Bitcoin Forum

What do you think that might happen with Bitcoin if no scalable solution becomes accepted?

Will it remain as a store of value, while other altcoins take the lead for everyday transactions? Or will another cryptocurrency take its place as the top in marketcap?

I would like to know your thoughts about this, as the ongoing scaling debate will further limit Bitcoin from reaching new heights. As for me, I believe that the Bitcoin community would come up at a resolution somehow to put an end to this issue, and make the pioneer cryptocurrency great again. What do you think?  :)

-> Probably bitcoin will no longer be used for micro transactions but it can remain as valuable assets. Actually most of the people are buying bitcoin as investment rather than to use in their daily life, so new money may keep on pouring causing pump on price in future too.

-> Other alts have already taken some piece from bitcoin's marketcap but money will keep flowing between bitcoin and alts. This may also continue in future too, but i don't think any other coin can replace bitcoin from top position in marketcap due to different facts and one of the reason is that all other alts doesn't have big community support and their supply is either very high or is not limited.

Bitcoin will be forgotten.  That will probably will happen if Bitcoin never scales.  No one will use an obsolete currency specially the kind of currency where bitcoin belongs depends on the technology and scalability. 


Something that ceased to update/upgrade will never be valuable in technology, they will become obsolete and forgotten.

If you read Core's road map they want it to be able to scale both on chain and off when necessary. They just want it done slowly and safely as possible.

If bitcoin gains so much value in time, it won't make any sense to use it for small transactions.

On the other hand, If we don't see a development about the problem, the price may not climb at all. It's a problematic situation in every way.

You assume that the idea of crypto-currency has already scaled. It hasn't. And if Bitcoin is the lead (by far) crypto-currency, and it hasn't scaled as a currency, no crypto-currency is likely to scale to mass adoption.

The real barrier that I see is stability of price. It's hard for a merchant to have faith in accepting bitcoin if they don't have confidence that the revenue they earned today will have the same value as tomorrow. Certainly there's upside but we've seen plenty of bitcoin crashes too. So if merchants don't have faith in the stability of the currency they'll need a fast option to convert bitcoin received to fiat, and that kind of speed doesn't happen with Core (does it?)

Another question: Does bitcoin need to scale as a currency to remain valuable and important? What if bitcoin scales as a store of value investment?

It will become obsolete. As for a store of value, it depends on enough people wanting to buy it.

Now, why would anyone buy it? That's the question.

We are at the point where scaling needs to be solved in the next few years.
Bitcoin will stay king for now, but another coin with faster transaction times and better optimized blockchain could definitely take over.

Confirmation time and sending fees are probably the two biggest obstacles for a crypto coin that aims for mass adoption.
(Aside from security and privacy obviously.)

i think if bitcoin remains at 3tps while competitors grow beyond that in actual volume, the first thing you'll see will be a massive exodus to other cryptocurrencies, driven both by demand for actual usage of cryptocurrency as well as speculation.

Bitcoin will continue running but there will be a massive and unrelenting bear trend driven by these fundamentals.
Within a short time, it will become much less profitable to mine, and most miners will quit or move to other coins... difficulty level and network hashrate will drop heavily,
which will kill any delusions people may have had about it being 'gold 2.0' since it won't even be the most secure coin any longer.

Bitcoin will always be the first, so it has the brand, ...there will be a window of opportunity for it to make a comeback (not to #1 necessarily, but at least somewhat competitive) but the longer it goes without scaling, the more the brand will be tarnished until it will become a 'myspace', a has-been in the eyes of the crypto world.

How much of this is true, and how much of it is "greater fool game" ?   By this, I mean: suppose that bitcoin has reached its "full scale", whatever that is.  Suppose that bitcoin's use is more or less stable for 10 years and that there is no real hope for greater adoption (because everyone has already adopted it, or because it found its niche, or whatever).  How many people do you think are willing to KEEP bitcoin as an investment, that is, as a secure store of value in the long term ?  And how many people were simply in bitcoin because they were hoping for "moon" and ended up not finding a greater fool to pay them 10 times the price they bought it for ?

For instance, suppose that one would know that in 2025, bitcoin's price is still in the $1000 - $1500.  How many people in bitcoin right now, would think that that is great as a store of value, that they can keep their value unharmed for 8 years (investment) ; how many would sell their coins immediately if they would know that bitcoin was still in the same ballpark 8 years from now ?

If the former, you are right, many people consider bitcoin as a long-term store of value.  If the latter, bitcoin's market cap is nothing else but a bobbal of hot air driven by a greater fool game that collapses from the moment that there's no more moon in sight.

(altcoins are even worse, BTW).

If Satoshi's prediction is correct, there are only two possible outcome: (1) zero volume (death) of bitcoin and (2) large volume (mainstream), in 20 years' time (by 2028?). If bitcoin never scales and the volume can't go up, it will die.

Bitcoin value comes solely from it being listed and traded in the exchanges (Mt. Gox previously).
Bitcoin value is nothing without an exchange (never mind even if it has infinite scalability).
And the values of securities (stocks, options, ETFs, commodities, etc) listed and traded in exchanges are based entirely on falsehood, where value tagged on any particular security is made up and illusory).

Because it retains its value. Because its value isn't impacted by country or geo-political risk. Because its supply is finite (once mined). Because its supply isn't influenced susceptible to nefarious manipulation. Because Casascius coins are shiny like gold!

If we ever agree that it has no value, it will have no value. Just like the Dollar...the only reason it has value is because we all agree that it does.

I guess this BTU will overcome the superiority of bitcoin if bitcoin will no longer scalable. People will turn on using other Altcoins that is worth of their time, and is worth to invest their money, because there is no use to use something that don't have value anymore, it is just a waste of time, hoping for something that won't never happen.

But, I am sure that this come will not come in bitcoin, maybe it will, but it will take a longer time before this thing could happen. Bitcoin solidity is not that easy to penetrate by others Altcoin power, bitcoin is still the superior amongst them.

From what ive seen around here. I think bitcoin scaling problem is just one big scheme or in other words a power grab method on who takes control this digital currency.
But have they forgotten that the one who controls bitcoin is the users itself,  now the miners, community are really mess up bcoz of BU and Cores power grab methods and affecting us normal users.

Maybe in the future bitcoin will remain as a stock and currency .
When used as a stock the price when goes up will be of high price , well trading is not for all people.
Currency is being used as a majority by all who are using bitcoins .maybe they earn it through signature campaign , sell it so that they get the fiat.

Can you teach me how am I (a user) actually control Bitcoin?

Because as far as I know, the only "control" I have in Bitcoin is just to buy and sell it and nothing more.

Scaling is not the push factor here, but rather who will be behind the wheel of this experiment. I would rather limp along with a congested network, than having a network that are not secure. < BU dev's have already shown that they cannot secure the code >

People will leave if they know their money is not secure. They did this with all the services and exchanges that were hacked.

The scaling can still be substituted on the 2cnd Tier < Off-chain services > if it is really a problem. The internet runs on TCP/IP, but everything happens on the Application levels. < This is the level with the highest impact for the users >

people will still use it as a speculative tool like gold, to store wealth, and someone will still use it as a currency with the merchants that are accepting it, will remain without any much doubt a niceh market

but if you think about it, if few people will begin to use it, the fee shoudl decrease over time, thus making it usable again

If there are no scalable solution then we are left with one solution and that is to change POW to proof of stake or POW. That way all bitcoin holders can participate as long as they have a desktop wallet. If this will be implemented we will no longer rely on the big miners rather all of us will become stakers and bitcoin will become more stable than it ever has.

I don't think that it'll necessarily affect bitcoin's status as a store of value.

The reasoning behind this is that you don't need something to be a functional currency to be a store of value. For example gold and silver, are they divisible? No. Are they interchangeable? Not really, as you have to go to such trouble to verify each bar's purity.

But yet, mankind still perceives gold and silver as the ultimate store of value.

The same with bitcoin in my opinion, even if it doesn't scale, it'll be digital gold.

" Something that ceased to update/upgrade will never be valuable in technology, they will become obsolete and forgotten."

I agree

I think even there he was wrong, unless of course in a trivial way: EVERY monetary asset ultimately fades away.  The only question is: over what time scale ?  10 years ?  50 years ?  500 years ?  The only monetary assets that have a millennia-long history of store of value are gold and to a lesser extend, silver, and some precious stones.  But even precious stones are not eternal.  Obsidian used to be one of the most valuable precious stones in early civilisations, for millennia.  Now, it is very secondary.  Diamonds are now considered precious.  1000 years ago, they weren't.

But no human-created monetary belief system beyond these have ever stood the test of time.  So ultimately, bitcoin will be worthless.  The question is only: when ?  10 years from now ?  50 years from now ?  500 years from now ?

Before that time, bitcoin will be worth something.  And no, it will NEVER be the "money of the world".  Nothing ever is.  Even the dollar is not "the money of the world" although it came close during a few decades after WW II.   The dollar is NOT backing China's economy, Europe's economy.  It is essentially the currency of petrol.

So, apart from the obvious "sooner or later bitcoin will go to 0", bitcoin will not be zero, nor everything.  It will find its niche, until it is replaced, which can take quite some time.  Like all money.

Of course, at a future point in time, one may ask whether some or other cryptomonetary system that has some roots in bitcoin and is more successful, "is" bitcoin, even if one wouldn't recognize it as such. 

I agree, the biggest problem that is driving people away from bitcoin is  the transactions and fee, bitcoin has been for a long time the leader of the cryptocurrency and it will stay that way, but with these problems that it is facing today the alt coins are trying to catch up to it, although they are not as popular as bitcoin, but bitcoin is not accepted in all online shops, but there are many investments in it like debit cards which allows us to use it like regular money.

that is your power.

If there's a network split you can dump the version you don't like and trade it for the version you see value in.

Bitcoin will be the leader and will rule the crypto currency sphere in the future,scaling is a big issue and it has to be rectified with the amount of users and transaction growing with time you have to stay upto date to accomodate everyone,alt coin has its market penetration and we have a ton of currencies and it is hard to follow everything,i do like to see bitcoin as an asset than a currency and so i am not worried about online shops accepting bitcoins.

But in my opinion although bitcoin currently has a transaction fee which is expensive compared to altcoin it is not a significant problem. Due to the current bitcoin fee not displace the bitcoin above all altcoin. I think today bitcoin is more believable  for investment than any other coin. Because the price is relatively stable compare. Thank you

It will eventually die if it fails to scale. The fees will grow very high as more user come in. Scaling is a very big issue and if bitcoin fails to address it, I think it is time to switch to an alt-coin which have a better take on scaling issues.

It may happen that way. However, there could exist the possibility of the cryptocurrency to remain alive, even if it doesn't scale. By then, it will only be used as a store of value, but not as a payment processor to handle everyday transactions. Maybe if this happens, another cryptocurrency will take the lead and become the number one in market cap. It would probably be Dash or Ethereum which will take Bitcoin's place.



Yeah. That is one of the good things that the Core team has. They carefully revise the code for any security issues to make Bitcoin as safe as possible. Even though they've been slow on implementing upgrades to the network, at least they've been trying to make them as reliable as possible.

The recent bugs that were encountered on Bitcoin Unlimited, shows the lack of development to carefully revise the code for any issues before releasing it to the public. However, if BU would put security and reliability first, then it would become a recognizable alternative that might overcome Core. Just my thoughts.  :)

It will remain just as digital gold: A hodling coin to hedge against the system instability.

Other coins could take the lead to be fast low value transactions. Maybe LTC if it ever manages to get segwit deployed, which would lead to Lightning Network. Segwit makes Lightning Network better and BTC will never have segwit at this point.

yes that is very true bitcoin is already one of the best crypto currency and hope that it will remain as number one currency for ever, i do not think that there can be any currency that can compete with bitcoin. bitcoin is already number one currency of the world and will always remain as number one crypto currency.

Makes it better how?

That would probably happen, as other altcoins take the lead and become used primarily for everyday transactions. Bitcoin will remain as digital gold, where it is scarce, and it would be limited by a few people to be able to transact in it, but will not serve its purpose to send money quickly to anyone in the world.

Honestly, I think that it is better for people to become interested into other altcoins, as it would greatly benefit Bitcoin from ever being congested by high transaction throughput. Thus, the more users migrate from Bitcoin, the better as there would be less unconfirmed transactions on the network.

Nevertheless, if Litecoin takes the lead by getting the approval of SegWit, then it would be ultra-fast, as well as have higher capacity than Bitcoin to handle more transaction throughput, making it used in the mainstream world. Just my opinion.  ;D

Although we can still run the LN without SegWit but looks like it will be less on the advantages.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/
SegWit gives a lot of benefits. Thus LN effectivity and efficiency less without SegWit. LN will lame without SegWit.

Looks like Syscoin will be the first to implemented the SegWit and LN activation.

I am sure people whom we trust dealing with Bitcoin are also thinking of the same question right now. In fact, this is at the heart of the ongoing debate right now on how to scale Bitcoin most especially when looking forward to the future. I am sure though that the whole Bitcoin community can be able to find an accepted solution for this scale challenge. At the end, Bitcoin will continue to rule and be the leader of the cryptocurrency world. I am so positive about that. All other coins will just follow along though they can have a good slice of the pie too.

It's the TX_ID fix that makes  Lightning Network better.
and i guarantee you no matter what happens, no matter who "wins".
a TX_ID fix will come to bitcoin in less than a year

alt will take over

Definitely there will be no sense to use bitcoin anymore. Its hard to think but that's a possible scenario if ever bitcoin will never scale. If that happens (hope not), bitcoin community will split and switch to altcoins. So altcoin will take over the market. Maybe DASH, ETH, XMR will possibly take over because these are top contenders.

There is no debate except for FUD. Bitcoin will never scaled directly and thus it will remain KING of crypto and all financial assets for that matter.

Detail on post titled "Hacks & puppets & forks - how to destroy bitcoin": https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1834310.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1834310.0)

but i do not think that such situation will every happen, i am hopeful that bitcoin will continue as an active currency and hope that it will continue as number one currency of the world.

I think that if bitcoin becomes non scalable which is by nature is not going to happen, is that bitcoin becomes more of a collectible rather than a currency, it will become more of a diamond than a gold, the reason why bitcoin will always be scalable is because as time goes by the price is going to increase and this leads to us changing the values that we use it with, so we don’t have to worry about this and worry about altcoins taking over the exchange market.

Scaling bitcoin is just a small issue right now. Because we all know that the main reason of the sudden changes of its value is depends on the support of the community of bitcoin. So the bigger problem is how bitcoin will be well-known as a crypto currency of all country. Because if it happened the demand of bitcoin will increase resulting on the improvement on the value or stock of exchange of bitcoin. And that is the time people we see the scale and the possibilities of bitcoin through the future. Some says that if bitcoin never scales it will become obsolete, yes it is right but for me that is impossible to happen for now to bitcoin. Because to future of bitcoin is just starting for now.

Well, only time will tell what would be the use case of Bitcoin at some point in the future, as the same is uncertain. If it never scales, then it would be rather used only as a store of value, and more as of a rare asset with similarities to Gold, but not meant to be used to handle your average everyday transactions. Bitcoin would be more of like a reserve currency against other cryptocurrencies in existence (just like the USD in the fiat world).

While it may continue to remain in the top spot at market cap ratings, other altcoins may take the lead into becoming mainstream as they prove to provide better features than Bitcoin, and faster confirmation times.

Big corporations, businesses, and banks alike would use Ethereum and Ripple to handle all the world's transactions in the future. Since they have blazing fast speeds and can scale exponentially, they would become the standard towards making digital currency payments. Just my thoughts.  ;D

You don;t have to imagine, you can already see that altcoins will take over.

Bitcoin has already failed to scale and the longer it continues to fail to scale the more altcoins will take over.

If it takes much longer, the damage will be irreversible, assuming it is not already too late.

i've been reading so much about bitcoin and i always encounter this scalable term..

can anyone explain this to me on the most simplest way?

Huh? ??? This is what you are calling a roadmap?  https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/011865.html

That is one possible scenario. But it does not mean Bitcoin will die. It will always be there as a store of value. A kind of "digital gold" which is something how, most of the people who are hoarding it, see it anyway.

Bitcoin scalability has been one of the attracting motivations for its users among others.how can one imagine the value becoming imbalance especially negatively?
im sure it will be abandoned in that condition and will surely become obsolete.

Hmm,I guess it will still be in use and have fairly large volume but it won't be the success that it could have been and not so much people will be using it.Then other cryptos may  use BTC's popularity and take over

Agree. Even if Bitcoin doesn't get to scale, it will always be in the eyes of investors and everyday people, to be used as digital gold. Due to its limited supply, and deflationary nature, it may continue to rise in value the scarcer it gets.

Thus, Bitcoin would be used as a reserve currency for other cryptocurrencies, while altcoins take the lead in handling everyday transactions. We've already seen alternatives like like Bitshares and Ripple, which can handle more transaction throughput. It would only be a matter of time before people start using them more than Bitcoin itself for their daily transactions.

However, if Bitcoin comes at a consensus level among the miner's hashrate, then we could see a bright future for it. There are many proposed solutions to make Bitcoin scale, but only one shall prevail. When that time comes in, expect for BTC's value to increase exponentially. Just my opinion.  :)

One possibility is someone eventually developing a crypto coin which isn't a pre-mined cash grab that is good for everything bitcoin is not.

That could alleviate pressure off btc being a jack of all trades when it was designed to be a master of none.

It makes more sense for an alt coin designed for loans and high speed transactions being used for those purposes, rather than reinventing bitcoin into something it was never designed to be.

Yeah. That could happen at some point in the future, where a new alternative cryptocurrency would become designed with innovative features, and most of all, overcoming Bitcoin's current issues which are scalability and fungibility. If this new coin, would implement SegWit into its code when launched, have a limited supply like Bitcoin (or probably even less), and becomes fungible with anon features like ZK-SNARKs, then it may overcome Bitcoin in market cap ratings and popularity as it will be the most valuable cryptocurrency available on the markets.

Thus, having speed efficiency in processing transactions, implementing privacy over transactions, and having the ability to scale over time, is key towards having a successful cryptocurrency that would become used by the masses in the mainstream world.

Nevertheless, I'm hoping to see Bitcoin evolve and take a step further into becoming scalable, but if it doesn't, expect to see another altcoin which will take Bitcoin's lead. Just my opinion.  :)

can anyone expalin what scaling means plaese. thank you.

Folks have at least two views of scaling.

The one I am use to is where a function is measured to get work done at some rate and then after some change/improvement the function can then get more work done at a higher rate.  For example, a truck might be able to haul so many tons then some bright person gets the idea to hook a second trailer behind the first and double the rate.  Scaling like this comes at a price, e.g. miles per gallon, etc.  Scaling like this will have some physical limit, e.g. it may become dangerous to keep on attaching more and more trailers, etc.

Another view of scaling involves making a more subtle sort of change/improvement.  Instead of just increasing the capacity, the idea is to arrange to do the work with less effort.  Using our example, some bright person reengineers the things being hauled to be much smaller and lighter and so many more fit into the first trailer.

Nothing precludes taking advantage of both kinds of scaling.

I have seen occasions where folks dismiss the first sort of scaling although I have yet to find out what they term it.

I completely agree. Bitcoin will never die because has network effect. That means has a big user base because people want it. Therefore, maybe people use some altcoins for everyday micro payments like as litecoin but most of their funds will be stored in bitcoin.

David Rabahy already gave an answer, but I'll try mine.  In general, "scaling" has to do with a relationship between a "cost", C and a "scale" or "scope", S, which we can write as a function: C = f(S).  S can be "the number of customers", and C can be "the cost of the store handling them".  S can be "the number of bits of a secret key", and C can be "the amount of computing needed to crack the key".  S can be "the number of nodes in a network" and C can be "the cost of the network".  But it can also be "the average time it takes to connect two nodes".

The function "f" is determined by the type of solution one presents.  If one uses another technology, this function f changes.  
What matters in "scaling considerations" is the overall large scale dependence of f on S.  For instance, it can be "proportional", "quadratic", "exponential", "logarithmic", "sub-linear" ...

In bitcoin's example, the scope S can be the number of users, but usually, it is more the number of transactions ; C is the "cost" in terms of network bandwidth, block chain size, and so on.  Usual on-chain scaling is about linear.  That is, for twice as much transactions, you need twice as much bandwidth, block chain size, etc....

In fact, "linear scaling" is not dramatic at first sight.  

But in fact, if we think more about it, it is not really linear.  It is linear when seen from a single user.  But when seen from the total size of the network, in fact, the scaling is rather quadratic.  If we have N users, then we have most probably N/K full nodes, which, each of them, must carry a block chain and a network burden proportional to the chain, which is, itself, proportional to the number of transactions.  So the total cost of "more users and more transactions" is actually quadratic.  As it has to be carried by more users, the cost per user is linear.   But this is nevertheless a problem: the more bitcoin has adoption, the more expensive it is per user.  That's not the idea.  As such, people look for solutions where the cost of adoption is not quadratic for the whole network.

It seems that as such, decentralized block chain technology is capping itself to a certain adoption size, above which, it becomes too expensive to be used, or needs to decrease its network nodes to just a few who take all the burden (and can take all the decisions) -> centralization.

I don't know, I just had a transaction for only 0.03 BTC that cost me 89000 sats in fees.    The problem is I have a lot of small transactions in my wallet and even small transfers take lots of bytes!   This is the kind of thing that could kill bitcoin!

Bitcoin will be adopted by all of people and the most important bitcoin will be considered as currency
many people use bitcoin for payment method because of there are not fees must be paid on every transaction
also there are not debate in all of comunity bitcoin because of block size problem.

your comment does not make any sense at all!
if there is no scaling, and a lot of people adopt bitcoin "as a currency" they can not use it because there is simply no room for their transactions in a block. and the fees will continue to rise exactly because of this so your second statement is also wrong because there is a fee and that fee will continue to rise with more adoption and more competition for a place in a block!

Bitcoin will likely stagnate

And eventually a new Bitcoin will be born which will have these issues fixed (as well as a lot of others like PoW), with the old dying off eventually. Personally, I'm more curious why no one hasn't yet implemented instant payments in an altcoin. I heard that Dash was doing something like that but folks here quickly dispersed my suspicions. Litecoin was going for that too, but Wu and company seem to have halted this process as well

And in some cases, even if you paid that much fees, your transaction will take more than half a day to be confirmed. I do not know how much more bitcoin users can take this. The more the miners delay the activation of any of the solution, the more damage it make to bitcoin.

Yes, that seems to be their deliberate choice

Namely, try to postpone any solution for as long as possible since virtually any solution would make the fees they receive for confirming transactions to decline. That's why they are rogue. If I were them I would likely do essentially the same but since I'm not one of them I'm telling how rogue they are. But even if they succeed in their effort of putting grit in the machine, they are still shooting themselves in the foot over long term. Some day some coin which is not constrained by the mining monopoly will dethrone Bitcoin and then miners will have to walk home

Bitcoin will stuck someday at some point of price, won't move up but keep fluctuate around the circle I think.
At current price, bitcoin will still has great movement, steady increase every month/year but people cannot use it just like we use fiat money if it isn't scalable right?
Maybe someday, another cryptocurrency which could be scalable will surpass bitcoin price and market cap. Whether this could be solved or not, only time will tell.

Because of the more advanced technologies to come, I think it is almost impossible for bitcoin to remain as the most valuable altcoin for ever. Even I am not so sure that any other current altcoin can displace bitcoin from its actual hegemony. But this revolutionary alternate economy is just starting to grow and I am convinced that amazing surprises are coming soon.

This is impossible for a host of reasons

Unless you mean Bitcoin price freezing at the temperature of absolute zero, of course. The primary reason is that Bitcoin is a virtual asset which has no value of its own. Real assets can actually get stuck at a price which roughly corresponds their internal or intrinsic value (at the so called "fair price") and stay there indefinitely long (provided the currency they are priced in is as stable, indeed). But this is not the case with Bitcoin and its likes. This has a practical implication and application, so to speak. For example, when you see the price stuck at some level and start to think that it is not going to move anywhere from there. Obviously, this is no more than an example of being deceived by your psyche, and you can use this effect to your own advantage (since other people feel basically the same)

I don't think any altcoin  can take place of the bitcoin .
It is because the most of the users in the bitcoin market or you can say cryptocurrency market are dependent upon the bitcoin value and also you can see only few of the altcoins are dependent upon the USD or Another Fiat ( not upont bitcoin fully) .
But most of the altcoins have the value in the price of the bitcoin Satoshi , so here chances to replace the bitcoin by altcoins is impossible .
Since it is another matter that people start to use altcoins than what they have interest in the bitcoin​.
And here I think this is start for the bitcoin , Because here the prediction of the bitcoin for the increase in the price of 10k$ in 2021 can't be only the Prediction , after this prediction more and more people are going in the bitcoin Investment for the future .

IMHO I don't see a problem here as the coin doesn't necessarily need to scale, it can function without block size/application improvements. But without scaling, i think it would change Bitcoins use dramatically. Small transactions will be taken over by altcoins, and BTC will more likely take the status of digital gold.

What i'm more worried about is Bitcoins ongoing centralization. Its ecosystem should be as decentral as possible, yet it is more and more being taken over by a few persons controlling monstrous minepools, and with that a ton of consensus power. The reason Bitcoin is still alive is because we trust in a few important things: it's reliable development team, its security and the fact that it is decentral. The last one worries me a bit, as the coin gets more and more centralized, even geographically.
BTCs development should be in the hands of the people, not in the hands of a few mighty miners that control enormous mine pools. They own enormous consensus power and seem to prioritize their own interest (making money) in front of ethics.

i think altcoin can not be in the top of marketcap as bitcoin is the leader of cryptocurrency and bitcoin is like a path for the others. i think altcoin is like a helper for bitcoin and support for bitcoin in cryptocurrency. without altcoin, bitcoin is nothing and all of crypto currency is related with each others. in trading for example, if bitcoin is down, altcoin will be up and if we trade btc-altcoin, we have makes profit in bitcoin and we can also increase our bitcoin amount. but if bitcoin is down, altcoin will be down, so we can buy altcoin again and sell it in high price.

I think if bitcoin never scales the bitcoin will not be used by many people. Because that will not be useful for everyone and it is not applicable to be converted into their money currency. If bitcoin will not be scaled many people will not pursue to use the bitcoin.

I am certain that bitcoin will scale soon... but if it doesn't, other alt-coin will take over. Eth is a potential candidate but I think it also has problem- too easy to scale (centralization).

If bitcoin never scaled we would have a problem, bitcoin would lose some of its interest and this would affect its adoption level as there are other coins that don´t have its problems by now and that could be presented as an alternative. However, despite the scalability debate that is still in place, I think that there will eventually be a solution because in the end the worst solution would be that there were no solution.

Alts coins are already attracting new users who have been disappointed with the current scaling war and I think this will continue if sooner than we think. Currently, bitcoin is no longer a choice of doing micro-payments because of its high transaction fees. Imagine if I want to send money back home as remittance, I would rather used other payment methods rather than used bitcoin because of high fees. We need this issues resolved so that bitcoin can scales up and be adopted globally, otherwise the general public will look for other alternatives.

If bitcoin never scales and another coin does then I think that coin will eventually become the dominant coin, that is why it is important to keep pushing bitcoin forward with new innovations, in the world of technology if you stay stagnant then other projects will eventually overtake you.

BTC market dominance now down to 59.5%. I guess that's what happens.

BitCoin surely has the largest community and I think they can find a solution to this problem. But if it never get's resolved, you basically answered your own question. It will remain as a store of value, and other alt coins out there will take the lead because they can work better as a currency.

BitCoin can't be both a long term store of value, and an every day currency. I think the BitCoin community needs to choose a route, and stick to it.

I dont think what can we do if segwit won't happen and hardfork also.
The blockchain will be way too slow, and fees are too high to use btc for everyday use.

And mass adoption just in a dream and more bitcoin traders will be looking for the fast transaction through off-chain.
I think so, More people are interested using off-chain transaction to be his bitcoin scalability solution. With 15 minutes and you can deliver off-chain transaction just in some minutes rather than using bitcoin transaction, 15 minutes for a single confirmation.
Bitcoin must learn a lot from litecoin and how are they doing it.
But I will strongly disagree about UASF.



Just the voters will give impact to the consensus. We are the spectators.

Anyone having Swiss francs in his wallet?

I do. It's a strong and very stable fiat currency. Switzerland is a small country, and it's currency is well regarded by all investors, holding its value among the US dollar or the Euro from much larger economies.

I hope BTC will become like the Swiss franc.

Yes. That's what I've thought it would happen in the future, if Bitcoin doesn't overcome its issues. Another altcoin will take over for sure, addressing key issues that are essential towards mainstream adoption. When it becomes scalable and fungible enough, while taking in consideration its decentralization, it will become a huge success surpassing BTC's market cap, if it also adapts a limited supply.

There are many cryptocurrency which are having issues towards getting the approval of the miners for SegWit, but if a new coin comes released with SegWit into its code, then it would become much easier for the scalable solution to become accepted there, as it would have a small hashrate at start. Thus, the bigger the hashrate a cruptocurrency's network has, the difficult it would be to gain the necessary consensus for SegWit to become active. I think that is why Bitcoin and other alts haven’t gotten any luck so far.

Still, Litecoin is closer towards SegWit activation, and it will be very beneficial to the cryptocurrency if it becomes a reality. Just my opinion.  :)

I don't think that this will help Litecoin much

It has been around for ages, and people already got used to it being a second grade cryptocurrency. When (and if) SegWit gets activated in Litecoin, people would rather think of it as a testing ground for Bitcoin, not as its own endeavor toward its own Bitcoin-free future. Apart from that, Segwit itself can only be considered as an interim solution. A Bitcoin killer coin should look more toward instant, ping-time payments and with low costs at that

I said this more than once. If bitcoin doesn't manage to scale this year, and ethereum will keep developing and getting adoption from institutions and corporations as it curently does, there's 50-75% it will replace btc by the year's end. Mark my words.

And what awaits then the mass owner of Bitcoin coins, if they all expect a Rainbow future for their capital. This does not affect the price of Bitcoin in the coming years?

It would of course, at a large scale. If bitcoin would never scale, some other coins might take the spot who already has the lead in terms of adoption and development e.g. LTC or ETH. However, what coin would replace bitcoin that I have no clue about since I'm still wary about ETH rise and LTC seemed to be too far off the charts.

This is going to be a tough issue if it never does scale as I would think that another currency would take the rains, maybe ETH? You never really know on something like this, but the one thing that I do know is that people on the BTC network are sick and tired of paying such high fees and are probably close to just simply cashing out and just using another method of payment all the time rather then keeping their bitcoin like they're doing now and paying like $1.30 for one transaction.

I do hope it scales though, as I see that as the only chance for Bitcoin to be able to be seen as a currency that is going to be able to hold some sort of foothold when it comes to the masses accepting and using it as a whole. If it doesn't people are just going to find something that will suit their needed, like anything else in the world this is how it works.

Blockstream/Core made it clear that they didn't want Bitcoin to scale, thereby forcing people onto the Lightning Network. Since the Lightning Network doesn't really exist yet (and there are many unanswered questions about its security and viability), the markets responded by moving volume over to altcoins. Bitcoin dominance has been cliff-diving in 2017, today it's 56%: http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#btc-percentage (http://coinmarketcap.com/charts/#btc-percentage)

Bitcoin has a lot of inertia due to name recognition, services, and hype, but eventually it will slow down as it becomes less useful. With the mempool reaching new all-time highs as we speak, we should be seeing a lot of unhappy bitcoin users in the next week. Some of them will flee to alts, and others will leave the space entirely.

I agree with your analysis, and I would even add something to it.  The "fight" has cleared up an issue and broken a taboo:

1) the issue that "bitcoin as the world currency, to buy coffee, and to buy sky scrapers", has some fundamental problems to it, and things are not as simple as it seems, that bitcoin is subject to power structures just as well as any other financial system, and the technical challenges to turn bitcoin in a world-monetary system without being under the control of some Chinese dudes, or some other banking cartel, are far from resolved.  In as much as this was thought to be an "engineers' fight", it turns out that, well, bitcoin as a world currency will not come without another form of obscure power over people's money.

2) all the discussions about the BU hard fork or the segwit soft fork, or the hard fork to another mining algorithm to piss off bitmain have shown that an alt coin is not so very different from bitcoin, after all, and that those "shit coins" are often technically superior, and only differ from bitcoin by a brand name.  Thinking of alt coins anything different than shit coin was taboo for a true bitcoin believer, but now that the filosophical discussion arose whether one shouldn't actually turn bitcoin into an altcoin to save us from the "other side" killed somehow the belief in a fundamental difference between an alt coin and bitcoin.  This belief was necessary to refrain from taking alt coins seriously.

I also believe other platforms, like ETH, WAVES, STRATIS etc will take over where Bitcoin has left off and other alts like LTC will take the merchant market share. Bitcoin will be remembered as the first large scale digital currency and may still have some value, but won't be used for small day to day transactions if they don't get their act together re the scaling problem.

Maybe you're right, But i don't see that bitcoin does not manage to scale this year, I will predict that bitcoin price will increase to 2000$ before the end of this years, So in a couple of years there is no crypto can take this place, Even if the ethereum will keep developing as you said.

Wtf, have you been conscripted into the shills team?

Regarding shit coins they are really shit coins, by any name. You may want to actually pay a visit to Yobit exchange and see for yourself how it looks (and feels) in practice. It kinda seems that you completely got lost in your ivory tower. Most altcoins are outright scams that were intended as scams right from the start. If it is a matter of difference between Bitcoin and the rest of the pack, why then the Chinese mining barons are opposing the SegWit activation in Litecoin so hard? Kiss goodbye to common sense and basic logic?

Exactly. I mean, it's not that difficult to create a coin that would surpass Bitcoin in market cap and adoption. All its needs it's to implement SegWit at launch, establish a very limited supply with no premine or ICO, and have active development to be able to surpass Bitcoin. By having a deflationary model and everything else just like Bitcoin, it would quickly gain traction. Especially by having SegWit within the first day of launch, which will be a huge booster for the new coin.

Also, there could exist a possibility of an existent altcoin to take over Bitcoin too. In my own opinion, both Ethereum and Dash look like the ideal candidates to become the top cryptocurrency in market cap. Just sharing my thoughts.  ;D

Scale or small is just in the map image so you can know the core path they want.

What are the scales?

if it was possible, it would have happened already!
nobody is stopping anybody from doing it and we all know code is open and you can just copy it and start a new coin with any specification.
the problem however is the adoption, nobody will give up bitcoin which has been around for a long time and trusted to go to a new thing.
and on top of that the developers these days are only looking for profit and their own pocket, they don't care about developing a good coin. so they never do it.

If it is not difficult, what are you waiting for?

The problem is that just implementing SegWit in a brand new coin won't help you a lot, if at all. Simply because SegWit aims at solving the problem of scalability which is already there. But to run into that problem in the first place, you should already have wide adoption, otherwise SegWit will be of no help to you altogether. Further, SegWit itself is no more than an interim solution which somewhat fixes current issues (which a brand new coin wouldn't have anyway), but it doesn't allow infinite scalability in the way Lightning Network does. So more power to you implementing the latter from scratch if you think it is as easy

Lean toward the second option it will remain a store of value but it may become dated and stagnate given long enough, that said the first mover ability is one that takes a while to be destroyed. It's similar to the facebook vs myspace which one retains usage in the long game is the utility.
We still have quite some time till that stage though but altcoins are already starting to see uses and conversions the main coin that people adopt first though remains Bitcoin and will likely remain so for some time yet.

Bitcoin cannot reach what it meant to be, I think it could reach at least $10,000-$20,000 per bitcoin while others expected bitcoin could achieve $1 Million, we hope so. People may invest on another coin which has good devs team and easier to handle by layman such as some coins here which has potential to reach that point. But, we don't know what will happen with bitcoin whether it can or stuck in this condition.

Very good points. Changes come very quickly in technology, and even faster in the crypto space. Perhaps coins get more mired in power struggles as the financial interests in them diversify and become more at odds with each other? Maybe we'll just have to keep moving on to the next coin, as corporations continually try to take over whatever the currently hyped coin is? It's a crazy concept. Bitcoin dominance is essentially over - it's about to drop below 50% as we speak. It could well be a shitcoin in a year if no one takes the helm and scales the network logically and simply. 

The "engineer's fight" has been ironic, because the most technically skilled people (Core) are arguing for a technically deficient solution (Segwit). I suppose that they have no choice. Blockstream's $75 mil will pay their salaries for a few more years, long enough for them to transition to another coin's dev team...

Well, I think that, because Core has some smart guys in there, they are *realizing* the problem that was pointed out to Satoshi way back, that his solution to make a world currency, fancy, smart and successful as it seemed, simply didn't cut it.  These are hard words and of course, coming from me, insignificant being as compared to God Satoshi, who am I to speak such blasphemy, but it was almost IMMEDIATELY pointed out to Satoshi that his system, where ALL users need to know in principle ALL transactions EVERYWHERE, and EVER, was going to have a scaling problem, and Satoshi uttered something like that a few big data centres could take care of that, essentially admitting that his solution could only work when centralized again.

In a certain way, Core has been working on a *totally different kind of payment system*, namely the LN.  But, *it is a totally different payment system*.  It simply isn't bitcoin.  Even if it is using bitcoin as an underlying system, it is a totally different way of transmitting payments, the concepts are totally different, and the trust relations and the power structures are totally different.   One could almost say that LN and bitcoin are about as different, in their concepts, as was Schaum's e-cash and bitcoin.  So all preciously gained confidence and trust of bitcoin is going out of the window with LN.  This doesn't mean that LN is bad, but it is SO DIFFERENT in its approach to transactions, that most alt coins look more like bitcoin as it is now, than the LN looks like bitcoin.

And, again, people have raised some fundamental issues of the LN idea.  Like people told Satoshi he had a problem with scaling and Satoshi replied with centralization as a solution (without calling it that way), people are telling the LN proponents it has scaling problems leading to centralization, and that is also brushed under the carpet.

And finally, all of this is in the idea that one day, bitcoin would scale "to VISA levels".  But the *economic model* of bitcoin and many alt coins doesn't look AT ALL like most fiat currency economic models.  Most of these systems have economic models that look like highly speculative assets, not like currencies.

So it might very well be that bitcoin, nor most altcoins, ever NEED these big volumes, because as speculative assets and not currencies, they don't need VISA level scaling, as "the masses" will never buy coffee (on chain or off chain) with speculative assets that aren't reliable units of account (= with relatively stable predictable values).

The emphasized part is where you go totally nuts (again)

Not that you are rational in the previous parts (preceding that), but they at least have some veil of rationality cast over them even if the latter is entirely superficial and thus any feeling thereof is purely fictional and misleading. But that's not my point. I don't think that LN is so different that it can't be used over the current Bitcoin blockchain. But since it can, then you can't possibly claim that all confidence and trust that Bitcoin acquired during these years goes down the drain or out the window (you choose which way you are wrong). Otherwise I could claim that any update would effectively make Bitcoin into an altcoin

Technically, of course it can be used.  But bitcoin's "trust model" was essentially that, if you were the owner of a coin, you could transact it to just any other user, that did not have to be a "declared user" or "have an account in a bank somewhere" or anything like that ; that the P2P network would propagate your transaction to a miner, just ANY miner, and that it was sufficient that ONE of the miners included your transaction in a bloc, and that was it: your transaction was done and valid.  In other words, the only way that bitcoin can censor your transaction, is by having ALL miners reject your transaction, or by a majority of miners *forbidding* you to transact (soft fork against your transaction).  Other than that, you have a permission-less system.

In the LN network, this is totally different.  You have to be on the network with a GIVEN PARTNER of which you cannot change  because you locked in your coins with him (*) and you only can transact with someone who *is already a customer on the network*, and you are totally dependent on the approval of your transaction by all the intermediate partners (of your partner, of your partner's partners / etc...).  In the LN, you cannot just see that A is not transmitting your transaction, and then switch to B.  If you have your funds locked up with A, then B is of no use to you (*).

(*) yes, of course you can eventually try to settle on-chain.  But the whole point of the LN is that there's by far (orders of magnitude) not enough room on chain to do all transactions.  So while *exceptionally* you can try to settle on chain, for MOST if not ALL of your transactions, you are dependent on your partner.

This is a totally different trust model of "transacting".  I'm not saying that it cannot work out somehow.  But it is much more involved, with much more complicated power games possible, than the simple "bitcoin way".  This is why I say that it is radically different, as a NOTION OF TRANSACTING COINS, to be forced on the LN or to do things "on chain".   BTW, the LN makes only sense when you are forced onto it of course (in other words, when the block chain is mostly unavailable/too costly).  Because if you can do a transaction on chain, there's no reason to go through all  the hassle of the LN.  It is only when the block chain is totally congested and way too expensive to use, that you are going to consider the LN, so you have to see its "power model" in that frame: "essentially no possibility (or way too expensive) to do on chain transactions, or to settle".  In that light, the LN *is* a radically different way of doing transactions than bitcoin's standard way of doing so.

It wasn't that hard to anticipate that blockchains would become bloated and the network would get congested - people have made jokes for years about "write-only databases" and other such broken constructs. Even a child will tell you that if you have to keep adding pages to a book forever, after awhile you won't be able to read the book or even lift it off the (broken) table. I always laugh when some corporate doofus yaps on about the "genius of blockchain", since it's actually a fairly flawed concept. Unfortunately pruning hasn't solved the bloat problem.

Of course, the consensus algorithms and novel use of cryptography in bitcoin are strokes of Satoshi genius, and they are what made the whole thing work. Ironic that we would be embroiled in a 3 year fight about this very subject, with certain Core devs going so far as to edit Satoshi's original whitepaper.

As far as the Lightning Network goes, first off, it doesn't exist. Second, as you point out, people's trust in it will need to be earned. Finally, starting people off on LN with "you now must use this because Bitcoin has been artificially limited based on intangible threats" is really not a good beginning. Personally, I became intuitively skeptical of the concepts the minute I heard those words...

I absolutely agree that the crypto space as a whole could easily approach VISA levels, or even pass them. Trying to reach VISA transaction volume with bitcoin is a mistake in so many ways.

deisik: I think it's time to open your heart and your mind to the world of ideas out there. You seem emotional and distressed. If something you believe ends up being wrong, you can just change your mind.

Indeed, bitcoin can very well stay what it is ; there will be a natural market limiting transactions to those that are worth it within the space that is allocated on its block chain.  The only thing that this is harming, is the fundamental belief system that needs to propagate the myth that bitcoin is going to be "the world's currency".  As long as people are somehow *believing* that, they can make silly projections of like "hell, if all fiat is going to be in bitcoin, and I'm holding 20 bitcoin, I'm holding a millionth's worth of the world's cash !".

So there needs to be sufficient technobabble that can make it *credible* that bitcoin is going to be the world's cash even though it won't ever.  There needs to be a technological projection that bitcoin COULD eventually handle the world's transactions, if that is needed to have sufficient belief in it to keep the *speculation* coming ; even if the true usage of bitcoin is speculation, and that this speculation needs only a few MB of transaction bloc size ; the technological adaptation to the real usage (shifting coins between speculator clearing houses: exchanges) would kill the myth that keeps the speculation going.   My stake is that that is what the LN is about.

As to the question on whether it makes sense for bitcoin to be a "sleazy big business reserve currency", I have to say I don't know.  This would be the case if bitcoin were the absolute monopolist in cryptoland, which it has been for 8 years, but which is seriously put in doubt with the recent fall in market share - although this has to be confirmed long term.  In speculation land, I don't see how one asset can be the obvious undisputed monopolist leader, because that would be in contradiction with the efficient market hypothesis.

As long as you can still transact in the old mode, all the differences you were going to mention after that are irrelevant (I didn't read past that since it was an evident red flag where to stop). That's the basic point which you should address first. If people can transact in the "old-fashioned" way, they will continue to trust Bitcoin. Indeed, some of them may not quite like that (i.e. payment channels via LN), but since Bitcoin is essentially an open source project, it all comes down to just personal likes or dislikes

You may (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1899005.msg18936862#msg18936862) finally want to learn how to explain things in a concise and predictable way

Well, if you can still easily transact in the old mode, then the LN doesn't make sense.  The LN only makes sense if it carries orders of magnitude more transactions than "the old mode" CAN sustain ; and if it carries orders of magnitude more transactions than the old mode can handle, the old mode is simply not available any more, because of full blocks, high fees, and maybe monopoly agreements with miners selling their exclusive bloc space only to big LN hubs to settle.

In other words, as long as there is room on the block, nobody will use the LN.  It is only when you are FORCED on the LN, that you will use it.  And if you are forced onto the LN, it means that the old mode is simply almost not available (difficult, expensive, rare).

You explained perfectly well the deflationary spiral, and the fact that it ends all economic activity.  Until everyone is sitting on his stash of deflationary money, and has no bowl of rice to eat.  Because he sold it to get more deflationary money.

I don't really know

I don't really know whether you are deliberately confusing different notions you refer to here or due to the lack of proper understanding of the differences between them. Basically, you are trying to sell the idea of should (in the sense of having to do something in the prescribed way only) for the idea of may (when you would be better off if you do something this way). In other words, with LN you may still transact in the old way if you choose so but you might not want to transact that way. This distinction is important in questions of trust. In the first case (when you have no choice), the trust goes out the window, while in the second it remains. Obviously, LN is about the second option


You should keep your posts as short, simple and comprehensible as this one. You would fare a lot better here (otherwise, I see no reason in your posting across the forum)

Bingo. You just described Blockstream's $75 million business plan: Restricting the bitcoin blocksize artficially and then scaring people about quadratic hashing and capacity ceilings being reached. It should've convinced people that LN is inevitable. Unfortunately there has been a hitch: people aren't drinking the Segwit Koolaid, so Blockstream can't move forward with LN over BTC as only a settlement layer. Since there is no opinion leader other than Greg Maxwell (a bit of a troll for a CTO), they really aren't able to lead more than the "tech-lemmings" to LN.

Also, there is the slight problem that a functioning LN doesn't exist yet. I'm happy to try it if it works over Litecoin. A perfect little sandbox. They just activated a few hours ago...

You should stop telling people what they should do.  Like it, or don't like it.  Answer, or don't answer.  Read, or don't read.
As I told you, writing concise, well-worked texts is much more work than I'm willing to spend here.

Point is, apart from some *technical* tests, the geeky fun of it, and the buzz for a while, I don't see why anyone would use it on litecoin, as long as normal transactions on LTC work very well (and LTC has 4 times more room than bitcoin, and is much less used right now).
Why would one lock one-self in with "a guy on the internet", if one can send the transaction directly to destiny ?
Because if the "guy on the internet" decides to settle, your funds are locked for a certain time in any case.  If the "guy on the internet" decides not to transmit your LN transaction (because his PC is down), you cannot use your funds for a certain time either.  Why go through all these inconveniences when you can send your transaction directly ?
(apart for the geeky fun ?)

Isn't this equally applicable to you?

In other words, don't tell me what I should not tell you, okay? In fact, by telling this you have just revealed what is behind your posting here (you can think that I was specifically interested in revealing that, apart from a host of other reasons). You are here to boost and rub your ego, now that's as clear as day. Obviously, you aren't interested in actually explaining things to other people (unlike me), you are here to make an impression on them. You want to shine but you don't care to shed light on anything. That's why you feel so hurt and pissed off when someone pokes (a shit end of) a stick in your inflated ego

i think bitcoin is the face of digital currency. when you meet someone and you want to tell them about digital currency you must first mention bitcoin. you cannot mention all coins, but atleast the history will be traced to bitcoin. so even if it never scales it will be a great store of value, people will buy it then exchange it with other crypto particularly ethereum or dash that is if they want a faster transaction. But i dont see bitcoin ever dieing,

And you like replying to people that are only here to rub their ego :)

No, really, I'm only here to provoke answers from which I can learn something.  I don't care at all what others might get out of what I'm posting.  I want to test my own ideas and see what reactions they bring, because these reactions may tell me something about my ideas, which is what matters for me.  No, I don't want to help anyone, no I don't want to impress (how can an anonymous pseudo on a forum "impress" what so ever ?), no I don't want to teach anything to anyone.  But sometimes, this can be a side effect of me trying out my ideas.  I couldn't care less about what others gain or what others think of a pseudo on a forum, not knowing who I am for real.

Take a step back, and think of what we are doing here.  We are just writing stuff on a forum, and we are anonymous to one another.  What counts is what is written, not the identifier under which it is written, which only serves to link posts together in order to understand lines of reasoning.  We could just as well all use "anonymous" as identifier ; it would simply be somewhat harder to have exchanges of arguments because one would have to quote all the elements to which one is replying.

Maybe I should abandon my pseudo here and create a new one, so that no "personality" is linked to it.

You are one of these people that cannot distinguish an argument from its author.  That's not a way of having logical arguments.  It is quite useless as a pass-time, especially if the author is a pseudonymous identifier on a forum.  You could just as well argue with a bitcoin address about its personality traits.

You can say that I like to poke a stick in their ego

If you don't like that (which is understandable), don't show it up. Regarding the bullshit you wrote after that, you are not the first who writes this stuff. In fact, everyone claims exactly that, but there is no use trying to deceive me (or anyone else, for the record) into thinking that you are really into something you pretend to be. I have seen it many times, and I have been there myself, though I was more sincere and honest and never claimed that trash ("I want to test my own ideas and see what reactions they bring"). If you were really looking for that, there are ways which are much more effective and efficient as well as places much more productive and fertile in this regard. But you will be quickly shut down there by the dudes who are genuinely above you (and which don't want to show off at that)

Completely agree with you, mate. It's now the time where cryptocurrencies are proving their real use case in the real world. While the ever-increasing userbase in Bitcoin is inevitable, there should an emergent consensus to help Bitcoin scale before its too late.

If the scalability debate remains without any consensus from the miners and community as a whole, another altcoin will take the lead. So as you said earlier, it would be somewhat similar to MySpace vs Facebook where the latter has taken over as the top social network. Only time will tell if the same happens with BTC or not. Just my opinion.   :)

Bitcoin is just a Digital Asset that most people that use it have no idea of what Bitcoin actually is. Bitcoin is not meant to get transferred every second of the hour because it has a transaction fee.

Bitcoin is a collector's item and once people begin to just figure that out then the price of Bitcoin would go up, it does not matter if there's people trying to build a larger Blocksize for Bitcoin because less people would spend it on junk.

I express my strong disagreement with this attitude

It seems to be a case where you are rationalizing in hindsight the Bitcoin failure as a genuine currency ("not meant to get transferred every second"). As to me, this is sheer nonsense (or just a dumb rationalization if you please). Bitcoin specifically was meant to be a currency (as per Satoshi), and the fact that you pay a hefty fee to transact with it nowadays confirms just that, i.e. that something is wrong with Bitcoin in respect to its transaction fees (technically, with Bitcoin mining, which is the case). It is not a collector's item by any means since its role is purely utilitarian (i.e. it is only a tool such as, for example, a sledgehammer or screwdriver)

It is possible other cryptocurrencies might want to take the lead. The thing is the fact that bitcoin got accepted today massively is as a result of the huge increase in value over time. Personally, I believe storing it for a long time would definitely make me a bigger boy later. A time will definitely come when we will stop seeing bitcoin as an asset instead of a means of transaction.
Nevertheless, the ease of transaction too is something but if another crypto currency decides to offer something better, people may want to give it a chance but I don't think that will stop bitcoin from still operating.

That will not work. The main reason that Bitcoin core does not want to increase the blocksize is that they want to force the "fee market" that is supposed to replace block rewards as the means of securing the Bitcoin network, while there is still enough of a block reward left to secure the Bitcoin network.

My take is that any proof of work coin that has a fixed maximum number of coins, with the exception of demurrage see edit 2, will not be able to scale unless it gives up de-centralization.  In the top 10 coins  Monero is the only proof of work coin that has given up on the maximum number of coins in exchange for a 0.6 XMR minimum per block reward in perpetuity. It is this minimum block reward that has allowed Monero to have an adaptive blocksize limit and thereby scale on the main chain without have to be concerned about the need for a "fee market" to replace block rewards.

I have not included Ethereum since it is planning to move away from proof of work to proof of authority or proof of stake. Interestingly Ethereum Classic moved away from a minimum block reward to a fixed maximum number of coins when the Ethereum Classic community decided to stay with proof of work. In my opinion this was a terrible mistake.

Having worked closely with the Monero adaptive blocksize, it has become very clear to me that without a minimum block reward the Cryptonote adaptive blocksize limit will cause the total fees per block to go to zero at the same rate as the block reward. This will lead to no incentive for the miners to secure the Monero network. By analyzing the Monero adaptive blocksize and fee structure one can see why "solutions" such as Bitcoin unlimited will fail, since these type of solutions are in effect a much weaker version of what Monero already has. In the Bitcoin unlimited model for example net fees to the miner will fall to zero much faster than with a Cryptonote style quadratic penalty

Edit 1: Litecoin and Dash have fundamentally the same flaw as Bitcoin. In the case of Dash the situation is made even worse since the falling block reward not only has to support the miners but also the masternode network and project funding.

Edit 2: Demurrage as in Freicoin could be used to create a permanent block reward while maintaining a fixed number of coins.  

I 100% agree with you.

In any case, this "limited number of coins" is more a religious thing than anything else, to boost speculation.  A good currency has a mechanism built into it to regulate the value of the coin so that you don't have to check every day whether the sum that was going to buy you a car yesterday, is going to buy you a burger, or a house, tomorrow.

The problem with PoW is that even though it is not a bad idea to burn seigniorage, it is an awful idea as "cryptographic protection".  One should have distinguished PoW for coin creation, and another cryptographic mechanism to decide upon the consensus, and eventually yet another mechanism to secure the consensus (immutability).

In fact, we can see the whole of crypto as a very interesting experiment on how some naive ideas lead to the consequences that have been predicted in some cases (like the deflationary spiral).

to me, it will be difficult for Bitcoin to be used for micro transaction as a normal form for transaction in the market and as the top in all crypto-sites, it wont  and can't be underrated because of its high price in the market system.
In years coming the price of Bitcoin will still be increasing, other coins will increase but can't beat the price of Bitcoin in the market.

Wait a minute - the main reason that Bitcoin core does not want to increase the blocksize is to force people onto Segwit and over to LN and their other patented solutions. They've stated this publically.  Also, why would bitcoin Core care about fees? Miners will secure the network for meager fees.

Your claims about money supply are interesting. Is it possible that your views about current inflationary economics cause you to regard such systems as normal and stable?

One should distinguish between inflation/deflation (= the change in real world value of a token) on one hand, and debasement (= creating monetary tokens) on the other hand.

In general, a good currency has only very mild inflation or deflation, and what's more important, this mild inflation or deflation is *predictable*.  This makes that the currency is a good representation of value as a function of time, and hence a good "unit of account".   Whether the deflation or inflation is 2% or 3% ... doesn't really matter.  If you KNOW that on average, a currency has an inflation rate of 2%, say, you KNOW that 10 years from now, a given sum represents 20% less value than that same sum today, so you can take this into account in every long term agreement.  If you know that the currency is mildly deflationary, you know that a given sum will represent about 20% more than today, so that too, you can take it into account.
As such, mild inflation or deflation, for a currency, doesn't matter much, as long as it is predictable.

But in order for a currency to keep its inflation or deflation rate close to the "programmed" one, the currency OFFER needs to adapt as a function of its value.  If the currency is too expensive (that is, if the deflation is too severe), more currency needs to be put on the market.  If the currency becomes too cheap, (that is, inflation is too severe), currency needs to be taken out of the market.

A currency with a given production rate, worse, a currency with a decreasing production rate, and an increasing adoption, will be explosively deflationary.  That's exactly what we saw with bitcoin.  Everyone is cheering that bitcoin went up from $0.1 to $1700 or so in about 6 years, but that is a catastrophic deflation.  

Imagine that 6 years ago, you signed a contract with me that I would clean your room for 100 BTC (say, $10) per day, with an indemnity of breach of contract of 5000 BTC (say, $500) if you decide to stop the contract without me failing to clean your room.  Then I'm rich now, and you will be working the rest of your life to pay off the contract !
You cannot do business in such a "currency".  

If that currency would become in general usage, then the economy would fall in a deflationary spiral: as hoarding currency instead of spending it would lead to higher wealth, and as the increase in value of the hoarded currency would outpace any reasonable true economic return on investment (look at bitcoin: what real world economic investments allow a factor of 10000 ROI in 7 years !), nobody would spend, nobody would invest, and everyone would hoard more and more currency, having less and less currency running around, increasing even more the value of the few coins that are available and not hoarded yet, inspiring people to hoard even more.

If bitcoin never scales, this will cause bitcoin to lose people's interest. It cannot be used for small transactions and other micro transactions.

Sounds like a fair summary of current mainstream neo-Keynesian monetary policy. I just wanted to point out to you that this system is by no means normal, stable, or rational, and it has no successful historical precedent. It's just been "the system" for the past 40+ years in G8 countries.


Aren't you forgetting that inflation also arises from increased monetary velocity, not just increased supply? So the increased nominal exchange value is not necessarily "catastrophic deflation" at all. As you point out, in a classic deflationary event, the velocity of money spirals downward as the currency becomes more valuable - it's smarter to hold money than buy goods and services. This doesn't effect bitcoin for several reaons: 1. bitcoin not a primary unit of account, and 2. it isn't required to purchase vital goods and services. Furthermore, there is an increasing number of goods and services that can ONLY be purchased using bitcoin. People who aren't taking fiat profits on exchanges are likely buying more of these "exclusive" goods and services as we speak - if they're smart, they know that the price/fiat exchange rate will correct soon anyway. Remember that people buying into the bitcoin currency to acquire goods and services don't care what the fiat exchange rate is - they simply buy the coin and get the product at roughly the same exchange rate (or better if they bought in January). Additionally, remember that bitcoin is a financial asset class of its own, which continues to find new market share and investment. Finally, I doubt that a complete stagnantion of BTC trade and exchange voume would happen on the bitcoin network - most people know that this would kill bitcoin and a devaluation would be close at hand.


I don't think people are really writing up labor contracts for BTC. Just about every store I've seen uses national currencies for pricing and the BTC price is determined by daily exchange rates. There's no real problem with that other than wild fluctuations before exchange. Somebody from Coinbase said in an interview that their large merchants exchange their BTC for fiat once per day day or more. That insulates the merchant from large losses (but also large gains).

This is not neo-Keynesian at all, it is rather neo-classical, in Friedman's tradition.  Keynesians want to influence economic activity with monetary policy ; Friedman considers just the monetary value stability.  Keynesians think that one should print more money if the economy depresses, and that one should restrict monetary supply if the economy booms.  Friedman's monetary view is rather that the monetary supply should keep money's value as constant as possible:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monetarism


You can hardly think of Friedman as a neo-Keynesian.

One should regulate the money supply so as to keep as stable a monetary value as possible, in the sense of Nash's ideal money.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideal_money


Nash proposes something of the kind in principle as the Big Mac index, but smarter.  The idea is to have *constant economic value* of the money unit even though that notion itself is difficult to define precisely.


He considered the Euro as a good candidate for asymptotically ideal money, exactly because the European central bank has only a single objective: inflation of 2%, and no neo-Keynesian targets to meet.


That is true, but velocity is something that is hard to control, is a function of people's habits, mood and so on, and is especially a function of the perception of whether an asset is speculative or not.  When you look at monetary velocity, it is not something that has uniform behaviour, and remains grossly within some boundaries.  You cannot "regulate" velocity.  You cannot make people spend faster or hoard more.  In fact, velocity is at the origin of two instabilities: the deflationary spiral, and hyper inflation.   The deflationary spiral happens when people speculate on the strongly rising value of a monetary asset: they hoard it more and more, lowering as such, the velocity, and hence increasing even more the market value of those few coins on the market, confirming the speculation of rise.  This is bitcoin's behaviour.  
On the other hand, hyper inflation is when people speculate on a strongly falling value of a monetary asset: they try to get rid of it as quickly as possible, increasing as such the velocity to very high values, and hence, decreasing even more the market value of the mass of coins chasing goods in the market, confirming the speculation of drop.  This is what has happened to some famous hyper inflations like the Reichsmark.

The knowledge of a stabilizing mechanism avoids both instabilities, but one doesn't have any handle on people's spending decisions which determine velocity ; as such, the only thing one has a handle on, is the coin emission.


But then it is not in a state to become a currency !  If the argument against why it is not behaving like a currency, is: "because it is not a currency yet", then that's not very convincing as an argument of why it is a good currency, no ?  In fact, the deflationary spiral is even worse for a non-essential asset, because in as much as the deflationary spiral of the principal currency is tempered because after all, you HAVE TO BUY FOOD, here, nothing stops one from hoarding all of bitcoin, because you don't have to spend it to get food.


Apart from ransomware and dark markets, I wonder what ?


You mean that someone was offering an exclusive bitcoin tooth brush for 0.1 BTC 2 years ago when it was around $200,- (so a brush for $20,-), that same tooth brush will still be sold for 0.1 BTC ($180.- right now) ?  I would hurry cashing out my BTC into fiat and buy 9 toothbrush in the supermarket with it, no ?


Absolutely.  I don't claim that "bitcoin is dead".  It has a bright future !  I think it will go sky high - but in the same way that complex derivatives could go sky high.  Bitcoin is a hugely speculative asset, it is BY FAR its principal usage.  Look at this forum.  Look at what people say about it.  Look at the volumes.  This is all speculation.  But speculation is a HUGE market.  Hell, it is MUCH MUCH bigger than the fiat market.  The whole financial world is the market.  Not the "payments" application of fiat.  It is a market that is about 10 times the world's economy all by itself.  This is the true nature of bitcoin and most crypto.  It is purely speculative, and once big finance will get into it, it will be HUGE.  But entirely speculative and if it is well done, totally unpredictable (efficient market hypothesis).  

In fact, I think crypto finally invented, what the financial world has been looking for: abstract speculative tokens.  No more need to speculate on derivatives linked in the real economy, like oil, real estate, food, metals, technology or whatever: just abstract tokens to gamble on.

That's not what one pretended, but that's how it was designed.


I think that this is again this fallacy of taking a desirable objective as an actual consequence.  It is not because "bitcoin would crash if there wasn't any merchant usage" that "merchant usage will emerge".  But moreover, I don't think that it is true, that bitcoin has what so ever to do with merchant usage.  Merchant usage was a story told in the beginning, to kickstart it, and there IS some marginal merchant usage, but it is not what bitcoin is about, nor what sets its price.  Pure speculation is.  And I think it has a monstrously bright future in that.

I am enjoying this thread even if we are a little off-topic. Apologies to OP.


I'm not familiar enough with the terminology and schools of thought to debate you on this. All I know is that you're backing your arguments with roughly conventional 21st century capitalist economic theory. I don't necessarily refute this theory, but I regard it with a healthy dose of skepticism, and I believe it's not necessarily applicable when analyzing bitcoin. So debates over bitcoin money supply, deflation/inflation, etc. are not necessarily covered by this theory.


Well, I must disagree with you here: velocity is precisely what is interesting about the last 20 years of monetary, banking, and economic policy and law. The establishment is moving more and more toward systems which CAN control velocity and DO. Read up on the cashless society. The current vast majority of financial transactions use electronic fund transfers which may be FROZEN at any point. People don't even realize how quickly all of their bank deposits could evaporate or move into an inaccessible state. Any future "Electronic bank runs" will end in seconds rather than days. AML laws are becoming so tight that the cash economy is hugely curtailed and has high overhead. If you talk to an economist about controlling monetary velocity, they will even tell you that it's necessary in this age of rampant money-printing to prevent hyperinflation!

So of course it's possible to control velocity - that's precisely what the USA Fed (for example) has been tasked with (control of supply and velocity meets their inflation targets)! They influence velocity by setting interest rates and printing more free money for banks.

Cryptos represent a new challenge to this regime. Velocity is really only bounded by network capacity, and it's not decreasing at all, in fact it's increasing. This is not any deflationary spiral. Furthermore, the coin supply is increasing every day. Controlling the global movement of cryptos is already creating headaches for the financial elite. Imagine if cryptos grow 100-fold in the next ten years - they could fuel a vast Forex arbitrage market, even undermine the central banks' control of exchange rates. Many outcomes are possible.



Well I guess the conventional view of bitcoin is that it's an asset and a currency, right?


Apart from ransomware and dark markets, I wonder what ?
[/quote]

Yes, these are the primary uses for bitcoin as a currency right now, but the utility of bitcoin applies to global commerce as a whole. With 3 countries outright legalizing bitcoin, I suspect the number available goods and services to skyrocket.



Pure speculation sounds like an oxymoron to me... and it's not why I'm here. But the space could degenerate to only speculation. And I think that would be the logical conclusion of the experiment...

The issue will be solved its just a matter of if it will take a catastrophe to make it happen and what the aftermath will be.

bitcoin will never scale. no hard fork will happen and the fees will get higher and higher only the rich can use it. small users will go to litecoin and that is why there is a craze for LTC nowadays

Well, call me conservative, but I'm not buying the idea that whole international pans of economists are in a kind of conspiracy or group think erroneously putting aside a former correct theory of money to replace it with gobbledegook.  Economy is a complex science, because it combines different fields and sociological aspects, but I don't think that world-wide scolars are deluded to the point of defending totally erroneous views on things.  Our state of knowledge advances of course, and what was once thought to be more or less right, turns out to be more subtle than imagined, but I won't just say that most of late 20th century monetary theory is bogus, and that some ideas from the beginning of the century are "obviously" closer to the truth.  In fact, the "classical" story of how money came to be (namely, a generally used commodity that was more and more used as an intermediate good of exchange) is historically proven *entirely wrong*.  Nowhere, ever, a generally used commodity became money.  This is nevertheless on what older theories, such as sound money doctrine, are based on.

And the "this time it is different" story, I don't buy either.  Bitcoin is a monetary asset, just like any other monetary asset, that is, not of direct utility, but only of value to be exchanged for something of value.  It doesn't fall outside of the scope of any theory regarding monetary assets, not more than most other things of which the direct utility is small or non existent compared to its exchange value.  What sets bitcoin apart is its form.  Not its nature.

There is not much difference in principle between private money (as it has existed often in the 19th century) and bitcoin.  The issuers of the private money are the miner pools ; for the moment they stick to a pre-determined emission curve (the famous 21 million coins) - in principle they could change that any moment.  And there is a public auditing system of their ledger.  So the concept is quite well known ; the form is new.


Well, that's a very radical way of "regulating velocity".  You can hardly call that a monetary policy.  It is an emergency (panic) decision to do so, to try to block a run-away condition.  Things like what happened in Greece at a certain point, was just a measure to avoid Greek banks which were essentially bankrupt, to collapse, the time needed to bring the Greek government back to reason, or to have it decide to step out, so as not to have the whole of Europe pay for Greeks' jokes.


In the modern fiat system, a bank run doesn't exist any more, because there's no fractional reserve banking any more.  Banks are 1-1 covered in principle by non-monetary assets, which they can use to obtain as much central bank money as they want - the only thing is that it costs them interest, and hence they only keep a small reserve handy ; but normally banks can now obtain as much central bank money as their assets allow them.   It is because, exactly, this was locked for the Greek banks, that they had to restrict money movements at a certain point.  But a healthy bank cannot undergo a bank run any more in the modern system, because it is fully covered.


Yes, but they don't control velocity directly.  By setting interest rates, they influence the desire to exchange non-monetary assets for new money, so essentially, indirectly the monetary mass, because they change the incentive for people to want to borrow (= exchanging non-monetary assets for freshly invented money) and of course, this also has an indirect effect on velocity.


In fact, it is difficult to talk about velocity for a speculative asset, because it doesn't buy goods and services, but it exchanges in and out with other monetary assets, so there is no "Q" that has any meaning.  If I exchange 1 bitcoin once a day for fiat, and back to bitcoin, my contribution to Q is 2 x $1700, and my contribution to the number of coins exchanged is 2 (two trades).   If I exchange this coin 100 times a day, my contribution to the number of coins (velocity) is 200, but my contribution to Q is also 200 x $1700.  So this doesn't modify anything.  Fisher's formula had as an idea that Q was some genuine "irreversible" acquisition of goods and services.  It is still mathematically valid for exchanges, but as Q augments with V, it doesn't change anything.

The deflationary spiral resides rather in the fact that people hoard (even if they quickly trade in and out) coins for the rise of its value, and not because they use it as an intermediate between earning and spending value.  In other words, the deflationary spiral is the monetary equivalent of the speculative bubble run-away but seen from the other side.

Bitcoin's price is not pushed upward by the demand for bitcoin to be used as a currency.  It is mainly pushed by the desire to hold bitcoin when it rises, with the idea to make benefit over it, by "buying low and selling high".  Not by earning for goods and services (say, "salary") and by spending it on goods and services (say, buying stuff).  This happens, I don't deny this, but it is not the demand for salary that pushes the price of bitcoin.  It is the hope for higher prices that makes one buy bitcoins, not the need to use it as a currency. 
If there had been an upper cap on the value of a coin, then this speculative nature wouldn't be there, and bitcoin would *essentially* be used as a currency, because there's no hope for "rise".  Yes, there is volatility, and normal speculation as a side effect, but it wouldn't make its market cap.

Yeah. Bitcoin has been established as a solid cryptocurrency for several years now, and it would make it extremely difficult for another cryptocurrency to take the lead. Due to Bitcoin's value proposition such as decentralization, deflation, and the highest network hashrate among other cryptocurrencies, it will stay as the top crypto for years to come.

However, that may be subject to change, if Bitcoin doesn't reach a resolution for its scalability controversy soon. It is up to this date, where Bitcoin hasn't increased in transaction capacity, while other altcoins have successfully done so. Dash for example, has managed to reach consensus among its community for an increase in block size up to 2mb. Even BitBean has higher transaction capacity than most altcoins nowadays with a block size of 20mb.

So the more transaction get unconfirmed in the Bitcoin network, the more it would be closer towards becoming less used by everyday people as they would want a cryptocurrency that it is highly efficient in processing transactions. They would shift to another cryptocurrency that could deliver high speeds in transaction confirmation time, and well as low fees (unlike Bitcoin which continues to increase in fees). Just my thoughts.  ;D

For me it's clear Bitcoin is no longer an cryptocurrency that can bring our requirements for the daily life. it's true that many altcoins can replace Bitcoin but to be clear we all are waiting for Bitcoin to reach its previous height again. I believed that solving only the transaction problem is not our exact solution we should think about future about how the block size is going to fulfill and how all the other blocks are going to mine because day by day the Bitcoin mining goes on the network will face another stress.

It is not a question of if the issue is never resolved. It is a matter of how much pain the community has to go through until it gets handled. Will the price plummet? Will it cause bitcoin to be passed by another coin? St some point it will get fixed. Lets hope it is before too much damage is done.

Straw man argument. I'm not replacing economic theory with "gobbledegook", I'm simply pointing out to you that mainstream theory just supports the current system, which is neither stable, normal, or rational (surely you don't you believe that, right?). Imagine what the "economists" said about the spending and lending of the king and his court... I'm sure it was favorable. Many of these so-called scientists are just rationalizing the current system. Friedman is precisely such an ass-licker - do you know that he advocated "shock therapy" for people starving in third-world countries? If you've read Austrian economists or any libertarian arguments you should know that there are many theories that aren't in concert with your line of thinking.


Funny you should mention Greece... you do realize that their entire collapse was caused by a combination of criminals who retired from the Greek government, the ECB, and Goldman Sachs? And you do realize that the "Troika" was nothing short of a coup? Not much economics to discuss there - it was outright fraud and theft.  Or maybe you just listened to the mainstream account and stroked your beard? How about Cyprus? Did you know that 50% of private citizen's bank deposits were simply stolen by the government to pay private bond holders (Goldman again, I believe)? This is precisely why the global system is highly unstable - confidence is likely at all-time lows, and the level of fraud is unprecedented.  When the "economic laws" are in the elites' favor, they invoke theory, when they're not, they quietly break all the rules and print money or just steal it.

The term "radical" is relative in this context.

My point about velocity is that the central banks are able to print trillions because of the very fact that they can and will cut velocity when needed. Remember daily withdrawal limits on bank accounts? Notice how long it takes an international wire to process, and how often they are frozen? Inflation would be massive if velocity couldn't be tightly controlled when needed.

Bitcoin is a whole different animal. Funny that Blockstream attempts to control the velocity of bitcoin in their own way...

I simply think that economist's understanding of things like money improved over the years.  A bit like medical knowledge improved over the years, and that medical theories from beginning the 20th century are maybe less accurate than those of end of the 20th century.


This is what I count under "conspiracy": that bogus scientists are just ass-licking power, and that all academics in the whole world nicely repeat that, and even though they could perfectly understand why it is wrong, they conspire in continuing to tell bullshit for their master's sake.

My simple point was that the Austrian vision, namely that a collectible is perfect money, has serious problems of stability.  I don't even think the Austrians deny this.  What the Austrians do, is to prefer this monetary stability over having central power that regulates its value, because they consider this regulatory aspect as a source of corruption.   They are right of course that it is a source of corruption.  But that doesn't mean that collectibles are good money: they simply revert to collectibles because they hate so much central control, that they couldn't think of anything else.  

However, people have been thinking more about the ideal functions of money, what money should do and not do, if it were to accomplish its function better, and most probably Nash's definition comes closest to what ideal money's behaviour is.  The reason is that if money behaves differently, it has undesirable consequences, essentially by replacing value in a non-ideal allocative way.  Seigniorage is such an example.  There is no "economic merit" in acquiring value from others, simply because one is printing money, or simply because one is sitting on a stash of money.  This doesn't allocate means in any efficient way, and doesn't solve economic problems for anybody.  

Money as an economic lubricant works best when it has a stable value on which one can count, that's essentially the conclusion of economists.  However, it is not because an abstract model of money is like that, that one knows how to make an asset that works like this.  The Austrians couldn't think of anything else but a collectible, but a collectible doesn't behave, by far, as ideal money, simply because it is an inelastic offer that confronts a variable demand.

If one could make a monetary system that has stable value, that would always be better money than a collectible.  Fiat money tries to implement that.  The problem with fiat money is when the regulator of the money supply also has political goals, and if one of these goals is to give seigniorage to the state, the compromise is to make a slightly inflationary money: that gives enough seigniorage to the political caste, while at the same time providing an asset to the market that approaches ideal money: its value is not entirely stable, but is predictable.
 
What crypto currrencies pretend to do, it to take the corruption of central control out of the system.  However, bitcoin and most alt coins revert back to Austrian visions of collectibles, which are not stable.  What crypto currencies should have done, was to take more advanced visions of money from modern economy, and implement that in a non-centrally controlled way.  I've indicated a way to do that.

It is ironic that bitcoin, which wants to "fight" the "corruption" of central control (which comes down essentially to seigniorage, that is, giving loans to the state), has itself a HUGE seigniorage effect because of its instability.  The seigniorage is not "during its life time" but "at its beginning", and is far worse than any central bank has ever done.  If ever bitcoin achieves its goal of "replacing fiat", it will have made a few early adopters more rich due to early-printer seigniorage than the entire US government over many years !


I know rather well Austrian economy, I'm actually quite favourable to many of their arguments.  However, it is an OLD school.  Understanding has evolved since. On the monetary issues, they only had embrionic understanding, and economists evolved since then.   Austrian's vision on how money came about is simply wrong, and historically invalidated.  Nowhere, ever, a rare commodity evolved into a currency all by itself and market forces.  I know very well Rothbard's work, and it is appreciable as a critique of central control, but it is not a good theory of money.  It is a theory of how we could do without central banks, and they could only think of collectibles.
You should also read David Graebers' Debt, the first 5000 years.  It has a much better historical account of money than the Austrians.
In any case, bitcoin solved the issue of central control, but put in the wrong issuing function, to turn it into a rare collectible, with huge initial seigniorage, instead of turning it into a stable currency without seigniorage, even though all the technical elements were on the table.  As such, it does behave as a rare collectible, and not as a stable currency, because that's how it was designed.

The problem with many of these theories is that they are conspirational.  I also consider the state as the enemy of the people, but not as a conspiracy.  The state is simply a powerful entity, made of humans, and as all humans are enemies of other humans, of course the state is a powerful enemy.  There's nothing special about that.  However, the "new elite" that would emerge if ever bitcoin became world currency, that is, the profiteers of early adoption, are most probably just as bad as current states are.  Enemies are there were collectivity and community spirit is important.  Whether that's a state, a corporation, a wealthy group of people or just a large collection of friends doesn't matter.   The state is no exception to that.  But the state has nothing special apart from being the current winner of the law of the strongest.  Take it away, and another one will win the law of the strongest.   There's nothing special about that: we are social animals, which means that we want to dominate, or be dominated, we want to abuse, or be abused, we want to extort, or be extorted.  It is just our nature.  No conspiracy.  We're just like that.
As such, bitcoin, as it is designed, is only a palace revolution.  It replaces the powerful and corrupt (that is, humans) by other powerful and corrupt.  It is not a design of ideal money at all.

I think it is much more complicated than that, but the essential problem of Greece is that an economy that was used to an inflationary currency and a state that was used to cover its ill-controlled finances with extra loans in an easily obtained own currency (which was at the root of the inflationary currency), suddenly got propelled into a much stricter financial system, with a very low inflation currency (the Euro), where loans weren't tempered by inflation "on command".   In fact, Greece was simply economically not ready to join the Euro zone, but this was done for essentially geopolitical reasons.  Goldman Sachs accepted the mission to falsify the Greek books so that the political goal could be met.

In the beginning, the state and the economy continued to live like before, but with a much stronger currency, which lead them to believe in an apparent sudden wealth.   Moreover, the Greek state borrowing money like crazy, was the feast of German banks !  Everything seemed to go for the best.  Do you know that Greece, at a certain point, was the highest importer of Porsche sports cars per capita ?  They spend themselves to ruins with the Olympic Games in 2004.

However, when pay day came, things became more difficult.  The Greek state and the Greek economy were used to push debts away with inflation - this was not possible any more with the Euro.   Their way of handling money was simply adapted to a highly inflationary currency, and their fast integration into a strong currency system made them live a lot above their means for a while, and put them into debt beyond what was reasonable.

Put the international banking crisis on top of that, and the story is complete.


I agree, but this could have been solved in exactly the same way without doing that: putting a tax of 50% on all possession.

I'm always amazed at how people seem to think that the financial system is "stealing" them, while they pay 10 times more taxes than what they lose in the financial system.   If inflation is a form of theft, then it is of the order of 2%.  Nobody pays 2% of taxes.  I pay around 60% or so if I count everything (social security, income tax, VAT, propriety tax, local tax....).  I couldn't care less about those 2% or so.

Exactly. One way or the other, miners will recognize that a consensus would be needed for Bitcoin to scale, otherwise their profits would become reduced when people shift to other cryptocurrencies and prices start to decline. I believe that Bitcoin should've had a different consensus mechanism than PoW in the first place, because it may lead to mining centralization where it is happening right now.

Big mining manufacturers like Bitmain, have the most hashrate, making it more difficult for Bitcojn to reach full consensus for SegWit approval. It is said that Bitcoin is China's coin due to the fact that it is the country where most of the hashrate resides.

Only time will tell what Bitcoin's future would be like if it continues as is. Just my opinion.  :)

Nothing negative will happen to Bitcoin if Bitcoin does not scale. Since the price of Bitcoin is only relevant to the amount of people that are purchasing it, the people that are holding Bitcoins will know that they will have to hold onto their Bitcoins even longer because the sending a Bitcoin transaction will be pretty slow.

The same thing will happen to bitcoin that happens to other industries that dont improve if it doesn't scale. There are too many others waiting to take its place.

But all of this is moot because it will scale.

ETH price will go up and more people will use it. No reason to use btc right now. 1.66 usd fee to transfer. Yikes. People sell stuff on forums here for 10 and 20 bucks. Paying 1.66 usd is insane fee for nothing. That is 5 to 10percent fee...

Probably. If people see it as a long term store of value, rather than digital cash, then it would continue to be used even if it doesn't scale. The difference is that it won't be used for average every day payments, unlike altcoins.

I believe that the more people migrate to altcoins, the more Bitcoin's network load would be reduced, making it less slower with a diminished amount of unconfirmed transactions.

Perhaps, we will see the day where Bitcoin's market share would be greatly reduced, as a result of other alts rising. Just my thoughts.  ;D

If the bitcoin doesn't scale anymore maybe the bitcoin does not become famous and maybe we haven't forum now. Maybe bitcoin will more powerful in some day. If bitcoin doesn't scale maybe other money or coin will release and it being famous.

Exactly. At some point, if Bitcoin doesn't scale and fails, people will migrate into other cryptocurrencies which have better features and governance. The key for a cryptocurrency's success is mainstream adoption, and in order to achieve that it would need to scale, otherwise people would switch to another coin which is faster and could handle their daily transactions.

Recently, Bitcoin has shown support for SegWit2x, but since code hasn't been released and fully tested yet, it should only be a matter of time if it becomes successful or not. Also, there is a possibility of Bitcoin splitting into two distinct currencies which may cause chaos in the market if it happens.

Nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what happens in the next month, but before the move is done, you should secure your BTC investments just in case. Just my thoughts. ;D

No problem with different thought here, but the most important thing to do is wait for actual results of what will be happening next month. Securing your btc is the good choice to have for now and if btc will not scale and worst fails, there could be changes of peoples choices on currency and  bitcoin will not be recognized in different countries; yet it's current system is still developing and doing great as we seen the price of todays updates.

The US $ has gained so much value in time, yet everyone wants to use it for micro transactions.

Somewhat delayed reply (much has changed since then) but still

If Bitcoin doesn't scale, it is unlikely that it will be used as a store of value. Strictly speaking, it hasn't been used as a store of value at all ever since its emergence. It has been used as a speculative asset, and let's remain honest here, people buying it were looking primarily for earning profits via it not saving their wealth with it. Bitcoin with its insane volatility is simply not suitable for that purpose. In this way, if Bitcoin doesn't scale, its use will shrink and once its price hits a certain threshold on its way down, Bitcoin will switch into an uncontrollable and fierce collapse mode

Probably it has gained it's value but for some how maybe today bitcoin is rising.Who knows Tomorrow? Maybe Bitcoin become a one of cheap currency and lost the value what it has right now. People are spending and getting income from bitcoin.So therefore people want fast transaction of bitcoins in a less number of withdrawal

That is certainly true, mate. Most people are into Bitcoin not to use it as a store of value, but mostly to make money out of it. It is often seen as a tool to make you profits, and sometimes wealthy if a right strategy is followed.

However, people would become dissapointed if the pioneer cryptocurrency doesn't scale as their transactions take longer to confirm, as well as fees become higher, making them switch to another cryptocurrency which could deliver better speed and cheaper fees. Also, Bitcoin is still volatile which is one of the weaknesses it has to become used as a serious currency unlike the USD which is stable.

Despite all the facts, I'm still confident that Bitcoin will become improved over time and scale to new heights that were never imagined. Most recently, SegWit2x has shown support from the majority of miners, which may become successful once active to open the pioneer cryptocurrency's path for growth in the future.

Whatever happens, it is always best to diversify your investments into other assets just to be safe. Just my thoughts. ;D

I see no point at being disappointed here

Especially, if you made decent profits with it (well, losing a goose laying golden eggs might be a cause for disappointment, after all). Bitcoin would remain the first decentralized cryptocoin out there, but personally, I would prefer if it quickly kicked the bucket than kept slowly spiraling down and gradually turning into yet another shitcoin that folks would be ashamed of. Bitcoin is only a tool, and I don't see a lot of sense in becoming emotionally attached to it

If it loses the scale then I think the number of bitcoin will increase in the market like traditional currency and the rate of pay of services and commodities will increase but will never disappear because of virtual features which are the core need of virtual world. And very honestly it is now the demand of the new generation and they can  have the best chance to use bitcoin for their online business or any other online activity.

If that happens bitcoin will probably not be used for small transactions, but lean more over to being like gold. It just won't be spent that much, but people will still hold it. Other altcoins have already taken some of bitcoin's market cap but there is still not much happening with them. I think if that did happen bitcoin will become a speculative tool, literally internet gold but people will still use it sometimes. It just wont be as useful as it is right now. 

Bitcoin takes such strong positions in the cryptomarket because of its popularity. If people start using other crypto currencies for daily transactions, then bitcoin will decrease in price and demand for it will fall. As for other cryptocurrencies, they will take Bitcoin's place.

I don't think we are ever going to live up to that

Bitcoin is not gold, in the sense it doesn't have that base of intrinsic value that gold has. That means that gold won't lose its properties if it stops being used like it was used in the past, i.e. as money (in other words, it didn't lose its value when it stopped being a means of payment). You can in fact claim that Bitcoin will remain the same Bitcoin even if no one uses it anymore. That's true, but these properties that make up Bitcoin, unlike those of gold, are not what Bitcoin is valued for. Bitcoin is valued for its being a highly profitable speculative asset, and if it just stops being profitable for any significant amount of time (I'm not even talking about being abandoned as such), it will lose all its appeal, allure, and attractiveness

It might be. While Bitcoin is often compared to Gold, it still lacks the full properties of Gold since the pioneer cryptocurrency is extremely volatile, unlike the well-known precious metal. But, one thing for sure is that if Bitcoin never scales, people will head towards other altcoins which are faster and provide better features.

In the end, the market will decide if BTC remains as the top cryptocurrency or not. People would prefer to use a cryptocurrency that would be able to manage their daily payments in the less time possible. Thus, if Bitcoin won't be able to provide quick settlement, then it would greatly reduce its chance to become used in the mainstream world anytime soon.

Hopefully, with the recent emergence of miners accepting SegWit2x, we might see a positive change for the pioneer cryptocurrency that would maintain its position in the market. Only time will tell what lies ahead for Bitcoin's value proposition. Just my opinion. :)

Safety and slowness in carrying out the forthcoming scaling of bitcoin are now very important for its viability. Therefore, everything goes to the fact that this problem will be successfully resolved in the near future. Bitcoin can not stop on the way to solving this problem. In any case, I hope so.

Yeah me too. If Bitcoin manages to solve its underlying issues in a safe and secure way, then it will open its path for greater success in the future. Sometimes is best to not rush things, in order to help develop a solid solution that would become a success in the long term. Because if proper steps are not taken to ensure the security and safety of users funds within the Bitcoin network, it may lose its credibility and may lead to its end.

Today, marks an important day for Bitcoin towards SegWit activation and the emergence of a UAHF called Bitcoin Cash. Hopefully, everything will lead for the better and Bitcoin will prevail towards fully adopting the SegWit2x solution. All that will lie ahead will be its 2mb block size increase, and it will be complete. Just my opinion :)

Probably, micro transactions will lessen and bitcoin will just serve as valuable assets of the people who  entered the bitcoin world. The value may stop rising up or worse depreciate through time. Bitcoin may die if that happen but I don’t think it will because it has a very high potential.

If bitcoin never scales, it will just be like gold, reserved to very valuable transactions.

Microtransactions will move to other cryptocurrencies.

It certainly won't be like gold

Simply because gold has unique properties that no other metal or substance can reproduce. By and large, Bitcoin is essentially just one cryptocurrency among many others out there. It enjoys the first-mover advantage, of course, but this is obviously not enough to always stay at the top. In fact, I can tell what will happen if Bitcoin fails to scale. It will first stagnate with it price lacking enough growth, then its profitability will start to suck, and after that people will massively dump their Bitcoin stashes in favor of more profitable coins which don't fail to keep up with the progress (evidently, not limited to solving just scalability issues)

You do have a point there, mate. Comparing Gold and Bitcoin nowadays, is just like comparing apples and oranges. Given the fact that Bitcoin lacks many of the properties of Gold such as fungibility, it is difficult to compare as digital gold.

Also, one of the biggest problems Bitcoin is facing right now is its ability to scale to a large user base. Because it is having a hard time trying to reach full consensus within its community, the vision of using it for mainstream payments will become quite distant into turning as a reality.

Therefore, there are currently better cryptocurrencies with greater features, and scalable solutions already activated within their protocols. In this regard, Bitcoin has been already outmatched, but in terms of market cap and value, it is still king.

Nevertheless, only time will tell if it will be able to keep up as the king of cryptocurrencies or not. Just my thoughts ;D

This is a very tough question. I dont even like to imagine a scenario where bitcoin fails to scale, because it could get very ugly for all cryptocurrencies in the market...

I wouldn't be so pessimistic

In fact, I don't think anything devastatingly bad or ugly is going to happen at all if Bitcoin fails to scale up in due course. It is not used in the real economy anyway, so what's the difference really? It is not something which works today and breaks tomorrow, it is something which just doesn't get done in proper time. In this way Bitcoin is likely going to simply fall out of use eventually and pass out of existence in the end. But it definitely won't be a certain date or event. There'll be enough time to prepare yourself and your money for the switch. Basically, you should have already done this, I mean to be prepared

It seems to me that bitcoin is not affected. Many people perceive within as gold and used for transactions other cryptocurrencies.

True. Even though fees are rising, and transactions are slow on the Bitcoin network, people will continue to use it as a store of value. Since there are many other altcoins which provide faster transaction speeds and cheaper fees than Bitcoin, people have the choice to migrate to these cryptocurrencies for their daily transactions.

So, even if Bitcoin doesn't scale to a full-fledged mainstream cryptocurrency, it will survive for many years to come as digital gold and the reserve currency of all the altcoins in existence. However, while Bitcoin has been struggling with scalability issues, a series of altcoins have emerged that address these problems. Coins like Pascalcoin uses the "SafeBox" mechanism for infinite scalability. On the other hand, we have IOTA and RaiBlocks which have a feeless structure and the ability to scale to a wider audience than the pioneer cryptocurrency.

Nevertheless, it shouldn’t matter if Bitcoin scales or not nowadays since it will be seen among many people as a form of long-term investment and not as a digital cash system for daily payments. Just my thoughts ;D

I think Bitcoin will scale - just in time, This was the same as the internet back in the day. Everone said it would never scale - it was always going to break - but as we know it scaled when it needed to. It wasnt always easy or pretty but it worked. I think Bitcoin will be fine.

Yeah. While other cryptocurrencies have already adopted scalability solutions and have increased their transaction throughput, Bitcoin has been slowly adopting upgrades in the safest way possible. Considering that it is the largest cryptocurrency by market cap, it should carefully test and implement safe, scalable solutions to avoid flaws that would cause unexpected loss of funds.

It has already adopted SegWit, and its paving the way towards activating the Lightning Network. Once this becomes a reality, then many altcoins would lose their popularity as Bitcoin rises in traction once more. In the meantime, Bitcoin will be used as a store of value until it scales properly to support micropayments and even smart contracts with RSK.

With patience, I believe that Bitcoin will reach much more than meets the eye. Most people are with Bitcoin, and the cryptocurrency will continue to leave its mark in the mainstream world for years to come. Just my opinion :)

Don't you mean "this is fine"?
http://www.orlando-hoa.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/this-is-fine-dog.jpg

I can't quite agree with your thoughts here

And I'll try to explain why. My main concern is that Bitcoin can't possibly become a long-term store of value because there is nothing unique about it. Let's take gold as an example of a true store of value. It is so thanks to the fact that it can't be reproduced and therefore it has no rivals nor competitors. This is definitely not the case with Bitcoin. Apart from that, it also happens that the qualities of gold that are unique to it are quite likable by the vast majority of people. In other words, Bitcoin lacks what gold enjoys, it lacks uniqueness of gold and thus it can't be "digital gold". If it ceases to be an asset for speculation, a vehicle for profiteering, it will soon cease to be an asset at all, losing all value at the end of the day

Interesting observation. In terms of scarcity and price against other cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is considered as digital gold among investors, traders, and everyday people. But, since Bitcoin is an extremely volatile cryptocurrency and a pure speculative one, it is hard to say if Bitcoin is digital gold or not (when compared to real gold). Right now, Bitcoin is in its very beginnings but things could change if it continues to improve and become recognized as a legal currency or asset in the real world. Once the volatility problem is solved, and other underlying issues such as high fees and slow speeds, then I think that it may deserve the title of digital gold.

In the meantime, Bitcoin will be seen among many people as a medium to profit within a short time frame. Only time will tell if it could keep its value in the long term, or it will fall and become worthless. Just my thoughts ;D

If bitcoin will never scale, it will mean that it will lose its investment appeal and the demand for it will drop, which, accordingly. will lead to its depreciation. At the same time, it will practically cease to function as a means of payment and will remain only as a repository of value. However, if the demand for it is not very large, then the value store from it will already turn out to be small. However, these gloomy forecasts, I think will not come to an end, since Bitcoin was started to implement SegWit, parallel implementation and lightning networks are expected. Already, the time of bitcoin transactions began to decrease and commission fees also. So let's hope that in the near future with bitcoin again everything will be all right.

I will become an increasingly surreal creature, formerly pretending to be a currency, but then having perhaps 100$ fees or - who knows - perhaps in the long run even 1000$ fees. Until it would at some point suddenly die.

Why raise old, not relevant for today?

I'm curious where you got this idea from

I mean that Bitcoin is thought of as digital gold by the people you enumerated. I for one don't consider it digital gold or anything to that tune. A highly speculative and thereby volatile asset cannot be gold by definition, digital or otherwise. Gold is a yardstick for invariability and permanence of value. If its price changes, it is rather the value of the currency in which it is priced that changes rather than the value of gold itself. Just in case, for something to be valuable, it is not enough to be scarce, it also should be useful for some purpose

I wouldn't say so, the fluctuations we are experiencing nowadays definitely have to do with bitcoin's scalability problem. As far as I understand there is feasible way to address the scalability problem until lightning network gets implemented. Which means the price will not be able to take off like it used to, because if the price increases, the increased traffic on the blockchain will lead to congestions, which leads to increased transaction fees and times, which leads to people losing interest and dumping their coins, creating mini-crashes like the same time.

So the gist of the story is, we need lightning network asap.

Obviously if bitcoin never scales, a lot of people will not put trust in it anymore. People will sell their btc and demand will decrease. We just hope it never happens and that bitcoin is not in its dead end.

I think that bitcoin will remain the new and most used currency in the future.

If bitcoin does not have a standard, it will die because it will not be accepted by the majority of people and will not be endorsed by governments in all other countries.

If scaling bitcoin is not carried out, it will mean that it will not provide everyone in transactions and transactions will hang. In this regard, demand for bitcoin will fall and, accordingly, its popularity and price will fall. Therefore, if bitcoin does not improve in this plan, it will be devalued and forgotten.
       However, I hope that such a scenario will not happen, because SegWit and lightning network are being introduced into it and that's why it is gradually coming back to normal.

I agree that we need LN as soon as possible

But I don't think it is going to change anything with respect to price volatility, at least not directly. The root causes of volatility lie in the lack of Bitcoin's adoption as a means of payment and its almost exclusive use as a vehicle for speculation. Speculation is the ultimate culprit here, long confirmations and high fees don't affect it. Speculation is going on at exchanges, you don't need to transact much if you are engaged in this activity. However, it can be claimed that cheap or free of charge as well as instantly-fast transactions would greatly facilitate Bitcoin's adoption as a full-fledged currency in the real economy and that would lead to lower volatility in due course

Well obviously it's struggling right now and its dragging the entire market with it. And then add the indian announcement and we're looking now at something to make hodlers a bit worried. Ever since btc rose in popularity, many governments seem to be a bit hostile towards it. But i still see a positive outcome from all this when the smoke clears

The value of Bitcoin is derived solely because it is registered and traded, bitcoin value is nothing without exchange
And the value of stock securities listed and traded in the exchange is based entirely on falsehood, where the value assigned to a particular security is made and unclear.

It will become a powerful cryptocurrency and we will use it for every transaction if we want, small or big

For me bitcoin as the face of digital currency. When you meet someone and you want to tell them about your digital currency you should first mention bitcoin. You can not mention all the coins, but at least its history will be traced to bitcoin. Even if it never scales it would be a great store value, people would buy it and exchange it with other cryptoes, especially ethereum or dasboard, because they want faster tractionactions. 8)

Fr me, if bitcoin does not scale up, then it will start facing some hard time with other altcoins, cause its fame will no more be there, and a coin might rise up to beat it down with the market cap. But if bitcoin should scale up again, then it will be a store of value and some other altcoins will be used for the daily trades.

If bitcoin doesn't scale up, I think the whole c
digital currency thing would die of. This is simply that bitcoin has proved to be a superhero coin giving life to others. To prove this is the glaring fact of the way the effect of bitcoin has affected every other coin, no one has been able to take the ride upwards yet. They are all waiting for the king. ;D

Completely agree with you, mate. High fees and slow speeds, is what will kill Bitcoin in the long term since it makes payments impractical. However, this may change soon as the Lightning Network becomes active within the Bitcoin network to reduce fees to a minimum and provide near-instant transactions. This might bring back people which used altcoins for lower costs and faster speeds. In effect, Bitcoin's market dominance would be greater as many altcoins would be rendered useless due to the Lightning Network's unrivaled speeds.

Those altcoins which implement the Lightning Network too (like Litecoin and Vertcoin), would see a major boost in scalability like Bitcoin. Therefore, it's safe to say that Bitcoin will eventually scale to a wider audience, promoting greater adoption in the mainstream world. Bitcoin will be cheap and fast like it did in its early days. Just my thoughts ;D

It looks very much like the same good old cart-before-the-horse view

Litecoin has Lightning Network implemented for over a year now and how much did that promote "greater adoption in the mainstream world"? I guess the result attained equals next to nothing. The news about LN being activated in Litecoin definitely helped boost its price (I'd been there and seen that with my own eyes if anything), and it is likely through Litecoin's higher price that it got more "adoption" among trading folks. That's all. It didn't help expand its use and application in the real world in any significant degree. In fact, LN is not even used in this coin at all. So what makes you think that Bitcoin will be much different in this department? LN may make Bitcoin more usable overall (though even this is disputable), but it won't magically make it used more as a means of payment, sorry. People won't pay with gold for common things, no matter how easy and fast such payments can be made in practice. The same applies to Bitcoin as well

And what awaits then the mass owner of Bitcoin coins, if they all expect a Rainbow future for their capital. This does not affect the price of Bitcoin in the coming years?

For me, if scalability is not resolved it will lead to bitcoin being a digital asset that gets its value based on rarity (at first). And as mining becomes hard, the miners will diminish and will cause a slow transaction which will lead to little to no adoption.

In short I think, bitcoin will be obsolete or die. Other currencies who can survive scalability problem will emerge.

In accordance to this, is there any thread in this forum geniuses are talking about on solutions about scalability?

I think what will happen is Bitcoin will continue to run and boost its buying price so that In a short time, bitcoin becomes out of reach and it will be much less profitable for most miners ...

I think bitcoin will never accept if not scalable because the government will think that bitcoin price can be manipulated by the big whales and they will easily to make the prices up and down.

I agree with what you're saying that the bitcoin community will come up to finding a new solution to end this issue but this will need more support from bitcoin user itself. and if we can unite, together we can make cryptocurrency greater again.

Scalability is essential for every cryptocurrency in order to increase its mainstream adoption, thus, the demand. Once the demand increase, the cryptocurrency is prone to succeed and rise to good heights on the coin market.
The more reason for most people engaged with Bitcoin is that it is seen as a long term valuable asset rather than being used for daily transactions. With this, the scalability does not hold much percentage to bring the down fall of Bitcoin.

If scaling bitcoin is not carried out, it will mean that it will not provide everyone in transactions and transactions will hang and Ever since btc rose in popularity, many governments seem to be a bit hostile towards it.But I don't think it is going to change anything with respect to price volatility, at least not directly and Bitcoin's market dominance would be greater as many altcoins.

Without scaling Bitcoin is facing slow death against cryptos, which are able to scale. If Ethereum manages to scale before Bitcoin, then it will become the biggest crypto.

You do have a point there, mate. Even with LN in Litecoin, people aren't using it that much when compared to Bitcoin itself. And once Bitcoin improves with the Lightning Network, it could happen the same thing. Such things will allow Bitcoin to continue be used as "Gold", while other cryptocurrencies or fiat will be used as "cash".

No matter if Bitcoin scales or not in the future, it has managed to change the economy in ways we've never thought possible before. The blockchain technology is a pure genius and can bring many benefits to our society. In the end, what really matters is the technology itself and not the underlying cryptocurrency. Any cryptocurrency uses the blockchain nowadays, so I guess that the technology itself is of greater importance than any kind of asset/token you could imagine. Just my opinion :)

I have a lot of points, bro

That said, I eagerly agree that Bitcoin and blockchain in general is a breakthrough technology in its own right, though I can't say that it has changed the economy much, not as yet. It can be said that it has built its own economy but it is still small and vulnerable, and it doesn't affect the real economy in any appreciable degree so far (whether it will remains to be seen). And let's not forget there are cryptocurrencies which are not based on the blockchain at all, so it is definitely not just about either Bitcoin or blockchain, or both. I'd rather say that it is applied cryptography and the Internet itself that are the major breakthroughs behind crypto as a whole

I think that sooner or later everything disappears, and bitcoin is no exception! But I am sure that in the coming years the crypto currency will become popular and will be used for its intended purpose!

It would be one of the best possible scenarios for Bitcoin if it never scales on the market wall. There are the people who are using it as a payment system and they will continue using it irrespective of the scalability point of view. The price would remain somewhat stable if speculators are not active in trading Bitcoin. However, things will remain same for the users (not the investors) and I don't see any possible harm in such case.

Currently bitcoin is no longer an option to make micro payments because of its high transaction costs. Imagine if I want to send money back home as a remittance and I prefer to use other payment methods instead of using bitcoin because of the high cost. 8)

Bitcoin is just a Digital Asset that most people that use it have no idea of what Bitcoin actually is. Bitcoin is not meant to get transferred every second of the hour because it has a transaction fee.

I believe that there will be a time in the near future that bitcoin will be replaced on the top 1 position as there are so many cryptos now that has more potential and more use that bitcoin itself. We can never deny that bitcoin has made its strong foundation but surely there will be a better one that will be its replacement.

Agree. Blockchain is still in its infancy and cannot be considered as a serious technology for our economy. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have been the experimental grounds for blockchain tech, to make it stronger than ever in the future. While blockchain tech has many inherent issues such as scalability and ease of use, the moment will come for it in the future, where it could handle anything within its path. If it wasn't for previously invented technologies such as the Internet and Cryptography, then blockchain wouldn't have become a reality nowadays.

Therefore, only time will tell whenever blockchain can scale up to millions of users without sacrificing its security and reliability. The blockchain's most valuable assets are immutability, and unparalleled security, and if it's able to scale without putting such assets at risk, then it would do just fine in the future. Other technologies which are not based on blockchain tech such as DAGs could also take off in the future, but it's a matter of question whenever they could scale safely or not by then. Just my opinion :)

I think altcoin is like a helper for bitcoin and support for bitcoin in cryptocurrency. I think altcoin can not be in the top of marketcap as bitcoin is the leader of cryptocurrency and bitcoin is like a path for the others.  Without altcoin, bitcoin is nothing and all of crypto currency is related with each others

No matter what area of life it is evolution is inevitable, BTC itself was a big revolution but decade after its launch we are seeing issues like slowness and high transaction fees associated with BTC transaction. BTC has to overcome these challenges else it will be very soon overtaken by coins that are lightning fast with zero transaction fee.

I'm not so sure altcoin can now replace bitcoin from real hergemony. Yet this revolutionary alternative economy is just beginning to grow and I am sure that extraordinary surprises will come soon. 8)

The point of success at which the bitcoin is like impossible to overtake and no other crypto currency has that potential that it can replace the position of bitcoin from the market . A decade before when bitcoin was introduced, it was unknown to every one and those who believe bitcoin that time are now bitcoin billionaires so bitcoin itself is a revolution, though bitcoin has several limitations like high transaction fee, illegal use but I am sure in future bitcoin will come up as a crypto currency without any limitations.

at this time no one can confirm it but I am sure bitcoin will remain the best coin even when the price of crypto coins has decreased very drastically bitcoin still remain the highest value if the cryptocurrency is not scale I think we just need to be patient and confidence in bitcoin

Fortunately, with the introduction of the Lightning Network, and Schnorr Signatures, Bitcoin would become more efficient in handling day-to-day transactions. Speeds will be instant, while fees will be almost free. As such, Bitcoin could scale to millions of users easily without sacrificing its decentralization. If developers, and the community, take the effort to make Bitcoin great again, then it would most likely succeed in the future.

However, if Bitcoin doesn't manage to scale (which I doubt it) then other altcoins will take the lead as they're faster, cheaper, and have better features than Bitcoin itself. Cryptocurrencies like Dash provides instant speeds with its "Instant Send" features, while others like Stellar and Ripple are extremely fast and cheap. Therefore, only time will tell whenever Bitcoin could keep up with the competition in the cryptocurrency market, with other alternatives that have better features than it. Just my thoughts ;D

I'd say we're already at the point alts are more handy for eeveryday use, but I tend to say Bitcoin will stay on top of CC's.

The decentralization system certainly makes all things scaled, prices can go up and down thousands of dollars a day, of course this is a very interesting thing because everyone is speculating buying bitcoin in the hope that prices skyrocket in a short time.

There is no need to assume that Bitcoin wouldn't ever scale. It is because there are many working solutions which can help Bitcoin to become used by much more many people. Lightning Network works quite well, transactions cost about 1 satoshi and they are confirmed instantly. The only problem is that there are not many merchants who accept lightning network payments. Also, there aren't many client which support lightning network yet so we will have to wait a few months before this scalability solution becomes a real thing. Give it some time, don't panic.

For those of us who are accustomed to cryptocurrency using the decentralization system then it is normal if prices rise or fall significantly, but this is a profit because we can get profit even though the price is down.

Scaling and decentralization are entirely different thing altogether :P, we have a scaling solution now and that is lightning network and we will see how things will go from this situation, it will take a longer period of time for everything to sort things out and if that happens it will sort most of the problems.

hard for altcoins to beat the dominance of Bitcoin, because the mains of all Altcoins are Bitcoin itself.

and this year Altcoins market is almost the same as Bitcoin, when Bitcoin drops then Altcoins goes down, and when Bitcoin goes up then Altcoins goes up.

Yeah thats true. Bitcoin is still the king of all cryptocurrencies. But in history, king is not sitting in the throne forever.
We dont know what will happen in the future. Theres a lot of possibilities that we cant predict.
Maybe in the future theres a much better platform other than bitcoin that could rival it.
But as of now i cant see other altcoin closing to the level of bitcoin.

I am certain individuals whom we trust managing Bitcoin are additionally thinking about a similar inquiry at this moment. Truth be told, this is at the core of the continuous level headed discussion at the present time on the most proficient method to scale Bitcoin most particularly when anticipating what's to come. I am certain however that the entire Bitcoin people group can have the capacity to locate an acknowledged answer for this scale challenge. Toward the end, Bitcoin will proceed to control and be the pioneer of the digital currency world. I am so certain about that. Every single other coin will simply take after along however they can have a decent cut of the pie as well.

The best solution is to go for another one that offer us what we need. Don't force it if it really does not work. We have some blockchain that are already doing better than bitcoin and I know that one of them will be the next heir to the throne.

The bitcoin is in real need of some kind of standart to make this currency more trust worthy and user friendly otherwise the process of acceptance would take too long and make this currency more weak and unstable.

for me the same thing will happen to bitcoin that happens to other industries that don't improve if it doesn't scale. There are too many others waiting to take its place,Bitcoin takes such strong positions in the cryptomarket because of its popularity. If people start using other crypto currencies for daily transactions, then bitcoin will decrease in price and demand for it will fall.

Yes. BTC is still the leading coin on the crypto market. There will not be any pennies that can surpass the BTC. BTC is a coin that exists and develops for a long time. Many Crypto users will think of BTC, which is something other coin will never do. So BTC forever is the king of cryptography

If bitcoin never scales:

1. The usage will definitely go down and other cryptocurrencies will take its position. So scaling is important for Bitcoins to move to a higher level in terms of technology.

2. With new crypto technologies/currencies launching every now and then, the bitcoin dominance (market share) will be expected to go down

3. However, Bitcoin is the father of all the currencies, It is known as digital gold. It can still be taken as a 'store of value'. We can still buy them and hoard them as digital gold as they do for physical gold or diamond.

4. It can be held as a precious thing, which can be passed through generations (hope this happens :)

5. Bitcoin has a first mover advantage, and all the other cryptos take learnings from it. So existence is supposed to be intact and should survive for years to come, even if the scaling does not happen.

in fact all there are positive and negative impact. if bitcoin scales and keeps growing its value higher, it can actually make its value will be destroyed someday. because bitcoin is considered a medium of digital investment and not a benchmark of exchange from currencies around the world. long-term effects, can affect the performance of banks in a country.

At first bitcoin is indeed accepted as an asset. It's just the development until now bitcoin serve as a means of payment. If bitcoin never scales in my opinion bitcoin will remain an assetand the use of bitcoin as a means of payment will decrease. If comparing the value, volume and circuating supply between bitcoin and altcoin to date, I think nothing will replace bitcoin.

if Bitcoin is the main currency (so far) crypto currency, and it has not been scaled as currency, there is no crypto currency that tends to scale for mass adoption.
The real obstacle I see is price stability. It's hard for merchants to have confidence in receiving bitcoin if they do not have confidence that the income they produce today will have the same value as tomorrow.

I dont even like to imagine a scenario where bitcoin fails to scale, because it could get very ugly for all cryptocurrencies in the market...

Never know what will be in the future. That's why we shouldn't believe only in bitcoin and have only it in our portfolio. If your money invest in different places and coins, you can save it more in hard situation.

I think bitcoin is the face of digital currency. when you meet someone and you want to tell them about digital currency you must first mention bitcoin

if it can't scale there is no way you'll be able to use it for everyday transactions in reasonable manner.
it might stick around for trading but not for everyday use.

I think bitcoin is the face of digital currency. When you meet someone and you want to tell them about digital currency you must first mention bitcoin. You cannot mention all coins, but at least the history will be traced to bitcoin. So even if it never scales it will be a great store of value, people will buy it then exchanges it with other crypto particularly ethereum or dash that is if they want a faster transaction.

i don't think any other coin can replace bitcoin from top position in marketcap due to different reason but bitcoin has the largest community support.

Another coin that can be scaled will be used if BTC can't scale. It is like MySpace and others. MySpace was the most used social platform. But now no one use it.

I am sure the bitcoin will turn into the strong currency and will be accepted for everyday transactions soon.

it probably just descends in price, and will be constantly on it, it stabilizes, but it will not be profitable as it was before)

I think that not all coins can be in the top of the most popular coins of the world. Like all companies, like banks, everything can be interesting only in specific countries or territories, and only a few become famous in the world, although cryptomir unites the whole planet

The bitcoin is built to operate within an ecosystem that is cryptographic in nature. Every cryptographic ledger has a scalability potential which is the reason this mode of transaction can be deployed for a wide range of uses. It likely couldn't happen. But if it happens, the other altcoins will also suffer the same loss at some point.

The bitcoin is built to operate within an ecosystem that is cryptographic in nature. Every cryptographic ledger has a scalability potential which is the reason this mode of transaction can be deployed for a wide range of uses. It likely couldn't happen. But if it happens, the other altcoins will also suffer the same loss at some point.

For micro transaction as a normal form for transaction in the market and as the top in all cryptosites will be difficult for bitcoin to be used.In years coming the price of bitcoin will still be increasing.Other coins will increase but can not beat the price of bitcoin in the market.No real problem with that other than fluctuations before exchange. Somebody from Coinbase said in an interview that their large merchants exchange their bitcoin for fiat.

If Bitcoin never scales, then I guess that it would be doomed then. Other cryptocurrencies have already scaled and have implemented better features than Bitcoin itself. So, people will simply move to the next big thing as soon as Bitcoin stales in growth. But, seeing that the Lightning Network is being heavily tested by the Core team, shows that Bitcoin could scale to a large mass soon. When the moment comes, I'm sure that Bitcoin will experience a spike in value as hype builds up with its latest scalability tech.

Hopefully, Bitcoin could continue to grow as it becomes the biggest medium of exchange in the world. ;D

if value is placed on bitcoin as one of the poineer cryptocurrency it would help bitcoin not to be obsolete and be of great gain

I guess if bitcoin will never scales its price or value will fall down in a blink. The reason why people are into crypto currency like bitcoin is because its value or price scales or rise and fall. With this set up they are having a chance to buy when the price or value is low and set this when it is high. And if this will be out of the system of the crypto currency surely the users and investors of this will left. So I strongly suggest to keep on buying and selling so the scale will never stop and the process will continue. 

If Bitcoin stops scaling, then it also stops living. Bitcoin will eventually die. If it will only act as a store of value, which is what's going to happen if it stops scaling, then Bitcoin is not anymore the Bitcoin that we support. The majority will leave. It does not serve its purpose anymore.  The issue of scalability, being the bottleneck of Bitcoin, has been given enough attention by the new coins coming out, thus defeating Bitcoin in this sense, although I believe the Bitcoin team will never ever allow this to happen. 

If we see current position. Then Bitcoin has good value and value of it increasing day by day. There is heavy amount for one coin. So I think it's hard to use for daily transactions. It's mainly using for investment. The trend of market are changing time to time. But now it is using as store of value.

Bitcoin will still top the rankings, even if its role is replaced. Because I think the role of Altcoin is just a complement to the existence of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is the main currency of kriptocurrancy so far, and it has not been scaled as a currency, no kriptocurrancy currencies are likely to scale for mass adoption. The real obstacles you see are price stability. Bitcoin will remain king for now, but other coins with faster transaction time and optimized Blockchain can surely take over.

I think that Bitcoin will survive, we would deffinatelly invent something to keep it healthy and operating, even if there will be a need of some replacing.

The problem is, the current landscape of the Bitcoin ecosystem is very different from what it used to be back at the inception of the cryptocurrency. The number of people involved has grown from a few dozens of passionate enthusiasts to over 10 min of everyday users.

I concur with you. Bitcoin will prove to be useless as people flee to alternative cryptocurrencies which have better features than Bitcoin and are capable of scaling to a large user base. As time goes by, Bitcoin becomes more of a store of value than a real currency for everyday transactions. On the other hand, Bitcoin Cash is becoming more scalable than Bitcoin and has implemented features that would allow it to expand its use cases from colored coins, to smart contracts, and more.

Therefore, if the original Bitcoin stales in growth by its underlying development team, then other altcoins will take the lead. Bitcoin Cash would eventually serve its purpose as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, while Bitcoin will stay as a store of value just like Gold. ;D

Popularity will contribute to the value of Bitcoin. So, if Bitcoin is not widely known and used then Bitcoin will not be able to raise its value. When people learn that Bitcoin is a digital currency that has outstanding advantages in terms of security and fastness, people will come to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has only a certain amount, according to the rule of supply and demand, the value of Bitcoin increases corresponding to the popularity of Bitcoin.

Yes. When Bitcoin started, transaction load was at the minimum level. Since, not everyone was aware of the digital currency, only a few were using it, allowing the Bitcoin network to process transactions without too much stress. However, now that Bitcoin has gained popularity, more people have been transacting on the blockchain, causing Bitcoin to become slow in processing transactions. This of course, can be easily fixed by either increasing the blocksize or implementing the use of the Lightning Network. Once this is done, then Bitcoin could easily scale to a wider audience according to their demands without high costs or slow confirmation times.

However, it would be very disappointing if Bitcoin doesn't scale to handle lot of users daily, since it would just become a mere store of value. Micropayments would become useless, and even small to medium transfers, allowing only large amounts of money to flow over the ledger because of high fees on the same. Hopefully, Bitcoin would take the right direction by upgrading to Layer 2 solutions that will make it practical once again. Just my thoughts ;D

All coins can scale to visa levels merely by using exchanges or other 3rd party processors to process offchain transactions.
Those offchain methods work right now without the complexities or limitations of lightning network.

The fallacy that was thrust upon your mindset , was that Segwit/LN was the only offchain solution, well it is not , and it won't even be the best.

Store of value is a sticky subject, because in my mind for it to be a store of value it needs a utility, ie: payment system or some other function.

True stores of value such as gold, when their price drops , the utility usage buys more ,
ie: Gold price drops, and more gold gets used in electronics or in dental filling or jewelry as it become cheaper for a utility usage.
It can only be considered a store of value if it keeps going up in price or maintains it's price.

Bitcoin no longer has a good utility usage as it is cheaper and faster to send other coins.
Plus it production cost per coin is now on average ~$3000 to $7000 per bitcoin depending on what country the asics are in.

During the past few months , it has not been an appreciating asset but a depreciating asset, so that destroys it as a store of value.  ;)

You can say the Bankers are manipulating the prices lower by restricting who can buy bitcoins,
and that wall street type are creating a mindset decreasing the perceived value per bitcoin by manipulating the futures markets, and you be right.

But you also have the tether scam where they are artificially inflating the price of bitcoin using a fraudulent fraction reserve system called tether without 3rd party verification they own any real US dollars.

So you have shenanigans deflating and inflating the price of bitcoin simultaneously, and at this junction of time, the deflating side is winning.

But offchain scaling is the only thing that is not a real problem whether they ever get LN working or not, as some exchanges already provide it as a service.  :)

You will come to find in the next year or two that Onchain Scaling was always more important , as transactions can only be deferred for so long offchain,
and without adequate onchain capacity , onchain fees become unmanageable for the majority.

I think he will fall in the price and strongly. No one will stop working with a coin that the government does not support. And with it there can be problems. But then again, time will tell what will happen to bitcoin and expect us a hundred

Was at Crypto Invest Summit earlier and was at the panel discussing Asia and the influence of the Asian markets on the global market.

The discussion began, actually, with a discussion of DEX vs CEX (decentralized exchanges vs centralize) and 2 of the 3 panel guys really seemed to think that Decentralized really isn't the way to go. Easy to money launder, etc, and some other very valid points I can't remember exactly. Miko seemed to think that it was a false dichotomy between the two anyway.

Really interesting guys: Nix Nodello, Miko Matsumara, and a guy from Korbit.

The question is not necessarily about scaling per se (like scaling the block size), but Bitcoin must adopt a way to accomodate a higher transaction stream than it does currently (SegWit was one such solution but it was not enough - we saw it in Dec 2017, true, SegWit was not widely used then).

If it fails to deliver such a solution, than it will not be used as a peer to peer payment system, and consequently its price will spiral down. Slowly at first, but gaining speed. If you want something to be a store of value it must have its utility, and the utility equals payment system.

If bitcoin ceases to scale, there will be a very big problem in its usual use for everyday needs. Apparently, it will be used more only for large transactions. This will significantly reduce the demand for it, popularity and its price will drop, but it will still have some value. Investors will gradually switch to the use of other crypto-currencies. Already in China, bitcoin is ranked thirteenth in rating, and in the first place, not surprisingly, not their NEO, but ethereum.

I believe that the scaling problem of the bitcoin that exists nowadays is just because of the fights that they have over the access to this cryptocurrency and the way to control it.

Bitcoin can still exist but will not be able to last forever. Some of the more technologically advanced platforms will replace Bitcoin and crypto. We do not want that to happen

The Bitcoin developers are aware of this scalability problem which i know they are seriously working on how to overcome it. They can not just sit and allow other altcoin to take over the market because of the down time and high fees bitcoin is using to conclude a transaction. I believe they are working seriously.

I think if bitcoin is never sales, bitcoin cannot grow like today and bitcoin will not reaching more people, bitcoin will stay on the ground without having a chance to known by many people in many countries. we know that bitcoin will grow only if we are spreading bitcoin in many places and without this, bitcoin will disappear and people will abandon the project and leave bitcoin in the dark places. and gladly, after 2010, bitcoin slowly to become popular and from that moment, people trying to know and learn about bitcoin so bitcoin now reach many people from all countries.

Sadly, that might happen with Bitcoin in the future if it doesn't scale to meet the demands of everyday people. Right now, there are many altcoins which are superior than Bitcoin in terms of speed and scalability. They've implemented several features that would allow them to scale with minimal effort whatsoever while preserving the security of the ledger. One good example of this, are DAG-based cryptocurrencies like Nano, IOTA and ByteBall.

Such altcoins have the potential to scale to millions of users, without downtime or a decrease in the network's transaction processing time. If they manage to become extremely popular and adopted in the mainstream world, then they could easily overtake Bitcoin as they'll retain their speeds while maintaining costs as low as possible. And best of all, these DAG-based coins have zero fees which promotes micropayments anytime, anywhere. However, all of this could change if Bitcoin successfully adopts the Lightning Network at a large scale. Once this happens, people will use Bitcoin again as a currency (and not a store of value) allowing its price and demand to increase over time.

Nevertheless, time will tell how and when will Bitcoin scale to attract new people into it. Just my thoughts ;D

If bitcoin should never scale, it could lose his position to another, better currency.

Exactly. We don't want that to happen with Bitcoin, as it is the reserve currency of all cryptocurrencies in existence. Hence, if Bitcoin fails because of its inability to scale, then altcoins will fail too since they're dependent on Bitcoin's price movements. We've seen many times how altcoins rise in price whenever Bitcoin rises in value.

Therefore, for cryptocurrencies to become mainstream, Bitcoin would need to successfully adopt scalable solutions like the Lightning Network, for others to follow its lead. If Bitcoin scales without issues with LN, then other altcoins can safely adopt Bitcoin's Lightning Network to scale too and have other benefits such as atomic swaps and more. As such, only time will tell whenever Bitcoin will remain a store of value or become an electronic peer-to-peer cash like it was in its early days. Just my thoughts ;D

Finally, Bitcoin will be accepted by most of the countries. It will be legalized, and it will be not more forbidden. It will become the most powerful currency.

In general, the bitcoin network is able to work in everyday mode. However, sometimes the load becomes peak and the process becomes more difficult. Many users have reported that they have to wait hours or even days before processing their transactions. There were many ways to solve the problem, but none of them has been implemented to date.

The problem of scaling has been studied for a long time. The first two serious proposals for its correction are contained in BIP 100 and BIP 101, where BIP means "Bitcoin Improvement Proposal". They were introduced in 2015 by the developers of the bitcoin kernel Jeff Garzick and Gavin Andresen, respectively. Both proposals mention an increase in the block size limit, and both these solutions are hard-wired, that is, if implemented, older versions of bitcoin software will be incompatible with the new network.

Maybe bitcoin is just an asset and will not be used as a means of payment as it is today. And maybe even Ethereum could be the best to replace bitcoin.

If I think Bitcoin is likely to be stagnant. And finally a new Bitcoin will be born who will have problems and this remains (as well as many others like Pow), and dying then will eventually die. I personally think I'm more curious as to why no one has implemented instant payments in altcoin. I heard that Dash would do something like that but the people here quickly disprove my suspicions. Litecoin also wanted it, but Wu and the company seem to have stopped this process as well.
 Bitcoin will be jammed at some point at some price point, it will not rise but and still fluctuate around that circle in my opinion. For the current price, Bitcoin will still have a large movement, a steady increase every month / year but people can not use it like we use fiat money if not measurable.
Perhaps someday another unmeasured cryptocurrency will surpass the Bitcoin price and market capitalization in general.

If the Bitcoin scaling never happens it means that most investors are just going to buy bitcoins and hold it for long term purposes, this means less and less people are going to use it for their transactions because of the fees that are going to be charged and they will move on to other cryptos that gives them faster and cheaper transaction.

I think the real issue here is the bad governance underlying Bitcoin. Most altcoins have better governance features and allow users to vote on specific protocol improvements, in order to reach consensus at a fast pace. But, that's not the case with Bitcoin as its community is divided between those who want to preserve Bitcoin as a store of value versus other who want Bitcoin to be used as peer-to-peer electronic cash. This has caused a split from the original Bitcoin chain which led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash.

Right now, both cryptocurrencies (BTC and BCH) have their own visions in terms of scaling, but as far as I know, only one will be able to scale successfully. I hope that the new Lightning Network, Schnorr Signatures, Mimblewimble, and other improvements for the Bitcoin protocol, would become a reality to make Bitcoin scale and handle more users, as well as, increase its privacy over transactions. I know that many criticize the Core development team, but with their Layer 2 solutions to make Bitcoin scale, it could be the safest route to help Bitcoin grow without sacrificing decentralization.

Maybe, someday in the future, Bitcoin's Lightning Network would become used by millions of people around the world, as well as sidechains, to allow micropayments, cheap and instant transfers, and much more. This will make Bitcoin great again, but it is up to the community and dev team to take the initiative to make this happen. :)

Maybe bitcoin can be no longer use in other ways but investing in it is still a good idea. It is a valuable asset that most of the users used it as an investment than to use it in their daily life. Price will sooner or later come back after this phenomenon.

Bitcoin developers and other professional users are aware of this phenomena and they are working seriously together to overcome this problem. They know they must do something, they can't let other coins overpower bitcoin that easily. I hope and believe that they are doing their best to make bitcoin better again.

If bitcoin is not expanded, I think this could lead to bitcoin being killed because its development potential  not have . Investors will begin to give up bitcoin because of   real investment purposes is  the future of bitcoin will be widely used.

Yeah. I don't think that scalability is much of an issue in Bitcoin, but more of an improvement to make it capable of processing transactions for the masses. And even if it doesn't manage to scale in the future, it will always be used as a store of value, similar to Gold. The Bitcoin blockchain is fully functional, and it's the most secure to date. While the pioneer cryptocurrency will continue to be used as a store of value, there will be other alternatives available for people to use as digital cash.

Lots of altcoins in the market have better features, and are much faster than Bitcoin itself. They could do the task of processing lots of TPS, giving people the ability to use them for their daily transactions. Hence, they'll use the Bitcoin blockchain for security and reliability, while altcoins would simply be used for quick payments and micro-transactions.

Nevertheless, let's hope that the Lightning Network becomes successful enough to bring Bitcoin to the mainstream world. There are still a lot of people who're unaware of Bitcoin, and Lightning payments might bring their attention. Just my opinion :)

well i think the biggest problem that is driving people away from bitcoin is  the transactions and fee, bitcoin has been for a long time the leader of the cryptocurrency and it will stay that way, but with these problems that it is facing today the alt coins are trying to catch up to it, although they are not as popular as bitcoin, but bitcoin is not accepted in all online shops and when you meet someone and you want to tell them about digital currency you must first mention bitcoin. you cannot mention all coins, but atleast the history will be traced to bitcoin. so even if it never scales it will be a great store of value, people will buy it then exchange it with other crypto particularly ethereum or dash that is if they want a faster transaction

i think  it is almost impossible for bitcoin to remain as the most valuable altcoin for ever. Even I am not so sure that any other current altcoin can displace bitcoin from its actual hegemony and If bitcoin never scaled we would have a problem, bitcoin would lose some of its interest and this would affect its adoption level as there are other coins that don´t have its problems by now and that could be presented as an alternative. However, despite the scalability debate that is still in place

For those of us who are accustomed to cryptocurrency using the decentralization system then it is normal if prices rise or fall significantly, but this is a profit because we can get profit even though the price is down.

Bitcoin will still top the rankings, even if its role is replaced. Because I think the role of Altcoin is just a complement to the existence of Bitcoin.

I dont even like to imagine a scenario where bitcoin fails to scale, because it could get very ugly for all cryptocurrencies in the market

This is an interesting question. I think that some people will vseravno want to have bitkoin at least as a numismatic value. After all bitcoin vseravno can be bought and sold. Apparently, it will be used only for large transactions. Now there are a lot of coins that can be used for small household transactions. The bitcoin will find a niche in this plan also in the event that it does not scale further. However, to say what will be its price in this case is quite difficult. Everything will depend on the further direction of the development of the crypto currency.

Bitcoin takes such strong positions in the cryptomarket because of its popularity. If people start using other crypto currencies for daily transactions, then bitcoin will decrease in price and demand for it will fall. As for other cryptocurrencies, they will take Bitcoin's place.

Well first of all it well never scale and Andreas can atest to that in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT9kJq_Ogrk. Even if scaling is a moving target and never makes it there, the current speed of which we have transactions is okay. Sure not many people can use the network, but the infrastructure exists and if it stays this current way I don't see a reason why Bitcoin wouldn't have value. It may not have value of 7k but it could easily have value between $500-7000.

Well, Bitcoin can always become used as a store of value, and for performing large transactions across the world. Even if it doesn't manage to scale, it will remain as a functional cryptocurrency with a greater level of security and reliability than most cryptocurrencies out there. At the cost of speed and high transaction fees, Bitcoin provides unparalleled security and resilience unlike any other cryptocurrency we know and love today. It's been tried and tested over time, allowing people to transact on the network, without the fear of third-party interference.

However, if Bitcoin does manage to scale to many people, then it would be even better because Bitcoin will not only become a store of value (due to its inflationary design) but also a digital currency for everyday transactions. In the beginning, Bitcoin was extremely useful for micropayments and cheap transfers. If improvements over the Bitcoin protocol such as the Lightning Network comes in, then the pioneer cryptocurrency can become great again as everything would be like the old days.

I'm sure that once this happens, Bitcoin's market dominance will rise, and other altcoins would be left behind just like the early days of Bitcoin. It's only a matter of time before the community and the dev team act together, to make Bitcoin stronger and better than ever. Just my thoughts ;D

It will become a powerful cryptocurrency and we will use it for every transaction if we want, small or big

This is a very tough question. I dont even like to imagine a scenario where bitcoin fails to scale, because it could get very ugly for all cryptocurrencies in the market

Hopefully, it would be this way in the future. If Bitcoin's awaited scalability solution called the Lightning Network becomes successful, then there's no doubt that Bitcoin will become a powerful cryptocurrency to handle any kind of transaction no matter how big or small it is. However, if the Lightning Network fails, then there would be nothing else left for Bitcoin to scale, leaving it in the dust as altcoins take the lead. In such situation, Bitcoin would be used specifically as a store of value or digital gold, mostly for large transactions. Fees would stay high, and speeds would be extremely slow, with the only benefit of greater security and reliability.

Nevertheless, with many advanced cryptocurrencies out there (like most DAG-based ones), it's safe to say that the blockchain is capable of scaling to a large mass of users. Now the question is if Bitcoin would be able to reach consensus to keep moving forward, or it would simply stale in growth, while its competitors take its place as the number one cryptocurrency in market cap. Just my opinion :)

Bitcoin needs to start working with governments and be legitimate. Secondly, he needs to have any assets, to determine its price with the prospect of further work.

If the bitcoin doesn't scale anymore maybe the bitcoin does not become famous and maybe we haven't forum now. Securing your btc is the good choice to have for now and if btc will not scale and worst fails, there could be changes of peoples choices on currency and  bitcoin will not be recognized in different countries; yet it's current system is still developing and doing great as we seen the price of todays updates.

Bitcoin cannot work with governments, because it has no central authority.

On the other hand, its developers may develop a new and better scaling protocol, which will not make the transaction fees go over the roof should the price rally of 2017 happen again.

I think altcoin is like a helper for bitcoin and support for bitcoin in cryptocurrency. I think altcoin can not be in the top of marketcap as bitcoin is the leader of cryptocurrency and bitcoin is like a path for the others.  Without altcoin, bitcoin is nothing and all of crypto currency is related with each others

I dont even like to imagine a scenario where bitcoin fails to scale, because it could get very ugly for all cryptocurrencies in the market...

In my opinion, the development, recognition and popularity of bitcoin occurs and increases. There are countries that recognize it as a payment option, and the number of establishments where it is possible to pay with bitcoin or other crypto-currencies is also increasing. Therefore, I believe that the crypto-currencies are the future, and bitcoin is the flagship in the crypto-currency market.

Also, Bitcoin is still volatile which is one of the weaknesses it has to become used as a serious currency unlike the USD which is stable.If people start using other crypto currencies for daily transactions, then bitcoin will decrease in price and demand for it will fall.

If that happens btc will be no longer used for payment or any transactions, even though it's still an asset. We all know that people are using btc as investment and so if it never scales, other users or investors may stop supporting it. It will maybe lead btc fo fall. Also, even though other coins already exist, btc is still on demand and mostly use everywhere. Today, money keeps rotating on btc and alt coins, eventually if blockchain continuously grow, many coins will be generated and former coins maybe replaced but btc will stay. The value of btc is very important to us for it dictates our gain and income. It is also where our investment depends on.

because of the problem of scalability bitcoin, the transaction speed is delayed up to several days. despite the increase in commissions, the delay in processing has not been resolved. attempts were made to correct this problem, and in 2017 the share of operations with bitcoin increased from 7 to 10%. If you do not solve this problem to the end, the speed will again be delayed.

if value is placed on bitcoin as one of the poineer cryptocurrency it would help bitcoin not to be obsolete and be of great gain

Yes. If Bitcoin never manages to scale, then people would simply choose to make their transactions on other altcoins instead. They've already implemented scalability features, making them capable of handling massive transactions per second without reductions in speed or a rise in fees. The only reason Bitcoin is still the top cryptocurrency in market cap, is simply because it has first mover advantage. However, one thing for sure, is that its market dominance has been greatly reduced, because people have migrated to other altcoins.

On the other hand, if scalability solutions such as the Lightning Network becomes successful, then Bitcoin would mostly likely replace altcoins over the long term, as people would switch back to Bitcoin for their daily transactions. The benefits such as minuscule fees, and instant speeds are too hard to ignore for Bitcoin once LN is stable and active on mainnet. As such, many altcoins existence would be questioned (like Bitcoin Cash), since LN would be far superior than simply increasing the block size.

Despite this, no one knows what will happen in the future, thus it's best to wait and see what happens with Bitcoin over the long term as a mainstream cryptocurrency for payments. Just my opinion :)

I don't think bitcoin has to scale just to remain valuable. reason wise? i cant say ,i just really think that those investing in bitcoin should have lots of faith and believe in it, cause i think the real issues has to be dealing with stability of price,so as not to put fear over and sell your coin worthlessly to crash what you believe in.you gotta have a lil faith peeps.

Right now we are in a very interesting time in the development of cryptocurrencies, while I believe in bitcoin we are still not sure if it is going to be the dominant cryptocurrency in the future, segwit was a step forward and it decreased the fees somehow, if the LN is really successful then bitcoin will be the dominant crypto for decades but if it fails then another crypto with superior technology will have the open door to try to take that place.

To tell you truth, bitcoin cannot be vanished or disappeared from the world. Bitcoin is so much adapted and used all over the world that no one can even think of leaving it. There is only one possibility is that we found a severe bug in the blockchain which may make all the bitcoins lost, but this again is no gonna happen.

If bitcoin never scales, this will cause bitcoin to lose people's interest.small users will go to litecoin and that is why there is a craze for LTC nowadays.

Yes. It's a very interesting time for cryptocurrencies indeed. Ever since SegWit was activated last year, Bitcoin has seen a sharp decline in fees, as well as increased user interest. Now that this has been achieved, it's possible to use the Lightning Network within Bitcoin. While LN has many benefits to help improve Bitcoin's scalability, it's not a perfect solution as some people say that it will make Bitcoin more centralized over time.

Perhaps, in the future, the Lightning Network would become successful enough to handle all the world's payments, while retaining decentralization which is the value proposition of any blockchain. If LN could remain decentralized, then there should be nothing stopping it from becoming used in the mainstream world. However, if all else fails, there's always the option of altcoins since they have already implemented certain upgrades for scalability (like Bitcoin Cash's 32MB block size).

In the end, it will be up to the people decide what's best for Bitcoin in the long term. Just my thoughts. ;D


Exactly. Bitcoin has grown strong over the years, which makes it practically impossible to become dead anytime soon. With the current amount of hashrate available on the network, as well as, the number of nodes distributed across the world, it would take a lot of effort and money to make Bitcoin disappear. However, if Bitcoin never scales to expand itself to a greater number of users worldwide, then it would be doomed as other cryptocurrencies with better technology will take the lead.

Only time will tell us what will happen once Bitcoin fails to scale in the mainstream world. ;)

if Bitcoin is the main currency (so far) crypto currency, and it has not been scaled as currency, there is no crypto currency that tends to scale for mass adoption.
The real obstacle I see is price stability. It's hard for merchants to have confidence in receiving bitcoin if they do not have confidence that the income they produce today will have the same value as tomorrow.

Yes. Bitcoin's the original cryptocurrency and the reserve currency of the crypto market. If it fails to scale, then other coins might not gain traction (even if their technology is proven to scale), simply because their leader has fallen. Blockchain tech wouldn't have been possible without Bitcoin, and if the first application of the blockchain as a currency fails, then I doubt that another crypto would take BTC's place if it becomes scalable.

Also, the real problem as you've mentioned is the price stability of Bitcoin. Since it's a volatile cryptocurrency, a real value cannot be established, making it an unstable medium of exchange for merchants and businesses alike. In contrast, fiat is stable and doesn't face any scalability issues.

Therefore, if Bitcoin wants to be used as cash instead of a store of value, it would need to scale as soon as possible, otherwise people might turn into other options or they will stay away from anything crypto. Scalability is necessary for mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, and if all else fails, then centralized payment processors will remain in the lead. Just my thoughts ;D

For me bitcoin as the face of digital currency. When you meet someone and you want to tell them about your digital currency you should first mention bitcoin. You can not mention all the coins, but at least its history will be traced to bitcoin. Even if it never scales it would be a great store value, people would buy it and exchange it with other cryptoes, especially ethereum or dasboard, because they want faster tractionactionIf the bitcoin doesn't scale anymore maybe the bitcoin does not become famous and maybe we haven't forum now. Maybe bitcoin will more powerful in some day. If bitcoin doesn't scale maybe other money or coin will release and it being famous.

It will become a powerful cryptocurrency and we will use it for every transaction if we want,then it will be a store of value and some other altcoins will be used for the daily trades.

You think the idea of electronic money has been reduced. It did not. And if Bitcoin is the leading currency (so far), and it is not scaled as a currency, no electronic currency is likely to extend to mass acceptance.

Everyone wants to own it. 21 million divided by 9 billion.

For me the value of Bitcoin is derived solely because it is registered and traded, bitcoin value is nothing without exchange
And the value of stock securities listed and traded in the exchange is based entirely on falsehood,f. This is simply that bitcoin has proved to be a superhero coin giving life to others. To prove this is the glaring fact of the way the effect of bitcoin has affected every other coin, no one has been able to take the ride upwards yet.

This is simply that bitcoin has proved to be a superhero coin giving life to others.You can not mention all the coins, but at least its history will be traced to bitcoin.

Good point. If Bitcoin (being the original cryptocurrency) hasn't been able to successfully scale yet, then I doubt that other altcoins will do so too. Even if they manage to scale quicker than BTC, they won't gather the level of attention within our world, since Bitcoin already has brand recognition and first-mover advantage. Honestly, I don't think that it's quite necessary for Bitcoin to scale, since after all it still functions as intended. Sure, it's quite slow, and expensive when it gets loaded with a bunch of transactions, but sometimes I prefer it to be that way, for the sake of decentralization.

Upgrading Bitcoin to become much more scalable, might affect its decentralization, in my own opinion. This is largely because there will be more bandwidth and storage requirements for nodes (when increasing the block size), or simply not everyone will be able to open or close a channel (in the LN when fees rise according to usage). Therefore, I think that the role of scaling would belong better to other altcoins than Bitcoin itself. :)

I don't agree with the statement in red. I think that the transaction fees are decreased now because much less people transact bitcoin than in Dec 2017 when the price reached its peaks. When the price increases to new peaks again in the future, I am sure that more people will want to transact (=sell their) bitcoin again and the network will be helplessly clogged again.

I agree, however, that if the bitcoin doesn't scale, it will be doomed eventually, even if it still can survive the next time like Dec 2017, it may be the last one it survives.

bitcoin will no longer be used for micro transactions,But remain a king.it will remain as a history,cos before you mention any coin you will ever introduce bitcoin before that person can understand.

I do not understand what you write. This is not about. BTC can not be scaled up. This is an impossible process because BTC is an independent unit ...

I do not think that this kind of situation is ever come in the market because now bitcoin is popular in every country.Moreover its market is also strong some countries start accepting it as a tuition fee and some use it as an asset.The day is not so far when the bitcoin will become a global currency.

i think may be one time in the future, another cryptocurrency will take bitcoin place as the top. nothing is impossible  ;D

What I feel is that bitcoin is a decentralised crypto currency and the reason being for bitcoin in lots of controversy is that its in decentralised form as there is no such proper authentic regulating body over the bitcoin that could keep eye over all the bitcoin activities and thus most of the countries feel very unsafe in legalising bitcoin in their nation as according to them the introduction of bitcoin in their nation would bring lots of terrorism in their country and the most important thing that they needs to understand is that only legalising of bitcoin everywhere in the world can resolve this issue.

According to polls, and information from practice, people buy bitcoin just because they hope that it will go up in the future. If the probability of such a hope decreases, then the demand for it will drop and digital bitcoin gold will collapse at one point.
If the scalability of bitcoin grows very slowly, bitcoin will gradually continue to lose demand and the level of capitalization, until the price ceases to dominate the price over other types of crypto currency. As soon as this happens, bitcoin will lose everything and at best remain an honorary crypto currency with the use for expensive transactions. The truth in this case is very difficult to predict its price.

Altcoin is a development of Bitcoin based on Blockchain technology. I think we should not stop there, someone will make Bitcoin change and establish its position with the world. The development of technology will not stop, I still hope Bitcoin will go further in the future.

This is also my take on it. Bitcoin was the seed, now it is growing and the roots are taking hold. The stock is growing and the branches are developing, these branches are altcoins. What will be the leaves? What will be the blossomed flower?

Let's hope for Bitcoin to become the biggest currency in the world with the successful adoption of the Lightning Network. I'm sure that once Bitcoin scales, it will leave other altcoins in the dust as it'll be able to perform instant transactions at near-zero costs. People from around the world would be using Bitcoin at a large scale and would no longer need to deal with altcoins to obtain better speeds and cheaper costs.

But, if Bitcoin never scales, then I guess that it will still be alive and supported by the community for a long time. It'll never lose its quality of being digital gold, as it's the most secure cryptocurrency today. Sometimes, for the sake of decentralization, it's good for Bitcoin to remain as is. Because, bigger blocks or trusting LN nodes, might lead Bitcoin to centralization in the future. Therefore, the most important thing is for Bitcoin to scale safely without compromising its decentralization. :)

Unfortunately, technology can not be stopped to wait for the dominant groups to reach a consensus, so the cryptocurrencies will continue to evolve and gain market with the accompaniment of bitcoin or without it. Anyway, the market seems to have assumed that Bitcoin will not be the dominant cryptocurrency in the future, and seems to be taking in a smoothie way the imminent decline of bitcoin as the dominant cryptocurrency so far.

The issue of scalability with bitcoin is a genuine concern since blocks are limited in size and frequency wherein on average can only process 7 transactions per second, a low throughput considered by many should bitcoin becomes mainstream.

Luckily, this issue is being addressed already for a couple of years now. Part of the solution is the Lightning Network. Its some sort of a cache that allows transactions to take effect while still being recorded on the blockchain (sounds a bit unsecured but the nodes are already out there and has been carrying transactions). Yet if i am not mistaken remains to be in test mode. But is a good solution nonetheless, retaining full control of both payee and recipient as if there were no web service that meddled in between (again, a bit like anti-bitcoin but works anonymously just the same).

So i guess scalability will not be much of a problem in the future as the core and developers know what is missing and is not gonna allow other cryptocurrency to take the lead without a good fight.

Bitcoin is a decentralised crypto currency and thus there is no such proper authentic regulating body over the bitcoin who could keep eye over all the bitcoin activities and thus leading to illegal use of bitcoin and I think this is the most important reason why most of the countries are in against of bitcoin and don’t want to legalise it in their nation but they all needs to understand one thing that the illegal use of bitcoin could only be stopped when everyone government would centralise it and will starts keeping eye over bitcoin activities and starts regulating it.

The team that is working on bitcoin soon intends to solve all of his technical problems. I'm worried about another question. How other payment cryptocurrencies will feel.

Honestly speaking, bitcoin is the leading in the crypto-world and I don't ever thought others coins will overcome bitcoin in the future.

That's certainly true, mate. Many people are in it for short term profits, instead of using the cryptocurrency for daily transactions. Whenever the network load increases, fees rise, and newcomers into crypto become completely disappointed (which results in massive sells within the market). The situation becomes worse if Bitcoin doesn't scale to handle large amounts of TPS for people worldwide. It'll still be the "digital gold" of cryptocurrency, but it won't fit its purpose as a Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.

If scalable solutions such as the Lightning Network and Sidechains become successful, then without a doubt, Bitcoin will scale to millions of users worldwide. I believe that the process for this to become a reality has been quite slow simply because developers want to make sure Bitcoin scales safely without sacrificing its decentralization. Of course, it's difficult to predict its price (as Bitcoin is volatile), but it'll be here to stay for many years to come.

Therefore, no matter if Bitcoin scales or not, I believe that it will continue to exist as a decentralized cryptocurrency for many generations. No one or nothing can stop Bitcoin, as it has grown too big to fail. However, only time will tell us what lies ahead for the longevity of Bitcoin as a cryptocurrency for the masses. Just my opinion :)

I think bitcoin is the face of digital currency. When you meet someone and you want to tell them about digital currency you must first mention bitcoin. You cannot mention all coins, but at least the history will be traced to bitcoin. So even if it never scales it will be a great store of value, people will buy it then exchanges it with other crypto particularly ethereum or dash that is if they want a faster transaction.

Much of the value for bitcoin as shifted from being that of a currency to more of being an asset or a store of value,much like gold.It will remain so even if it never scales

I agree we are the ones that makes the value of bitcoin. Well, if bitcoin never scales up maybe satoshi have something to do with it, and I think he had a backup plan.

If bitcoin never scale,turning it to 0 value and it dies, Do you think other altcoins can survive without it? With the prevailing market dump, others and their coins had to wait till it scales. People will endure a while till it revives, even if it takes 2 years.

If it doesn't scale through, then life goes on. It won't be the end of life. But i don't think bitcoin won't scale through, it will definitely scale through.

Yes sir! Bitcoin is King and will always be the King of cryptocurrencies no matter if it scales or not. All the altcoins I know of, depend heavily on Bitcoin's price movements, so if Bitcoin can't scale, then other altcoins wouldn't be able to successfully scale to a large mass either. There have been many altcoins which claimed to be superior than Bitcoin in terms of transactions per second, but none have been battle tested as Bitcoin. What I think is that if Bitcoin scales successfully, then other altcoins would do the same. Bitcoin is like experimental grounds for most cryptocurrencies we know and love today, which explains why all the eyes are still in the original cryptocurrency for quite some time.

But, if Bitcoin never scales then it's fine, because we would be able to continue using Bitcoin as a store of value with unmatched security and reliability unlike any other blockchain in existence. Therefore, scaling Bitcoin is only optional with the goal of making it useful as digital cash. It could continue to operate as intended without scaling but remaining as a store of value for the masses. :)

Scaling is really compulsory and not optional if we are to talk about massive global adoption. In fact, some are asking if the world is ready for bitcoin, but the more profound question is quite the opposite, is bitcoin ready for the world? And as of now, there is this constraint of scalability and it is not negligible.

Bitcoin had to to scale should it want more market activities and bitcoin knows exactly that. That is why we have witnessed a number of forks that took place in the past. This forks either soft or hard are proof that bitcoin will not stand still in the issue of scalability and that is good news for all of us.

This is a shaky point and an ancient argument

Basically, there are two camps which stick to quite polar views. One camp asserts that if a new break-through technology is implemented, for example, Lightning Network, or something even better, that would give Bitcoin a dramatic boost regarding its adoption and real use. But the supporters of this idea fail to give a plausible reason why it should happen if right now Bitcoin network capacity is not fully utilized anyway. Catchy phrases like whether Bitcoin is ready for the world don't fill that slack in this reasoning. The other camp, which I belong to myself, thinks that scaling up Bitcoin won't give anything in terms of adoption on its own. It won't boost demand just because of its very existence. Scalability issues will become such only when there is not enough processing capacity, and we are not there yet. Personally, I think that making Bitcoin transactions faster without adding excessive complexity and sacrificing decentralization (as LN assumes) would be a better solution in the short term if these issues actually start to impede Bitcoin's use. Though we already have Litecoin which does all that out of the box

Yes whatever may happen will not totally affect our daily lives, but will be good if bitcoin will continue scale through this will be a good outcome for bitcoin and this will give us more profit too.

I think many people have not accepted bitcoin because they do not really understand it or they are afraid of the risk that bitcoin brings. But if the bitcoin market returns soon and more people use bitcoin to trade more then that will help people to drop the negative thoughts about it.

Bitcoin is currently worth more than gold. Most people buy Bitcoin to buy Altcoins rather than using it in practice. Whether Bitcoin is expanding or not, Bitcoin will never be forgotten.

Excellent way to compare! Many feel very safe with their asset being gold, Bitcoin will eventually take over.

This problem has been solved in a few years. Some types of cache allow transactions to remain active while still being recorded on the blockchain. However, if I'm not mistaken I'm still in test mode. So I guess scalability will not be much of a problem in the future when the core and developers know what's missing and will not allow other electronic money to lead without a good fight. To be honest, bitcoin is the leading in the encrypted world and I never thought that other currencies would pass bitcoin in the future.

i think in the future bitcoin will be forgotten like other coin.

All must decide, and for the better! Bitcoin will remain and retain its value, and may even increase. Go to a higher asset class. And other coins will perform for him all the dirty work.

Part of the solution is Lightning Network. However, if I'm not mistaken is still in test mode. So I guess scalability will not be much of a problem in the future when the core and developers know what's missing and will not allow other electronic money to lead without a good fight. I was worried about another question. To be honest, bitcoin is the leading in the encrypted world and I never thought that other currencies would pass bitcoin in the future. When you meet someone and you want to talk to them about digital money, you must first mention bitcoin. So even if it never scale it would be a big shop of value, people would buy it then swap it with other codes especially ethereum or hyphens that is if they wanted have a faster transaction.

I am afraid you may be right, that if Bitcoin developers sleep longer and don't develop (research and develop?) way for an on-chain scaling (not off-chain, like LN), Bitcoin will be forgotten ...

Now there are more and more projects based on the blockchain of the 4th generation. The speed of transactions on these platforms is 10 times higher than the speed of Bitcoin transactions. Of course, Bitcoin remains the leading blockchain, but if no steps are made towards modernization, then the leading role of Bitcoin may take another currency.

So you are sayig that people buy bitcoin only to eventually buy altcoin and not to use it; and this is the reason bitcoin will not be forgotten... Well, strange thinking, I would say this is exactly the reason that the middleman (=bitcoin) will be eventually eliminated.

Then Bitcoin would become a store of value, more than Gold.

That's true. But what really matters is that if Bitcoin scales, it should do it in the most decentralized way possible. It's been seen that on-chain scaling is not the most decentralized solution, but it has allowed other cryptocurrencies to perform well with low fees and fast transactions speeds. One good example of this is Bitcoin Cash, which has already scaled to 32mb block size for on-chain scaling without the Lightning Network. But, the downside of this is that it will make the coin more centralized over time since storage costs and bandwidth requirements would be a lot higher for node operators.

For Bitcoin, the Lightning Network seems to be the most decentralized approach to scaling, yet it has some level of centralization. Off-chain scaling would allow the cryptocurrency to perform as usual without the risk of compromising the whole network in case the Lightning Network were to fail over time. Sure, it relies on third parties to route payments and open channels, but it's the best solution available yet for Bitcoin to scale for the whole world to enjoy.

All in all, even if Bitcoin will never scale, that shouldn't be a problem since people would have the choice to transact in altcoins, while using Bitcoin as a store of value. :)

but until now the development of the altcoin and its rapid growth and cannot be controlled can prove to be damaging to the market. People are still principled by the large number and reject quality because they will think "its just the same project"

Yes, if Bitcoin will not be able to increase its bandwidth in transactions, it will gradually lose its value, but will remain among the cryptocurrency and will be more used for large expensive transactions. It will remain in the elite of cryptocurrency and will not be used for daily purchases.

If the scaling problem doesn't get solved in a few years bitcoin's future could have serious problems because there is a high possibility that it could be replaced by some other coin that doesn't have this problem. We still have time, but it must be solved asap.

Lightning Networks is not a solution for bitcoin to scale, and the market is not taking it seriously or using it.
Bitcoin has lost the ability to discuss the topic. It was tried in the past with block size increase (what would be the problem to increase it and not split the community), but blockstream guys have took over the development of this coin.

If bitcoin does not scale, then it will go to zero as any shitcoin.

It's kinda hard to think about that, because i sometimes wonder about that as well. The future of bitcoin, how will it be accepted widely, and many other things.
And i think, the altcoins also has the potential to become as big as bitcoin, although i'm not sure whether they will beat and replace bitcoin position as the top or not, but maybe if some potential and great coin comes, or something drastic happen, it might be. Moreover bitcoin is already high and in the top, i mean the greater it is, it will take much time, hard work or effort to climb even higher. Sometimes it just reaches the limit and can't do nothing but fall.
But still, i wish none of bad things will happen and we will figure out and know what's best to do with bitcoin future.

No, as I say earlier, (1) LN is the off-chain solution, so it is solving bitcoin's problems outside of bitcoin, and as the result bitcoin gets slowly eliminated from the equation, and (2) if people buy bitcoin only to swap it to some other altcoins (altcoins that they can use more easily), they will just buy the altcoins directly when they have an easier way to do so, and that will take part in eliminating bitcoin too.

If the future bitcoin can't be expanded, the crypto market will be in saturation. Other electronic currencies will be affected more or less. But in my view bitcoin isn't expanded anymore is very difficult.

LN is a solution, but it is not fully decentralized. How this will be adopted depends on what the general public thinks is more important: Scalability or decentralization. If there is a way to trust a third party, it might be a solution. LN is not fully developed now, or at least it isn't easy to use now. When wallets start adopting LN, we will see how the community will respond.

I don't see Bitcoin going to zero as it is the holy grail of crypto. There will always be people interested in owning some Bitcoin even if the product can't compete with other protocols.

perhaps it does not need scalability, because it is only needed for long-term storage within the cryptocurrency

Exactly. I believe that there's no reason to worry about Bitcoin's scalability since it will remain alive for a long time. If it scales, then a lot of people would be able to use it simultaneously. However, if it doesn't, then it'll simply remain as a store of value (like Gold) just as it is right now. Whereas Bitcoin cannot fulfill certain tasks or needs for everyday people, there's the choice of altcoins as they're much faster, cheaper, and scalable than the pioneer cryptocurrency.

What's important here is for Bitcoin to remain decentralized. Hence, if scaling it would sacrifice its decentralization, then it would not be worth it. Hopefully, if the Lightning Network becomes widely adopted by people in the mainstream world and highly successful, then Bitcoin would've scaled to millions of users without sacrificing its decentralization. Just my thoughts ;D

Whenever bitcoin prices rise, more new users will join the Bitcoin ecosystem, and more people will use Bitcoin every day. Simply put, if Bitcoin networks can't handle increasing transaction flows by increasing throughput, Bitcoin will be difficult to retain users for a long time.

I think that then bitcoin will cease to be used for frequent transactions and will become more of an asset for the accumulation of money. IMHO

I think if there is no solution, bitcoin is only a value in the digital world, not the real world. then there must be a solution that is made so that barriers to existing barriers can be used as opportunities.

It will not be available by everyone who will use it but the right thing will be used for a long time. New things can happen next year with what will happen.

If Bitcoin does not scale and it will have its current throughput of seven transactions per second, then it will gradually lose its popularity and at the same time its price. It will also decrease its level of capitalization and when other coins bypass it in terms of capitalization, it will lose price dominance over other types of cryptocurrency and at the same time lose its place as the leader of cryptocurrency. Most likely, Bitcoin will continue to exist, but its price will not be very high and it will be used for large transaction costs.

I think it will be used to preserve and increase finances, only as a good asset. It is possible that it will no longer be used as a medium of exchange.

That's right! Because if Bitcoin doesn't address its scalability issues quickly, then other alternative cryptocurrencies might take the lead unfortunately. But, given that Bitcoin's Lightning Network is carefully being developed to reach mainstream adoption, it's unlikely that the original cryptocurrency will stay behind other cryptocurrencies on the market. As you said, we still have time, but once people get back into cryptocurrencies, then it'll be game over for Bitcoin if it remains this way.

High fees and slow transaction speeds are annoying, while other altcoins with a DAG architecture have already solved this problem. If Bitcoin wouldn't have had first mover advantage within the crypto market, then I'm sure that another cryptocurrency would've replaced it by now. But, time will tell us, whenever the Lightning Network or another scalability solution would succeed to make Bitcoin largely adopted by people around the world. It should be in the most decentralized way possible of course, because if it reduces centralization, then why would anyone want to keep using Bitcoin?

All in all, I'm confident that Bitcoin will scale in the future, but we would need to be patient if we want to see good growth in this cryptocurrency. :D

I think the storage of value for bitcoins would decrease since bitcoins will become obsolete due to the fact that it never go past beyond its capability. I think time will come that bitcoins will be left behind against alt coins being released today that are way better than bitcoins in terms of features.

Absolutely correct. Although the price of bitcoins is testing the patience of its users, I really want to say the people to wait. As you said, 'Bitcoin community would come up at a resolution somehow to put an end to this issue, and make the pioneer cryptocurrency great again' I believe it too and not long ago, we have received something beyond our expectation.

Bitcoin is attractive at the moment, wanting to become a daily payment instrument, transaction fee and transaction time is the core.

The problem is, the current landscape of the Bitcoin ecosystem is very different from what it used to be back at the inception of the cryptocurrency. The number of people involved has grown from a few dozens of passionate enthusiasts to over 10 mln of everyday users.

This will be an extreme issue in case it never does scale as I would commend that another cash would take the storms, potentially ETH? You never truly ken on something like this, yet the one thing that I do ken is that people on the BTC organize are worn out and tired of paying such high costs and are probably proximate to simply get the cash for out and just utilizing another system for portion all the time as opposed to keeping their bitcoin as they're doing now and paying like $1.30 for one trade.

I do confide in its scales, in any case, as I optically perceive that as the fundamental probability for Bitcoin to have the ability to be ostensibly observed as a money that will be prepared to hold some uncommon strong balance with respect to the dominant part enduring and utilizing it exhaustively. If it doesn't people are basically going to find something that will suit they're required, for example, whatever else on the planet this is the methods by which it works.

If bitcoin never scales this current bearish situation, i trust that other coins will rise up and become the future bitcoin. They will become the most talked about and most used for cross crypto transactions.
Bitcoin will now become the alternative.

Me neither. No other altcoin could match Bitcoin in terms of security, and reliability. Sure, the original cryptocurrency could be facing a lot of issues which are disappointing such as high fees, and slow speeds, but it's still the leader of the whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. The technology is there already for Bitcoin to scale, but it may need some time before solutions are tested to prevent the breakdown of the whole blockchain. Slowly but surely, Bitcoin is advancing with its Lightning Network to become a global cryptocurrency for the masses.

But, even if it's not successful in this regard, Bitcoin will always remain as "Digital Gold" due to its scarcity, unmatched security, and immutability. I hope that developers and the community would choose what's best for Bitcoin to help preserve its key aspects which are the ones mentioned earlier. :)

I think that even if scaling is not achieved, bitcoin will not lose its popularity among investors. Bitcoin will not be used for payments, but will play the role of an analog of gold for investors. But I still hope that bitcoin will be scalable.

If it is not expanded and the market is limited I think bitcoin will not be able to go further in the future. bitcoin will not grow, it is limited and gradually it becomes neglected and lost attention. Bitcoin needs to expand the market and attract the attention of more investors to grow and create future price fluctuations.

People see a cryptocurrency bubble. In the sense that most cryptoactives are overpriced - this is true. One day, most of them will disappear. But this is not the end, this is the beginning. Crypto-companies, crypto-positive people are now in euphoria: it seems that the handy, decentralized future is at hand.

But something so complex does not work that simple. 90% of tokens will fail. But when the bubble bursts, there will be really working ideas. This is exactly what the Internet experienced in the 90s. Most of the tokens in listings on the stock exchange will disappear in 20.10.5 years, because some were originally created for speculation, while others would collapse under the weight of their utopianism.

However, for Bitcoin, the only way out is to become a world currency, which is hardly possible. And yet, if this does not happen, you get what I described above.

Yes. If Bitcoin doesn't scale, then it would simply become ignored by people as they look for other alternatives which are faster and cheaper than Bitcoin. By then, Bitcoin would retain its properties as "Digital Gold" but it would lack the capability of being used as "Digital Cash". However, if Bitcoin successfully scales with the Lightning Network, then things would change for the better as Bitcoin becomes both "Digital Gold" and "Digital Cash" for the masses.

The pioneer cryptocurrency would then become useful for micropayments, smart contracts, and nearly every other thing we know and love from altcoins. When sidechains, and the Lightning Network is combined, you'd get an "All-in-One" blockchain ecosystem that's secure, resilient, and useful for the mainstream world. However, it will depend whenever people would adopt Bitcoin's new scaling technologies for the cryptocurrency to advance as a worldwide payment system.

Nevertheless, scaling Bitcoin or not, wouldn't matter since it's still functional as a blockchain system free from middleman. Bitcoin could still process transactions without scaling, but with the drawback of higher costs and slower speeds. Scaling would only make Bitcoin cheaper and faster for the world to enjoy, which is something optional for Bitcoin to achieve mainstream usage and adoption. Just my thoughts ;D

If it is happened that bitcoin will never scales, I think it will not die or disappeared but it will remain in the heart of some investors with a lot of positive mind about it. Because bitcoin ecosystem was already created a history of profitable investment and it was involved a large scale of money when manipulated effectively and with bullish market trend condition timely taking over.

There's no doubt that Bitcoin will increase in value due to its finite or limited supply. However, if Bitcoin doesn't manage to scale, then other cryptocurrencies will take the lead in fast and cheap micropayments around the world. Even if other altcoins manage to gain traction in terms of usage and popularity, Bitcoin will always be the most secure blockchain in existence. Scalability is not much of an issue if Bitcoin could remain secure and decentralized as possible.

As such, whenever people want to store their money securely for the long term, they'll use Bitcoin as it's a store of value. On the other hand, most altcoins on the market will become "Digital Cash" serving as true alternatives against traditional Fiat currencies such as the US Dollar and the Euro. Therefore, Bitcoin will do just fine even if it doesn't scale. If it scales with the Lightning Network, then it will have a huge advantage over most altcoins we know and love today. Just my opinion :)

bitcoin is still developing strongly, there are many new solutions to speed up payments for small transactions and other innovations in bitcoin.

If it happens. there are two possibilities that can occur in crypto currencies. all altcoins will experience price declines when bitcoin isn't scaled. because bitcoin greatly affects all altcoins and crypto currencies will be scaled. another possibility, altcoin will take over as the main crypto currency substitute for bitcoin and altcoin will become the parent of crypto currency for new coin to be released.

Yes, other cryptocurrency will take the lead. ETH is moving up. So if bitcoin cannot follow ETH,  then kt will definitely fall from the list. However, bing static on the price may have cons and pros as we. But it the main problem is, do still investors invest on BTC if that is the case?

You see, if Bitcoin is not expanded it will not be able to return to the $ 20,000 price as before. Bitcoin price increases require investment from human resources. If it is legitimate, of course the investment will be easy, so it will attract more investment.

The market will grow and fluctuate at bitcoin prices. I do not think that if bitcoin does not expand the market, the other altcoin could grow faster than bitcoin and replace its place. Bitcoin is always the focus to attract the most investment. If it does not expand the bitcoin trading market still happens and the value of the bitcoin still fluctuates normally.

If Bitcoin is not expanded to the world, it will be very difficult for our community. As Bitcoin is not widely developed, altcoins will not be able to grow independently. As well as good deals i think so and in any situation we also see Bitcoin will have its own development path.

for me, bitcoin will always be the top in its class, and rivals will never outperform bitcoin. because the impact of bitcoin itself for people is extraordinary, they have become very rich and fulfilled for all their life needs. I am sure of that.

I hope it doesn't happen, because if it does, it may be the beginning of the end of cryptocurrencies. It may generate panic as people as well as investors may loose interest in bitcoin and altcoins generally.

I think we can keep Bitcoin in stock form. Because whenever the price of bitcoin will increase. Then at that time we will have good profit.

I believe that there will be a time in the near future that bitcoin will be replaced on the top 1 position as there are so many cryptos now that has more potential and more use that bitcoin itself. We can never deny that bitcoin has made its strong foundation but surely there will be a better one that will be its replacement.

I don't think that anything will happen to btc because it will be the leader always. to my mind, it is not a problem now. i have heard that btc is going to replace our currency with time even

since bitcoin are limited in numbers. but the value can keep higher and higher. hence it could be one of the choice to store value. like gold or stocks.

bitcoin has already had several forks last year and has successfully scaled in several other coins. now there is a development of applications for the rapid passage of payments and it will be the next stage of penetration of bitcoin into people's lives.

The Ligthning Network, if this is what you have in mind, is an off-chain solution. So it is external to bitcoin. What we need is a scaling on-chain solution. Ortherwise, bitcoin will loose its leading edge in favor of some other coin.

Agree. Altcoins have already scaled, which means that they have an advantage over Bitcoin. They have near-instant speeds, and, in some cases, no fees. As such, if Bitcoin doesn't manage to scale, that shouldn't be much of an issue since people have the option to use other cryptocurrencies that are much more flexible than Bitcoin for micropayments or quick money transfers.

However, if Bitcoin manages to scale safely and efficiently, then it will be one step ahead for mainstream adoption and usage. By then, Bitcoin would be able to be used both as a store of value and as a digital cash system. While it won't replace every altcoin we know and love today, it'll certainly have a greater level of usage than its contenders. The most exciting part of scaling Bitcoin is that, its uses could be expanded to more than just finance. With the use of sidechains, Bitcoin could get smart contract functionality (like Ethereum), token/asset issuance, and much more.

Therefore, scaling Bitcoin is something optional but required if it wants to become the digital cash of the world. If it remains in its current state, then it'll be nothing more than a store of value, just like Gold is. Just my opinion :)

I think that it will! To my mind, btc will be the leader of the market for the long period of time. To my mind, btc is the coin that deserves being called the best one as it has many pros

I'm sure one way or another eventually some coin will replace BTC. Although BTC is great and it's truly the king but some day it'll become outdated.

I think that if it becomes stable in price, it can be used as a daily currency. And it is unlikely that any of the altcoins will be able to surpass him in this plan.

Despite all the current difficulties with bitcoin development, it can still be used as a currency, not just an investment. It will be able to scale as intended.

Bitcoin will still be functional as a store of value, even if it never scales. There are already a variety of options to choose from, as altcoins have scaled to handle large TPS with the lowest costs possible. As such, scaling Bitcoin shouldn't be much of an issue, unless it wants to achieve mainstream usage and adoption as digital cash. When put up to the test, Bitcoin is the most secure Blockchain to-date, which means that it's as safe, secure, and reliable as Gold.

Perhaps, scaling Bitcoin would further reduce the security of its network, as people would choose to perform their transactions within the second-layer (Lightning Network) instead of the main chain. Then, miners would start to leave as they wouldn't have a reason to confirm transactions on the same. While the LN is not released yet in a stable version for everyone to use, it would be interesting to know how Bitcoin will perform right after LN becomes widely adopted by the mainstream. Despite this, there's always the option to switch back to the main chain in case everything else fails, allowing Bitcoin to remain functional as a Blockchain network.

Nevertheless, considering how other altcoins have already scaled to handle large TPS, it means that Bitcoin's Blockchain technology has successfully scaled to the masses and that's what matters most. Just my opinion :)

Actually most of the people are buying bitcoin as investment rather than to use in their daily life, but maybe soon it will be used to pay different things in daily life.

what prevents you from using bitcoin as a way of storage, not a way for frequent transactions?

when governments start accepting payment of taxes and fees in bitcoin, then employers will start using it to pay salaries and bitcoin will enter people's lives even more.

Exactly. If you need a cryptocurrency for frequent, daily transactions, then Bitcoin is not recommended for you. You're better off looking into other altcoins which have proven to be faster, cheaper, and much more scalable than Bitcoin. However, if you're looking for unparalleled security, reliability, and a store of value, then Bitcoin would be the right choice for you. Scaling is only necessary for mainstream adoption of Bitcoin by millions of people around the world.

Hence, if Bitcoin doesn't scale, it wouldn't die but rather stay as a functional cryptocurrency that's useful as a store of value. The only downside would be that the more people use Bitcoin in its current state, the slower and costly it will be. But the bright side is that Bitcoin would retain its decentralization and security, which is the most important thing. If by any chance Bitcoin scales successfully with the Lightning Network, then it'll be a plus.

Other than that, I believe that Bitcoin could continue to operate as usual, while it leaves other altcoins in charge of bigger transactions worldwide. Just my opinion. :)

If bitcoin isn't scaled it won't be as popular as it is now. Altcoin prices tend to be stagnant and there is no upward movement in value because currently bitcoin can be regarded as a benchmark value in cryptocurrency.

If it doesn't scale up, it'll probably start crashing down slowly. Like an airplane losing altitude due to loss of fuel. I think bitcoins will spike back up to its $20,000 value last year and all it takes to do it is one swift investor move from everyone. But alas, we can't do so because we all have different ideas in mind.

The answer is quite simple isn't it? The number of transactions will be limited and this can either result in one of the two scenarios. The first scenario is that the transaction fee will skyrocket and users will be paying $100 or $200 for a single transaction. The second scenario is that the number of users will remain constant or even decline, as users will move towards a scalable coin.

Does btc really need to be scaled? I mean, of course, scaling will have its positive impact, but it's needed only if btc will become the mainstream means of payment, which is highly unlikely due to the very nature of btc. The best scenario for btc would be becoming value storage. No scaling needed in this case.

Yes. In fact, many people have already moved towards scalable cryptocurrencies with far better features than Bitcoin itself. Cheap micropayments and quick transfers are already possible with altcoins. However, I believe that it's good for Bitcoin to scale, since it'll be able to grow in ways that were never thought possible. If it scales, then most people would use it at a greater level than altcoins themselves. The only advantage altcoins have right now, is their quick speeds and low costs. However, Bitcoin can achieve the same results if it scales with the Lightning Network.

Since many altcoins have already scaled, there shouldn't be any reason to worry about Bitcoin scaling to the world. It can be used as a store of value, due to its limited supply and unparalleled security. At the cost of slower speeds and higher costs, it could be worth securing your money in Bitcoin if it provides you with unmatched security unlike any other cryptocurrency in existence.

Nonetheless, time will tell us whenever the Lightning Network will become adopted by the world or not. Just my thoughts ;D

At first bitcoin is indeed accepted as an asset. It's just the development until now bitcoin serve as a means of payment. If bitcoin never scales in my opinion bitcoin will remain an assetand the use of bitcoin as a means of payment will decrease

bitcoin will still be the best gold coin and I am sure bitcoin will remain number one even though transactions are not as many as altcoin because they have high selling points and crytocurrency will always increase and will always strengthen many altcoins wherever the market I think will be busy and investors will be happy in selling and buy if the market is crowded so that bitcoin will become the peak of altcoin sales

Bitcoin as a comparison in cryptocurrency is something that should be, because the value of bitcoin itself compared to altcoin is very different. Indeed there are a number of altcoins that are close to the price of bitcoin, but that is not a measure because of price fluctuations that cause price differences.

LN is an off-chain solution. I don't know about other users, but for me it is just not the same as seeing my tx in a block explorer. So, I am still looking for Bitcoin to scale, really scale, on-chain scale. Otherwise, the first scenario (of skyrocketing fees) will happen, of that I am sure.

The problem of bitcoin scalability is related to the initial limitation by developers of the size of one megabyte of the basic structure for data storage (block) in its blockchain

If BTC never scales, the industry will be majorly affected, people will not invest in other coins that are connected or inclined with BTC.  Some "coins" will be dissolved as well.  There might be a chance that the whole market will be disrupted  :-X :-X

Well, it's hoped that the LN would reduce load on the main Bitcoin blockchain by doing everything off-chain. Fees might not rise drastically like it did last year, since opened channels on the LN could process thousands (if not millions) of transactions without the need to close them. The on-chain fee would rely on opening/closing a LN channel. However, because channels could remain open for as long as the user wants, stress on the main chain would not be that much. Better off, Channel Factories would greatly eliminate the need to constantly open/close a LN channel, resulting in lesser fees on the BTC network.

As for on-chain scaling, it might work, but it has a far more centralized approach than LN. Imagine having a blockchain with huge block sizes of 128mb (like Bitcoin SV). This will involve higher storage and bandwidth costs for full node operators, which results in greater centralization of the blockchain. On the other hand, LN is a much more decentralized approach as anyone (AFAIK) can launch a LN node without the need to spend a lot in resources. The LN enables the user to select among different nodes available if he/she believe that a specific node is centralized. While I'm not sure how LN transactions could be tracked, it seems to be the safest approach for scaling Bitcoin without compromising the blockchain.

Nonetheless, if by any way Bitcoin doesn't scale, then it shouldn't be an issue, since other Bitcoin forks have managed to increase their block sizes for greater capacity. They'll serve their purpose as "digital cash", while Bitcoin will remain as a store of value and the King of Cryptocurrencies. Just my opinion :)

I think that if bitcoin does not scale, it will dry out as with any technology/company that does not progress into the future, it will be replaced and forgotten, but for that to happen the community has to let it die, which I do not think will happen because btc is decentralized and have very committed fans.

I think that btc will have a great future. I hope that it will be used widely all over the world. I think that it will be able to povide us with numerous advantages and one of them is the fast payments and confidentiality btc offers

If you can not scale bitcoin.
People are going to start losing bitcoin's reliability and it can go down much more.

If it doesnt scale , it may become stable which is i think good because it will be less threatening though we cannot experience a high potential profit anymore but this event can still open many possibilities for  bitcoin  .


Bitcoin can never get taxed because it is not under the governments but it can still be used by a government organozation or any other companies and they can used it to pay for thier employees  .

Scalability alone cannot kill Bitcoin although it is good for it to scale in order to achieve the daily usage of BTC in the purchase of goods and services, thus serving its first purpose as a currency. If BTC does not scale, it will still remain as a store of value which is already seen now - due to its limited supply, the increase demand will raise its value which will bring more profits to its investors/holders.

the community will definitely maintain the bitcoin market cap. if there is a store that accepts bitcoin as a payment, surely bitcoin is a coin that will be used for that. because bitcoin is the most popular coin and we cannot refute it. but if indeed the facts in the field indicate that the altcoin is more leading for everyday transactions, the ether, ripple, or xlm will lead it. and bitcoin will be forgotten.

Then it will be a terrible currency system. Number of the users will be limited, and bitcoin can only serve a small group of people. Other program will replace bitcoin one day.

if a currency type that which is restricted for extended module, no many people want to join it

All must decide, and for the better! Bitcoin will remain and retain its value, and may even increase. Go to a higher asset class. And other coins will perform for him all the dirty work.

That's certainly true, mate. If Bitcoin doesn't scale to the wider public, then it cannot be used as a currency. It would only be useful as a store of value, just like Gold. As you've said earlier, another cryptocurrency might replace Bitcoin sometime in the future, if it proves to be secure, faster, and cheaper than Bitcoin. The technology is already there to make Bitcoin scale to millions of TPS at the lowest cost possible. However, it would be up to the people to adopt new scaling solutions to help make Bitcoin a better cryptocurrency.

Otherwise, existing centralized payment solutions would stay on the lead for quite some time. Bitcoin and Blockchain technology need to beat out centralized systems like PayPal and Visa, to effectively remove the middleman once and for all. Only then, Blockchain would've achieved its true purpose by giving the people sovereignty over their own money.

Nonetheless, this will be long story that might never end if no scaling solution is put up to the test. Just my thoughts ;D

 it has not been scaled as currency, there is no crypto currency that tends to scale for mass adoption.It's hard for merchants to have confidence in receiving bitcoin if they do not have confidence that the income they produce will have the same value..

You do have a point there, mate. There would be no point in scaling Bitcoin for mass adoption, if its value is relatively unstable. Considering how hard Bitcoin has been hit with this year's bear market, it'll be quite difficult for Bitcoin to attract new people into using it for their daily needs. Hence, there should be more regulation in the crypto space to help stabilize Bitcoin's price. Only then, Bitcoin could aim for scaling to limitless TPS for the whole world to enjoy.

The real question is whenever Bitcoin's LN would become adopted or not within the future. Because if it doesn't, then the scaling solution would have failed. Then, there would be nothing else left for Bitcoin but to simply look for an alternative scaling solution which could be easily adopted by the masses. The key is to promote and spread education related to Bitcoin's newest scaling technologies to make people use them. Otherwise, Bitcoin will continue to be used as a store of value for a long time. Just my opinion :)

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