Something to mull over. For all of those people that say "small blocks are fine, because Lightning Network", check out the following LN matrix:



Assumptions and extrapolations

½ of txs are LN opens and closes
½ of LN closes and opens are merged
No non-cooperative closes
3 Channels per user
When indefinite, channels last 6 months

LLvl 1: 150 chan year, 150 close, 75 open
LLvl 2: 6 chan year, 6 close 3 open
LLvl 3: 6 chan year, 6 close 3 open

Even with 32MB blocks and the soft forks needed to make LN most efficient, we only get to around 280M users. That's not exactly tiny but it's also not competing with credit cards anytime soon. Without big blocks, LN just can't scale period.

sidechains: even gmaxwell has said that sidechains aren't a scalability factor since miners and full nodes would have to process the same amount of data whether in a sidechain or on the mainnet
segwit: this will get us an equivalent of a 1.7X increase in blocksize as a softfork, presuming that everyone upgrades to segwit compatible wallets and starts to create segwit transactions.

Don't get me wrong, I think that Pieter Wuille and Luke-Jr's contributions on segwit are damned impressive, but it's not a huge scaling win. In 6 months from now, presuming everything goes very smoothly we'll get the equivalent of 1.7M blocks. We're gonna need bigger blocks or to turn away new users.

this is getting really frustrating now. I had 2 transactions stuck for a whole day during this nonsense.

the normal (standard) fee is no longer enough

Exactly this is the secret behind the success of bitcoin. The fee market instead will kill bitcoin because it will hinder adoption and in the long run the fees will not reach the level it could reach. Satoshi clearly calculated with the rising adoption when he came up with the block halving. He never wrote anything of restricting bitcoin so that not all transactions can be put into a block in order to raise fees and make bitcoin unreliable because you never know if your transaction will go through or not.

It's really painfull to see what's going on.

LOL.
Bitcoin is A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. Proof: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

I'll give you the answer. Because most users/miners/devs/VCs/companies involved in Bitcoin believe that greater adoption and increased price is the eventual future of Bitcoin.

Thank you. I like you too.


Changetip isn't anything like bitcoin. It's centralized and in no way something you can use as an alternative to bank money. It is easily controllable and misses the advantages bitcoin has.

Yeah, network limits. I think you might take the 1mb blocksize limit as a given natural constant. It's not like you know.


Well, when you would hate the banking system and you think of an alternative, coming up with an encrypted currency on the internet... how would you describe it differently than the citation you wrote? Do you really think a whitepaper is the place where you put in your political views, your critics on the banking system, your wish to free the people from that system? Surely not.


Yes, but this should be the end of bitcoin? That's all it can provide in your eyes? Even when, why should someone send money that way when the fees will rise so high that you might even use other services? Because the state should not see it? And why use a bitcoin network where you never know if your fee, you put into, is good enough to make the transaction go through? You will have to worry if you paid too few and the then unreliable network will not forward your coins. Since there would be others that have the same problem and maybe they paid more so that you are, even when you thought you paid enough, will lose. Well, again, better use another service then.

In short, bitcoin will die that way. Maybe some rich guys, and that is elitist thinking when some of the 1mb block fans dream of a high amount payment system named bitcoin, that only works with high fees that are higher than the average third world country person can pay? That wouldn't be a currency for the people anymore, it would be a currency for the rich people in the world. And that is elitist thinking when you don't care about such points. Bitcoin should be an alternative for everyone.


Well, that indeed is a relatively new view on the topic. I see you are only two years less involved with bitcoin than iam but the first years everyone wanted adoption and bitcoin being used for all kind of transactions. And you still should know that it was that way. Now some guys think it's needed to artificially cripple bitcoin so that it loses a couple of it's rare advantages.

1. Yes, no real problems till now... now we have an artificial limit that cripples the network slowly. That was never a problem before. Now it is. I think this is an experiment on the open heart. Very dangerous.

2. Obviously mining is so lucrative that miners still think they should mine more. We have 100 times more hashrate than we would need to secure the network. And now the guys come out that claim we need higher fees because... the poor miners. Mining is a survival of the fittest, no job that can be taken and we all have to pay for it regardless how many want to do that job. There is no right on mining with profit.

That's true but it means too that mining as a business is very rewarding, otherwise we would not have so many people wanting to take part. Which means that raising fees in order to compensate for block halving and ensuring that miners earn more is not needed at all. Miners had to switch off their old and not profitable miners all the time. Mostly new hardware replaced it but there is no bad in lowering the reward so that less miners than we have now would take part in mining.

For sure miners will think differently but in order to having a future for bitcoin it would be sane to not look for the short term profit only.