Bitcoin is not what it was if you can't move it. Time to move on. Cryptoworld gonna change.
Yep. It really looks like it's finally happening. We are going to start getting the overflow of crypto traffic. Here's why:
- Blocks are already full (take into account the 700kb mempool limitation for some of the miners)
- Block halving is coming, which will cause lower throughput in blocks, somewhere between 400kb and 760kb*
- Segwit - 2x throughput
- Compressed signature scheme - 2x-5x throughput (I forget the name of this ?)
- 2MB blocksize - 2x throughput
- 4MB blocksize - 2x throughput
- 8MB blocksize - 2x throughput
All combined we'll have 40x throughput onchain and infinite off-chain, however the tx volume historically has growth 2-3x per year. Can they keep up until lightning is online with wallets? At 2x growth we'll need 8MB throughput at the end of three years (2018). At 3x growth we'll need 27MB throughput... Also consider the fact that hardforks without a governance method take about 1 year to deploy. It's going to be a hard couple years for the Bitcoin project it looks like.
Where's the rest going to go? Fiat?
We also have a governance and budgeting scheme. We're golden to build something much more scalable and decentralized than Bitcoin. I've never been so optimistic than now about our place in the ecosystem. There's only a small percentage that even understands that we've solved all of this already and the information is getting out.
If you build it... they will come.. right?
* If blocks are full and 10% of the miners turn off at the halving, it actually causes theoretical limitation of blocks to be about 10% less each. That creates a backlog, which will cause problems for the network, making it harder to transact on. Thus, that volume will leave the ecosystem. This is why it's so important to have a good difficulty algorithm backing your currency. We are immune to this.
BTC historic trends are highly affected by spammy operations with satoshi dice, faucets, idiots spamming the network for the lolz, etc. That's why even now, when "blocks are full", and a congestion problem is said to exist, the fees are still very low at 4-5-6 cents per tx for high priority and are extremely low (1-2 cents) for low priority txs that can be included in a few hours or within the day.
That's why both Andersen and Hearn's predictions about the coming catastrophy (Hearn expected bitcoin to "crash") never materialized. They did a quantity analysis but left out the quality data. So the only thing that happened, even at stress-test levels (which were more serious than what we have right now), was that people bypassed the queue with a few cents more in fees. And bitcoin became more resilient with 0.12 and the mempool limits. That's the reality of it despite the negativity flowing around.
Now, from our perspective, DASH's effective size per tx is higher due to mixing overhead - so we need to be able to scale multiple times more than BTC in terms of tx/s and max throughput to even get at the same level (for mixed txs that is). So it'll be a challenge for sure.
