I should mention that all the scaling solutions steal Fees from miners and open the door for security vulnerabilities.

You have to ask yourself... if Bitcoin really is flawed... then why don't these people with the "magical solution" create their own Alt-Coin?

Lolz. Bitcoin is perfect it does not need to evolve or compete. It is like god.

Use Litecoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Dash or some alt-coin for $1 transactions. They work great also!

if Bitcoin is ever to be a serious challenger to mainstream payments systems, it must be able to create enough liquidity to support very high – and variable – volumes of transactions at low cost. The desire to preserve wealth cannot take priority over the need to support economic activity. Poverty and inequality due to scarcity of money and high transaction costs are surely worse evils than (mild) inflation.

but bitcoin is not a commercial company, controlling supply to cause price frenzy either.

so holding back supply for a couple years and stroking the sheeps wool to tell them to just pay more is not they way to go either

No. If the bus is full, higher fees won't let enter more people. (There was a nice meme around but I don't remember where).

With 1 MB blocks and no LN/sidechain or other off-chain solution, Bitcoin's target audience and transaction capacity is capped artificially. It won't reach mass adoption and the price will go back to $10 or less. Yes, $10 per bitcoin, as the current price includes speculation that there will be mass adoption at some point in the future.

And the "settlement layer" thingy won't work, because Bitcoin is not really scarce - it's open source and there are plenty of copycats around that will be happy to take Bitcoin's leading role allowing a higher transaction capacity.

once 10,000 people want to pay starbucks they will start to ask...not only is starbucks co-signing 10,000 channels

why do i want to deposit $100 a month, or $1200 a year into a contracted multisig with starbucks. making them the new paypal2.0(thousands of other customers need starbucks to co-sign). which is n-locked for a month/year.. and then when withdrawing/settling after a month/year. my funds are held maturing for 3-5 days after confirmation (CLTV maturity) and starbucks can chargeback(CSV REVOKE) because they think they have the right.

much simpler to just deposit $25 a week using their separate internal bartab to deduct balance from the $25
and i can request my money back same day without all these locks and penalties for month/year. by simply not using LN
or
i can just buy a $25 giftcard

But isn't the bottom line that either the blocksize is too small or blocks need to be made more efficient?
If Bitcoin wants to be able to compete with, say, the Mastercard network in terms of amount of transactions per seconds it can handle, these things must happen, or not?

Otherwise, people would just be raising the fee without there being any ceiling to it.
If everybody does it, there would be a point in time that you'd have to pay 5 or 10 dollars just to have a transaction confirmed within the hour..

@kiklo:

These solutions are totally centralized, although I perhaps would buy a gift card from a local shop or business I trust, as it's unlikely they will run away with my money.  Lightning Network is only semi-centralized as the payment hubs may be centralized but there is no way they run away if I enforce my right to close the channel if they don't cooperate.

Hmm,

The Gift card solution is Decentralized, as every Business has an option on how to run it.
They can use a service like Gyft or they can make one inhouse with their own personal setup.
But there are already Legal Protections in Place with Gift Cards in either version.


In my previous post Option 2: Exchanges Clarification
Example would be if Poloniex or Bittrex act as a Crypto Escrow Service, you deposit some of your BTC , and they setup inhouse systems where you can transfer funds between each other on the exchange only. They already act as a large holder of funds anyway , this could be an additional service they could provide for a fee.
Since All Coin Exchanges could perform this type of function , it would also be decentralized and you could pick your favorite or be on as many as you wish.
Again it is an option , the exchanges are the ones that have to implement it.
* Their are also already laws on the books to protect people that use Escrow Services.*

But Neither require segwit and both can give UNLIMITED OFFCHAIN TRANSACTION CAPACITY.