> There is exactly zero progress to make it scale in the last 10+ years.
Lol, literally this week: https://taproot.watch/
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 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...
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.