anyway there is no financial reason why anyone would participate who does not simply want to help the system.
This is an interesting feature of cryptocurrencies. Someone levels a fair criticism of a particular implementation but it can be handwaved away because an entirely separate cryptocurrency solved this particular problem (nevermind that whatever replacement you’ve chosen has its own host of separate problems because those can be handwaved away the same way).
LN is not part of bitcoin and a total joke anyway.
Taproot will in practice have an even smaller impact, as it only affects special transactions that normal people won't use.
So yeah, it's not zero progress, but it's certainly not much.
Now, in November taproot/schnor activates which gives us ptlc’s on the lightning network as well as makes a lightning channel opening transaction look like a normal single signature transaction, yay privacy. All of this lays the groundwork for the next major base layer change, in probably ~2023, anyprevout. This will give us “eltoo” on lightning which is nirvana. Eltoo removes the penalty mechanism which makes running a lightning node on a mobile phone or home node much more reasonable.
Protocols take a long time to develop, especially ones where a miss-step could mean the loss of billions of dollars.
Do not believe anyone telling you that their coin solved bitcoin’s scaling problems years ago.
PoW/PoS was replaced by FBA (Federated Byzantine Agreement) Its not a coin its technology used by several systems and based on BFT (which is way older than bitcoin and bitcoin actually is based on BFT as well although maybe unintentional).
FBA just adds the federated part so a decentral system can be build. While bitcoin instead used a work-reward lottery system (PoW) to decide who can write the next block rather than finding a block everyone agrees on. Its really not that hard to figure out which of these solutions probably works better and scales somewhat like a distributes system is expected to scale.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Just watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDKntG4F0hg
So in about 5 years pretend everyone in the United States melts a wrench like that... Then a month later they do that twice, a month later they do it three times.
Hey, at least it will be fun.
We're not going to shut down entire sectors of the economy because of their environmental impact. People are going to innovate and invest in alternative sources of energy because it is becoming profitable to do so. The solution is hardly ever "just stop doing it", it's "how can we do this better".
Traditional centralized ledgering systems do everything crypto does better and with a fraction of the energy use. It also gives governments tools to combat inflation/deflation and manage counterparty risks within the system.
Crypto is a neat idea, but in the end it doesn't really solve anything, and instead only introduces a lot of unnecessary problems.
Taproot is the update we get after ten years of the BTC devs doing nothing except gaslighting users about the protocol's scalability? All that momentum wasted.
Not in a useful way: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/l8v8sa/heres_a_6of9_sc...
Let’s walk through a user story. I want to send $1,000 to a friend of mine in El Salvador:
* When I initiate the $1,000 payment, Strike debits my existing USD balance.
* Strike then automatically converts my $1,000 to bitcoins ready for use in its infrastructure using its real-time automated risk management and trading infrastructure.
* Strike then moves the bitcoins across the Gulf of Mexico where it arrives in our Central American infrastructure in less than a second and for no cost.
* Strike then takes the bitcoins and automatically converts them back into USDT (synthetic digital dollar known as Tether) using its real-time automated risk management and trading infrastructure.
* Strike then credits the existing user with the USDT to their Strike account.
[1] https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b90...
Both sides are Strike entities all this does is use bitcoin as a bridge for USD to USD which is completely pointless as both sides are USD.
You could just buy USDT (or another stabelcoin) and send it there.
Its a different story if there is actually a switch in currency needed. There is this famous and from bitcoin people often hated company called Ripple that specializes on cross-border settlement using crypto as a bridge currency. For that however the crypto must be actually moved and be sold locally for the local currency. And for that to work without risk due to volatility it must be fast. Hence they use XRP (4 sec) instead of bitcoin (10+ min). They call it ODL (On-Demand Liquidity).
>No BTC involvement required.
Totally correct. Remittance over a bridge currency only make sense under very specific conditions, which include that the input currency and the output currency are different. And a direct exchange is not possible or not cheap.
The traditional banking system does this as well, they usually use USD as bridge. To pair every currency with every currency simply isn't feasible and the low volume pairs would have no liquidity anyway. Its basically the same as with goods if you have wood but want metal you use a currency as bridge because there is no market to sell wood for metal. Now if you also have a location difference between the market where you want to sell and the mark where you want to buy then you actually can use the bridge currency to move from one market (location) to another market (location).
edit: looked it up, still looks like a total scam. I hope El Salvador is able to get through this without getting screwed and I guess I'll assume Strike (first time I've heard of it) is just as shady until I hear otherwise:
https://coingeek.com/crypto-crime-cartel-tether-using-its-st...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/strike-phasing-usdt-bitcoin-b...
* This guy starts talking about sending USD, but ends up talking about receiving USDT. USD != USDT. And while there are problems with sending USD across the border, there're absolutely no problem with sending USDT. And there's absolutely no problem buying USDT wherever you are. (But, what's important, there might be problems actually converting your USDT into USD.)
* Since we end up buying USDT with USD, the word "Bitcoin" in the middle of the story seems redundant and actually confusing.
* There's nothing about Lightning here. I mean, you can talk about how you use Lightning to transfer BTC inside Strike as much as you want, but if BTC is irrelevant to the user story, so is Lightning.
* I'm not sure how Strike and this user story are relevant at all. It started out about El Salvador accepting BTC as a legal tender, and how using it in actual transactions w/o lightning is problematic due to low TPS. How sending USD to El Salvador is relevant here at all?
In the case of merchant/customer interactions, the LN channel blocks customer funds from their balance, but they will never receive money from the merchant. So that balance will be sent to the merchant, payment by payment.
Not only does that block funds for the customer (which wants to reduce those, to avoid blocking too much, but that reduces the number of payments that can be made off-chain), but it also blocks the merchant’s reception of those payments: the merchant wants to be able to spend it soon, but it can only spend it on-chain.
That is compounded by the fact that most merchant/customer interactions are rare one-offs in the real world. I just don’t buy stamps every day.
LN channels are only most useful when the two parties exchange money bidirectionally on average.
It’s very common on lightning to pay liquidity providers to balance your channels to you. Lightning Labs has a service called loop where you can pay them an onchain transaction and it will make a lightning network payment to your channel for that amount, thus giving you more spend liquidity. Loop is sweet cause it does this in a non custodial way, look into it.
[0] https://1ml.com/
Today people in crypto may be willing to look up bitcoins they hold long term anyway. But in the real world this would be dead and trapped capital it doesn't work for you and you cant even use it to quickly buy something an take advantage of a market situation.
The only reason why someone would look up capital like that if is it makes money. So people who use someone else locked up bitcoins have to pay. This makes LN impossible to be cheap. You literally lend money to send money to someone. Its complete absurd. And as you said to make this more efficient large centralized pools are created so there will be a monopoly or oligopoly for lending, hows that gonna be good for the fees.
LN was dead before they started coding it.
Funny how they figured out that you cant make money with money services if you remove the third party, so they added it back in.
On top of that there are countless other blockchains/DLT that have cheap transactions on the first layer. Cheap as in fractions of a cent. To compete with that you would need to lock your BTC for free but then you still have the on chain transaction that LN needs sometimes that cost way too much.
Disclaimer: I'm involved.
taproot, which recently locked in, reduces the space needed to represent complex contracts.
moreover, bitcoin aims at being a concise and focused base layer on top of which secondary layers and sidechains can be built.
your absolute statement "exactly zero" is absolutely wrong.
Have you ever read the white paper that outlines what bitcoin aims to be?
Just kidding, it should only be p2p cash and it failed at that.
PoW/PoS will be replace by FBA in the next years and every system that can not switch away from PoW will become irrelevant.
... or even the title
Complex contracts? Are you joking? What kind of complex contracts do you think can be done on BTC? Their scripting language and capabilities has been neutered just like their blocksize. Good luck writing a useful contract on BTC.
(Yes this is on the Bitcoin SV implementation of the Bitcoin protocol - where they're using the original protocol that Satoshi envisioned)
Either way, bitcoin the protocol can handle waaaaaay more transactions than the BTC devs have constrained it to.
The protocol is protected by allowing everyone to run their own full node, to give every user and every entity the power to choose which version of the protocol they want to run. When the network is run by its users, the network evolves in a direction that is best for the users. When the network is run by a few large businesses, the network evolves in a direction that is best for them.
The Bitcoin Core's layered approach is a much better solution than big blocks. The first layer protects the protocol itself, and "big blocks" are implemented on layers on top of that without compromising the core protocol.
- Transaction fees are ~$0.0001
- The network has shown capacity for 50k tps
- On March 14, 2021, the network processed a world record 638 MB block
- As of June 4, 2021 the chain size exceeded that of the BTC implementation and is currently 418.17 GB
- New business based on micropayments have emerged like twetch, streamanity, peergame, etc
Twetch.app has more than 50k users. It's also a genuine use case. So is etched.page or the other above-mentioned services.
How can you abuse storage if there is a 0.5 satoshis/byte fee to write data on chain currently? Miners are for-profit entities and will always charge for storage.
Have a nice day
You claim centralized manipulation of bitcoin and fraudulent people while the protocol hasn't changed. Do you have legal evidence?
Also you claim price speculation as the only use case while I've listed several apps with real users.
You mention storage abuse and I argue that miner fees prevent that.
The protocol encompasses the nodes on the network. If the network is highly centralized the protocol is unsafe.
A centralized cryptocoin is just MySql with extra steps.
No, that was a lab demo of a single beefy system being directly fed with test data and being measured on how long it takes to process it.