I do not see SegWit and the lighting network as solutions to scaling at all...In Bitcoin there is a fundamental ideological divide between on chain scaling and off chain scaling. I favor on chain scaling
I thought Justus Ranvier
put it really well...every feature that bitcoin could adopt is good but you have to ask the question "good for whom" ?
I've seen very few people in this whole debate lay out such an informing and unbiased account of all the various priorities. In fact, I'm gonna have to watch that again.
Here's the thing that I've been trying to raise more discussion about, both here and in other places: There are 2 aspects to this:
[1] - scaling the blockchain
[2] - scaling the money supply
These need to be treated distinctly and I think thats what confuses people.
As far as
[1]-scaling the blockchain goes, there's no amount of native scaling you can do that can ever meet the capacity or functionality requirements of a mature economy that uses your currency as a denomination. For example, just take the cryptocurrency exchanges of today. All trades are instant, regardless of the performance of the respective blockchains of the currencies being traded.
Another example is retail.
Retail is always gonna use "off-chain" transaction handling simply because it's an application in its own right. e.g. a Supermarket has a great big SQL server in a back room (or data centre) connected to the cash tills at one end and the Visa network at the other that's capable of all kinds of stuff that a blockchain just is not equipped for. Things like instant reversals cos your cornflakes got rung through on the other customer's bill, discounts, store card stuff and wotnot.
To me, Blockchain scaling and performance is more about consolidating the monetary properties of an electronic asset, not supporting POS networks.
Next we have
[2] - scaling the money supply.
This is more about creating 2nd and 3rd monetary tiers (in the fiat world these are the credit tiers which basically form 80% of the money supply, in other words, the main part of it). These tiers are the "promissory notes" that Justus Ranvier was talking about.
Clearly, higher order monetary tiers are instant by their nature (because we're just talking about moving numbers around, not blockchain transactions). Any level of adoption will naturally result in the growth of these additional tiers - thats just how all economies work - so scaling kind of takes care of itself in that respect.
Thats why I think the point at which you scale the native blockchain to is largely arbitrary. The thing that's important however IMO is that its universally accessible (in the way that - even though I've got all my money in a bank account, I can always get it in paper notes to hold in my hand if I want). Thats the minimum level of scaling that a blockchain needs IMO. (i.e. that you can access it directly with a wallet client as you can today, without dependency on a 3rd party).
Blockchains don't have to handle (and probably will never be asked to handle) realtime commercial trades to any industrial extent, any more than the bank clearing network does today.
