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Comment by petefromnorth | Hacker News Reader

Why use LN when other simple L1 solutions already work great as money.

Litecoin (LTC) has cheap fees and lots of room. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is constantly improving and has a ton of transaction room to grow, with increases if/when demand grows. Dogecoin (DOGE) not my favorite, but does work fine for the money use-case, but development, from what I can see is a bit stale.

With these existing simple solutions, I don't see why Bitcoin (BTC) has to be anything more than the unit of account other crypto projects value themselves against.

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All those have problems. A huge amount of transactions in a distributed ledger means there’s a big requirement for storage space and processing power, there’s no way around it.

Lightning reduces the amount of transactions that must be in the ledger, and in consequence the storage requirements can be kept down. The BCH model of just increasing the block size indefinitely is not sustainable.

There is a way around huge storage requirements. Pruning, UTXO commitments, and things like Utreexo are all solutions for different aspects of that problem.

Still need to be able to transmit and verify the blockchain, so network capacity and CPU. You also need decent IO to maintain an index.

There are benefits to scaling on chain, but as above, its not sustainable.

Encouraging transactions that don't need to be stored on-chain forever and a day would be better batched up. You can then at least still verify your address balances.

Based on your reply, I don't believe you researched the technologies I just listed. UTXO checkpoints, for example, will enable one to trustlessly bootstrap a node nearly instantly (from the last UTXO checkpoint). Even 1MB (+SegWit) block size Bitcoin has an "infinite storage" problem that will continue to make running and bootstrapping nodes increasingly difficult. Should we decrease the block size cap to stave that off rather than look for solutions? I would say no. Instead, it's probably worth considering whether we need 100% of historic transaction data to be stored across all nodes, or even required to be directly checked by new nodes as they bootstrap from genesis block. It makes a ton of sense to me that if you trust PoW (which you probably do if you're using Bitcoin), you can set a threshold for UTXO checkpoint depth and simply bootstrap from there.

Verification of larger blocks scales quite well. Testers have proven this: https://read.cash/@mtrycz/how-my-rpi4-handles-mining-256mb-b...

What seems lost in this discussion is the idea that there can be (and maybe should be) a middle ground. Scale on-chain to the extent that technology allows and enables it. Surely, computers today are able to handle much more than Satoshi's computer in 2009, right? Simultaneously, building out off-chain scaling methods should also be encouraged. We don't need to put all our eggs in one basket.

Because bitcoin is money, and shitcoins are not.

Bitcoin is not fungible and because of its hard cap does not incentive actual use as a means of exchange.

I'll never understand why BTC Maximalists refuse to acknowledge faults in BTC and see how other currencies can solve them.

> its hard cap does not incentive actual use as a means of exchange.

Why?

Is that because it's has 'Scarcity'? People will pay more for it in the future?

If that case is so soundly put why would you not buy as much btc as possible?

Playing a bit of devils advocate here but wouldn't you say that it's volitility leads to more trading?

Means of exchange need to be further defined in this crazy overfinancialized world we live in. total trading volume of BTC is absolutely insane.

I'll use my own example, I purchased a month of a VPN service using BTC when it was ~11k, it's about $5 in fiat per month.

If you believe BTC will only go up, I don't see why you would want to spend it if your money will be worth more if you wait.

Regarding Volatility, yes it leads to a lot of trading, I mean means of exchange as purchasing everyday goods. The transaction history of BTC also adds regulatory hurdles.

So if every grocery was to be priced in BTC, you wouldn't eat? :)

Remember that the US was on the gold standard with a similar inflation profile to Bitcoin and consumers were consuming.

During the good times, you are correct that few people hoarded money in the hopes of deflation. During bad times, people actually do make this calculation (and so might be hamburger instead of steak). Deflation is believed to have significantly prolonged and worsened the Great Depression, and that experience was one of the motivating factors behind the global abandonment of the gold standard.

>So if every grocery was to be priced in BTC, you wouldn't eat? :)

Yes, people didn't eat much during the great depression, they had no money to buy more food even though there was enough to eat for everyone. How hard is it to comprehend that if you are unemployed you can't afford food?

If BTC results in unemployment then a lot of people are going to end up hungry.

>Remember that the US was on the gold standard with a similar inflation profile to Bitcoin and consumers were consuming.

We also had two economic depressions that lead to two world wars.

That’s like saying I don’t see why anyone would spend cash when they could buy index funds instead (if you believe index funds will only go up).

>Is that because it's has 'Scarcity'? People will pay more for it in the future?

What did they do to deserve that? Watch everyone else create the wealth they take for granted?

>If that case is so soundly put why would you not buy as much btc as possible?

Because most people barely have enough money for their basic needs as they have to pay interest to financial capitalists and ground rent to land owners. They have no surplus to speak of that they could possibly spend on a deflationary currency. They are the losers of this system even though they are the ones who are doing the work.

The holy grail is a cryptocurrency that can scale to billions of users while maintaining sufficient decentralization and security to be immune to state-level attack and corruption. BTC in combination with the higher level protocols such as Lightning (and others not yet conceived) is the only system that I believe can achieve this.

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