Bitcoin Forum

If bitcoin really became the backbone of the world's financial system, as every bitcoiner dreams of, it will be impossible for anyone to have a transaction confirmed on the main chain. The fee price will be so high that only corporations, financial institutions and governments will have the cash flow to do it. Second layer solutions demand a main chain transaction, so it won't help. Even early adopters will be forced to move to second layer solutions.
At this pace bitcoin is becoming a tool for the system it was created to destroy.

This conversation goes all the way back to Hal Finney, who suggested that banks could issue currency backed by Bitcoin reserves sort of like the Free Banking era of the 1800s. Lyn Alden points out that this is the basic structure of our money already. A base layer upon which successive layers lose hardness but gain flexibility. Venmo floats on top of Visa which floats on banks which float on the Fed which ultimately is grounded by US debt (Treasuries). Look hard enough into money and you see the whole world is just floating on top of US Treasuries. It's kind of mad.

So yeah, there's a good chance that future humans will rarely interact with real Bitcoin. Just like we don't pay for coffee with Treasury bonds, even if that's what ultimately is happening. The difference is that the base money layer would be a whole lot more solid with Bitcoin than it is with debt. But that's a whole other theoretical rabbit hole to go down.

This was known since the very first reply to Satoshi's announcement of Bitcoin on the cryptography mailing list: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/threads/1/#014814


This is why the Lightning Network was developed so you can perform transactions that do not require you to use the main chain every time.

Unless there's some significant transaction compression. Taproot allows for collaborative and privacy-enhancing transaction setups. Multiple users can sign a transaction and have their signatures combined into one, more compact. That, and the merging of multiple spending conditions into one, can greatly improve scalability. I can imagine a second layer solution, where 1000 users broadcast one Taproot transaction to open, e.g., 1000 lightning channels.

(That example probably won't work with the current lightning software, but it's technically possible)

Huh ? That's what you get from his reply to Donald ? That it doesn't scale onchain ?

"Long before the network gets anywhere near as large as that, it would be safe for users to use Simplified Payment Verification ( section 8 ) to check for double spending, which only requires having the chain of block headers, or about 12KB per day. Only people trying to create new coins would need to run network nodes. At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with that one node.

The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day. That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or 2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then, sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

Satoshi Nakamoto"

Second-layer solutions DO help — it's just that no one has found/publicized an actual viable solution yet. It's unrealistic to think that if bitcoin became an actual backbone of a huge financial system, that no one has yet figured something out for scaling.

Second layer solutions will probable be the future for small transactions scalability.

It doesn't make sense to save records that someone bought a cup of tea on every node in the network.

Small transactions should be kept on second layer, imo. However lightning adoption is not that high yet.

It is not my dream because I am living with reality.

Governments and central banks will use blockchain technology to build up their Central Bank Digital Currencies CBDCs but they will not directly use Bitcoin blockchain for it because they have no control on Bitcoin blockchain.

Has Bitcoin protocol been upgraded many times since 2009?

Think of its past upgrades technically, you will easily see how Bitcoin protocol will continue to be developed and upgraded in future to satisfy with new challenges, new demands and bigger opportunities.

Just force the smaller transactions out and off to LTC/Doge.

No BTC sends under 0.0005

No BTC fees under 0.00005

and push LN to every exchange .

at the moment I still am having trouble finding an exchange that will allow me to join and that uses LN

I am fairly tech minded and have tried 6 exchanges with no luck.

I can send from nicehash and I do have some very small btc mining there.

But I do not have an LN node I do not want one.

and with no ability to send from LN to a LN exchange I am kind of stuck.

Basically L2 and lightning will be the solution. These solutions are in use with Ethereum pretty much. Ethereum fees were awful for years and people finally started to just use Polygon, Arbitrium, Zksync, etc.

The transactions are very quick, very cheap. I think on Arbitrium it’s like 10 cents but on Polygon I’ve seen a transaction go for less than a penny. And you got pretty good protection. And if you want you can easily bridge back to ETH for cold storage use. This will happen to bitcoin pretty soon due to these high fees.

Well yeah of course once Bitcoin is used a lot 99.9%+ of transactions won't happen on the main chain. And you seem to be confused about second layers if you think it won't help. It is literally designed to help this. With, for example the main L2 solution currently, the LN, you can do a single on-chain transaction and then do many off-chain transactions, potentially thousands. So of course doing thousands of transactions for every single on-chain transaction helps!

Yes EVERYONE will use higher up layers in the future. That is normal and expected. All financial networks work in this way. Higher layers are for efficiency, lower layers are for security. Anybody who has a bank account regularly uses the higher layers and not the base layer of the fiat system. Bitcoin will be the same, except you'll be using Bitcoin instead of fiat and banks.

The base chain will only be used for on-boarding onto higher layers, and moving large amounts of money around. Think about it this way, if we're talking about Bitcoin being used on an everyday basis in a way that can completely replace your use of fiat: you do a one-time onboarding transaction to let's say the LN, you then get paid your paychecks on the LN, and spend money on the LN. You're spending your paychecks and getting your LN address refilled with each paycheck, so ideally you can do that indefinitely. The Bitcoin ecosystem will probably need other L2 solutions, and perhaps even L3 solutions built on top of those.

Also lots of people just care about convenience, and don't care about having a decentralized self-banking currency. So many millions of people will probably just have custodial wallets in which the custodian does the vast majority of the transactions off-chain and the users never even hit on-chain at all. Everyone is used to using banks, most people are gonna prefer their bitcoin being used like they used banks, rather than bitcoin displacing banks, and so banks or crypto companies will hold their bitcoin and everything will be handled for them internally at these custodians or on higher layer networks between custodians. Layers, custodians, etc scales Bitcoin's 5+ tx/sec to thousands of tx/sec. The ecosystem is going to be developed so that people can avoid having to pay a ya know like $100 fee even a single time to hit the blockchain, cuz nobody wants to do that.

The business models of the bitcoin ecosystem will be developed around users not needing to hit the chain and pay large fees. Thousands of transactions will be done for every single on-chain transaction. This will require a lot of building. Bitcoin is still very early stages in the grand scheme of things. Only a tiny bit of the eventual ecosystem has been built out or even thought up at this point.

subnetworks will have niche utility. but the current promoted one LN is not fit for purpose and is buggy. it doesnt meet its promises and is not "THE solution"
even after 6 years the devs have admitted to its flaws and the only work around is to join more centralised hubs and use centralised servers to manage channels while you sleep and other reasons to rely on centralised services..
they actually pushed bitcoin devs to include taproot multisig functionality purely to help LN offer more centralised "group" funding locks

LN suffers from liquidity bottlenecks because of the way it borrows each route participants balance for payments rather than paying direct to recipient
it has lots more other issues too like opening channel balance without a network audit that channels are "funding locked". yep some malicious services create channels(tempID) promising people balance on their wallet GUI screen, but without having funds locked to guarantee payment(services can double spend)

NEW FUTURE subnetworks could and should be developed without the flaws where they offer things for different niches.
they can also have their own offchain (reserve swap) bridges between different subnetworks. that way a 'adsense' subnetwork can fund swap with a "retailer giftcard" subnetwork

where there are numerous subnetworks offering different levels of service
EG
a "google adsense" subnetwork where penny/cent value is moved
a "fast food" subnetwork where payment of upto $50 value are moved
a "grocery/bill" subnetwork where under $1k value are moved

however the current promoted subnetwork that pretends to be "the solution" doesnt even meet 5% of its promises and its not a service for everyone although it pretends its something everyone should use instead of bitcoin

Not fully true. On certain 2nd layer (such as sidechain), Bitcoin on-chain transaction only needed when you "convert" between BTC (on-chain) and BTC (2nd layer).


Only if people decide to use centralized system which rely/use on Bitcoin on-chain network.

I have constantly asked myself how the community would fit in the principle of bitcoin's core principles of decentralization while looking for a solution to the issue of scaling. Since we are in an evolving space we may find the perfect solution to it.

LN is not a solution to everything. The points that OP raised, is super valid. The Bitcoin architecture itself is not enough for mass adoption. The network is simply not capable of handling huge amount of transactions.

Lightning network is a side chain. But it also needs to broadcast the transactions through the main chain. If the mempool always remains busy, eventually the lightning network will have to pay higher fees while broadcasting.

There has to be some core algorithm change to accommodate the changing needs of the users.

I was just like this OP, I had my mind set on the coming bull market and how the transaction fee will affect me so much at the period, many people have talk about using lightning Network few times already but I felt lazy about it, until I gave it a shot, well it is the only solution to high transaction fee right now, the earlier you get into this the better.

The only solution to avoid high fee is LT Network, do give it a try first and drop your result later, I advice everyone to get used to this already because I believe that the existence of Ordinals and other BRCs will greatly affects the transaction fee starting from few months from now on.

Even if the LT get congested too, possibly if people start seeing this as the only option left, I believe it will still be fair in comparison, I still don't like it but what can anyone do about it anyway?

It's certainly possible.  Some articles (https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/lightning-is-doomed) are already speculating that LN might evolve to be more of a "gateway" to make other layers interoperable. 

I'm reluctant to accept the notion that we should be introducing more custodial control, though.  The whole idea here is that we're meant to be cutting down on that sort of thing and removing the need to trust middlemen.  But I'm certain there will always be a non-custodial option for those who wish to take responsibility and maintain their monetary sovereignty.  Basically, there will be something for everyone.  However you want to manage your wealth, there should be a way to do it.

mk4 summed it up and I've said it often.

Scaling is a desirable "problem". Each stage that has required Bitcoin to scale has meant a milestone in adoption, and the crossing of bridges that required utility to get there. Any network other than Bitcoin and Ethereum would love to have a scaling problem. Pointless in building networks that can have 1 million tps without utility or providing the security Bitcoin does.

And if someone has figured it out, he's going to be one rich dude that's for sure.


Or maybe — it's not Lightning? I think we're betting too much on Lightning being 'the' layer-2. It could be something else!

It is concerning for us who spend and receive Bitcoin often.  But it is only a temporary concern like 'What do I do, I have to spend X transactions and I have to spend too many Fees to be a priority in the Mempool'.  Long term, this issue is not much of a concern.  Unfortunately there will be times when unpredictable things occur.  Fortunately there are ways to fight the issues.

I do think Lightning Network is of help but I do not think it is THE solution we need.  Either Lightning needs some changes or we need a different solution.  The positive thing is by having Lightning we see proof there is a way so hope is not lost.

I do not think Bitcoin will not be used much Onchain in the future as one user pointed above.  I HOPE this is not the truth because Bitcoin is not meant to be like Gold or other backings of Currencies.  It is meant to solve the trouble of 2008, right?  If we stop using Bitcoin and let Banks handle it then how to we help the vision of Satoshi come true?

Bitcoin transaction fees will remain high as long as there are abnormal rates of transactions. The reason why the transaction fee increases when a vulnerable transaction starts is because the transaction with the highest free will be confirmed first. That's because the block always gives the highest priority to the one with the highest transaction free. In this case, many are willing to pay high fees to complete the transaction quickly, due to which everyone is demanding high fees. And thus the transaction fees only keep on increasing.  Again, when the transaction volume returns to normal, the free comes down again

The miner chose the transactions to be include in a block, not the block automatically chose the transactions that has highest fee. Most miners choose transactions that has a high fee because they can earn more money than the transactions that has middle or low fee.

High transaction volume not necessary make the fee went high, if every people are make transactions by paying 1 sat/vbyte, it's won't increased to 2 sat/vbyte.

I don't really hope or think that BTC will ever become the backbone of the world's financial system, because not every country is going to adopt it, and even if they do adopt it globally, it will be abandoned after some time just like countries are trying to become independent of US dollars (example is BRICS). Even if BRICS can't oppose the US fully but it does make some impact. Just like that if BTC becomes the backbone of the financial world then it will also be opposed by rivalries.

Anyway, I agree with you on the fact that BTC is not scalable, because it can't even process the transactions of every citizen of El-Salvador if made. The transaction process time and block size is very slow. It has to be increased if BTC wants to become the backbone of the world's financial system.

The fee is already high and the scalability problems are already showing up even if it has not become a backbone yet, And talking about L2 solutions like lightning network, which you said, not going to work, but how in what way, because it did help us to reduce the transaction fee.

This whole high transaction fees thing with Bitcoin can definitely be worrying if you send and get paid in BTC a lot.  I mean, having to cough up more in fees just to make sure your payment goes through quicker is kind of a pain.  But in the big picture, it's probably not something to freak out about too much and  stuff like this happens sometimes

The good news is there seem to be ways to handle these kinds of scaling problems. that hopefully can help with capacity down the road.  For now fees might stay higher when traffic gets congested, but it's likely just short-term noise and not a permanent issue.