Bitcoin Forum

Even though i know the advantages of SegWit and LN, don't we need to increase block weight/size since i think current block weight/size won't be enough if more people adopt/use Bitcoin & some people might think LN isn't really useful since they still need to pay big fees to open/close LN channel?
I know raising maximum block size/weight is risking decentralization, but i think it won't be hurt to increase it not too much as long as there's data/consensus which says most nodes still can run even after raising maximum block size/weight?

What do you think? Also, CMIIW.

While I don't have a solid stance on raising the block size, I see a lot of roadblocks in the way of doing it.

• Raising the block size makes running a full node less accessible.
• Raising the block size requires a hard fork of the entire Bitcoin network, which imo would be extremely difficult.
• A lot of people are against it (/r/Bitcoin) just because other people have told them to be against it and haven't formed their own opinions, but are swept up in the tribalism

I also believe the lightning network will be successful. People may point at segwit and say "well segwit was supposed to help fees too, and we have low segwit adoption months after the soft fork". These people are correct, but they miss (imo) a huge point. Say a transaction fee on our congested network is $20. With segwit, that fee becomes ~$14 (roughly). With the lightning network, that fee becomes <$0.01. It's a massive, massive difference.

Say you have two choices: sell all your Bitcoins, because you believe Bitcoin is dead and can't properly scale. Alright, that takes 1 last transaction to move your coins to an exchange and sell them. OR, you could make one last transaction to open a lightning channel. Now, your Bitcoins are all available on the lightning network, where you can make instant, near-zero fee transactions.

I don't believe people will stop using the main network when people start shifting towards using the lightning network. But the more services that support the lightning network, the less payments will be made on chain, which frees up more room for people to make on chain transactions, transactions like opening more lightning network channels.

The battle that needs fought now (again, imo) is adoption of the lightning network. It's a drastic change from the benefits provided by segwit, which was more about fixing transaction malleability. If we could only fight one more battle, and it had to be raise the block size or get people to move over to the lightning network, the latter is going to work for a lot longer than the former. Because it's important which battles we choose here, because people will quickly get tired of needing to make changes to use Bitcoin.

Why raise blocksize if blocks aren't utilizing the recent blocksize increase of SegWit? Why raise blocksize if companies still don't batch their transactions? Why raise blocksize if a lot of software still uses horrible fee estimation algorithms? We have enough tools to keep fees reasonably low if only they were used more. But a lot of transaction traffic comes from centralized services like exchanges, and they are too incompetent or malicious to implement those technologies.


Some studies suggest that 8 MB would significantly decrease the network node count. We haven't even seen how SegWit's blocksize increase would affect it, so it would be very reckless to do any blocksize increases soon.

Sure, it's bad that fees are high, but high fees are not going to kill Bitcoin, because they are driven by open market, they are not installed by one side only like it happens in some centralized systems.
But centralization can kill Bitcoin, you can't undo the damage of big blocks if the blockchain became bloated past certain point.

Of courde high fees can't kill bitcoin, it even didn't affect it overally but don't you hear words from people who says so high fees make it useless to make transaction? Bitcoin is decentralyzed for me, safest option and great currency. These high fees does shit job, I can't receive transaction quickly without ultra high fees. And yes, some people prefer high fees and spammed network because they use it for theirself. Block size must be increased and I think currently even 4MB will be absolutely enough.

The Lightning network sounds like the best plan for Bitcoin's current issues, but what does it mean to adapt to it? Is it going to be totally different and outside of Bitcoin's blockchain? Does this make the value of Bitcoin lesser in any way?

The lightning network moves the majority of small transactions off-chain, in a way that they are always backed by a real transaction signed by both parties at all times. This allows users to pay each other without miner fees, but money transferred on the lightning network is always "real" bitcoin.

Graphene is really where it's at. A block size in and of itself isn't a problem. Storage is cheap. It's bandwidth. So if we can get blocks broadcast with low overhead, high compression, and low latency, we can continue to enjoy decentralization while upping transaction processing capacity.

As a quick fix for crazy high fees playing with block size and timing might increase
Bitcoin from 7 TPS per second to maybe 15 TPS like it has done for ETH but its just a quick fix
but my code will sort out the 19,000 miners that we don't need anymore

public static money MaxFee=1.50 // only need 1,000 miners and then they can then earn fair days pay for fair days work.

Longer term the block-chain needs to scale and if it's so good like they have been saying
for years then why would they now be telling us that "Off-Block" is the way to go.

The development team are not loyal to us so why should I be loyal to them and its not like they
didn't know nine years ago that the block-chain as implemented would never scale, it was always
a hack job from the start and now they are milking it and this could result in a total crash

Well is i am sure you know already when not opening threads and removing comments but reading them instead that
Lightning (LN) with its hubs/banks is using a degree of centralization so that old cherry won't work no more and LN takes
data "of-Block" so we may as well throw Block-Chain in the bin instead of making out it's the best thing ever designed by
man.

Yes you can undo the damage of big blocks by restructuring the data and is something called a data migration
but the BTC developers are getting rich pretending we are running out of space, disk space is worth $25 to store
a mere 250 bytes and they kind of like the introduction of banks that are trying to call hubs in LN

Maybe the development team needs to go back to school and learn what distributed computing is all about because clearly
the development team have dropped the ball and they are going about the fix in the wrong way entirely.

"But centralization can kill Bitcoin"

Fees are killing Bitcoin and we are getting some centralization anyway so why not patch for now and do the job
right using block-matrix or is that getting in the way of profits for them.

I like very much the comment that large blocks help a 51% attack,.

Could someone please explain more these points:

1. "BTC developers are getting rich pretending ..." ??? what does this mean, unlike DASH, there is no percentage for developers is there?

2. "Moving data to LN is killing the block chain": is the lightning network structured in a consensus manner similar to the block chain? so effectively it becomes a Block-Tree not a single chain, but still every spur is agreed upon before moving on to the next?

Anyone that writes a financial system and needs to protect against a 51% attack needs to find another job as do any
programmers that need CPU-wars between miners to keep Intel and AMD rich along with big oil and the icing on the
cake is Bitcoin will not scale and they knew this from day one, like nine years ago.

80% of the Bitcoin code is about mining, the miners and developers are one and the same and no one works for free
but now they have got greedy and are offering us bread today and jam tomorrow but it's too little, too late IMHO

Nothing at all "Block-Chain" about LN and the main sales pitch is on about "Off-Chain" which seem like back peddling
from what they have been trying to promote for the past nine years and if you look closer then it uses banks that host
private ledgers and charges fees but the development teams like to call them hubs instead.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A

Come on 20,000 full nodes just to process seven transactions a second when VISA can process 25,000 per second
and the network has 1000 X less processing power than the Bitcoin network and people fall for this clap trap.

I am aware my posts are being watched but they dare not drop by and have it out with me so do they
fear developers that are "Not on the team" and how long will it be before the masses see that huge
transactions fees is the real reason for $6,000 being knocked off the price of BTC
 

I heavily disagree with Anti-Cen who is going full conspiracy theorist, saying "censorship" and "ln is the same thing as banks". That's not how any of this works. Lightning Network is so vastly different from banking.

Lightning Network	| Banks
Completely Trustless	| Requires trust in a financial institution
Instant payments	| Payments take days to be routed through ACH

etc, etc...

I highly recommend that anybody not familiar with how the lightning network operates read this overview (http://dev.lightning.community/overview/) on how transactions are created and routed through the lightning network.

As for the rest of what they're saying, I'm not even going to give them the satisfaction of arguing with them because it seems very much like they're not interested in the technical details of how things work, but would rather go around with a sign on a stick telling everybody the end is nigh.

You "think" it would not hurt to increase it. Ok, I want achow or someone who has a deeper understanding of the block sizes and block propagation to make a comment on OP's "thinks it would not hurt to increase the block size".

OP, then why are the Core developers unwilling to do it? There has to be a good technical reason, correct?

Would you like to send me your email address so that I can forward on to you the messages that I get when my posts here are deleted and
then lets talk about "conspiracy theorist"

Yes banks not same as Bitcoin if we are talking about Ripple and VISA, they work fast and don't charge such high fees
and SWIFT like Bitcoin is living in the days of the past.


Do you deny these hub things take transactions of the block-chain that we were told was the best thing since sliced bread
Do you deny these hub things charge fees and keep a private ledger 
Do you deny these hub things use a degree of centralization

disagree all you like but I will call these "Hub things" banks because they are

Anyone can open a Lightning channel with anyone else, and anyone can also open as many channels as they like. But I guess you're going to call anyone with more than 1 channel a bank ::)


You've had it explained to you many times already, but it seems you're resistant to learning and just want to shout about everyone being a bank instead. You can use the same logic for Bitcoin mainnet, it's absolutely full of banks. One of the original taglines to promote Bitcoin was, in fact, "be your own bank".

---

agreeing with everyone who says "blocks aren't full yet", or "Bitcoin needs validation performance increases first so the network can handle it"

People forget that IF they start to actively use the lightning network, there will be far less on-chain-transactions.
Most TX's will be handled on the LN. There won't be the need to close a channel immediately. Your coins can 'remain' there without any problem.
This, compared with exchanges adopting segwit, would lower the fees to make it 'payable' again.



The point is.. increasing the blocksize is just a short-short-term-solution.
Its the easiest way of 'handling' this problem. Just double the blocksize every X years, when fees get too high.
You can double the blocksize now.. but in 1-2 years you will have the same problem again and your 'increase it not too much' is totally gone.
The only, real, way to reach mass adoption and an extremely massive scaling is by introducing a second layer to BTC.

Yes and what happens when you close the channel after Alice sends Bob $2 does it result in

1. Next to no fees
2. Bob having to pay $30 to miners as his Tx hits the block
3. Both Bob and Alice having to pay the Bitcoin miners $30 each


Wallets and Hubs are not the same thing at all and not only have I tried to explain this many times myself here
but others are saying just the same as me outside the church


And it went on to say "Virtual free transaction fees" so maybe "you're resistant to learning" when it comes
to hubs keeping balance, semi centralized and they charge fees just like banks do

People forget that Bitcoin came to fame because of the block-chain and LN takes everything "Off block"
until you settle up with various hubs that may or may not have good channels to other hubs/banks

Sorry but they are trying to have their cake and eat it

Block-Matrix is whats needed, not hub/banks so the scaling that's going on is at the wrong level and
miners will be queuing up to host major hubs and we know what they can do with fees already so yes
they might allow you to keep a channel open to them for a month but what account charges will we
be getting from them for this service.

Outside this church that i find myself in other people are having the debate
https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/7njeph/the_lightning_network_is_a_scam_it_has_nothing_to/
125 comments and the jest of the answers basically acknowledge that it can is more economical if
you don't use the car and take the bus which is basically whats going on with Lightning 

There's no advantage to closing the channel having used it once. So

4. Channel stays open, 0 fees



Anyone can become a Bitcoin bank, just open a wallet or a Lightning channel



Lightning will be free. Or virtually free.

And my Lightning node won't charge fees, alot of people will do this to encourage the network to be better connected. Probably alot of traffic will get routed through free Lightning nodes (why pay?). Someone trying to charge high fees is gonna have a hard time competing with that.

You don't know how it works, basically. Please learn, you sound crazy.

so if we P2P channel so I buy a car from you placed auto advert then I just keep it open ?


or unless the other side closes the channel which hub/banks will do when they need paying so that
they too can meet running costs of closing channels with other hubs/banks. Settlement needs real BTC
that are on the BC and fake copy will not do.


The miners will host the big hubs and we had this story already about fees that were more or less zero
two years ago.

Nodes are just relays and my argument concerns LN hubs and inter bank settlement and fees on top of BTC Tx fees  
[/quote]


I can always tell when I am winning and the other side resorts to insults but you did
not answer my points and want to talk around them so please let me know what
specific point you would like to disagree on and also note that I am not against
Segwit which kinds of brings file compression to the blocks using "Extended blocks" to
store data in BC because short term it is a good fix

Increasing the block size would solve our current situation, but how would we get most of the network to accept the change? In line with that comes many cons. Main reason is that it would increase hardware and bandwidth demands, thereby increasing cost to operate a node.

There's a somewhat 'controversial(?)' reason as to why core has not yet increased the blocksize. I think it's still being censored here, so if anyone wants the link to the reddit discussion send me a pm.

Everyone's a bank in Bitcoin
Everyone's a bank on the Lightning network


That's totally wrong

Validation performance didn't even enter my mind, that's a huge point. You wouldn't just need more storage space, doing things like running a full node on an rpi3 would become more difficult.

Yes if they hold the public key

No because not everyone becomes a hub and keeps lots of channels open because it costs
$30 in Tx fees to close them and get the balance committed to the BC

lets draw this out and Bob sends Alice $1.00

Bob---->You---->Hub1<><><><>Hub2<------Alice

You become a relay node that lets Bob share your major hub because you use Bitcoin
five times a day, always online and share the channel.

Hub1 settling up with Hub2 cost him money (in debt to hub2) so he wants you to chip in with the bill
and takes fees from you for the service but Hub1/2 settling does not mean that Bob is forced to settle
up with Hub1 or you or even Bob

Question
1. Hub1 and you fall out, fees to high but hub1 owes you $500 so explain settlement of the public and private ledgers
2. Bob owes you $1 but the channel is no use because you have no out going channels so what happens to Bob



Yeah, maybe you should take your issue up with this guy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFfBRzh9HmU
because i think people will see that my comment was totally right

Double SHA256 is not a huge bottleneck in terms of validation; if anything, it would just be the merkle tree size. Running full nodes on a Raspberry Pis is a bad idea in general. Low network performance and moderate to OK CPU performance.

Amazing little devices for the price so are you talking about the block files being on the network (LAN)
or coming from a USB disk drive attached to the device ?

200gb from RJ45 would be slow and even USB3 D-Drive (thinks they do USB3) would be slow
so are you talking about plunging a SETA drive into a Raspberry here ?

Reading back down the BC for a current transaction to check all part coins history making up
the wallet without a major large index in memory would involve reading near 200gb of block files
so hats off to anyone that gets a full node working on one of these $40 devices.

That's totally wrong.

There is no $30 fee (it's a bid-based supply/demand fee, not a fixed number). And there's no necessity to close channels often.

And there's every incentive to open plenty of channels. And free fees will undermine any attempt to turn Lightning routing into a business.



No, it's totally wrong. I'm talking to you, not some youtube video. If there's someone on that video who knows what they're talking about, they're definitely not saying anything resembling what you said.

Your ability to communicate facts about Bitcoin is completely inverted in relation to your confidence: you think you're perfect, but you sound like you're talking in your sleep after getting drunk the night before

Can the block size be increased using merely a soft fork? Because hardforks these days are just becoming useless and as they create an alter chain most of the people are reluctant to move on. Increasing block size will surely cater most of the needs of our present time and 4MB would cater need of a pretty long time.

IIRC the block size cannot be increased without a hard fork. The reason segwit effectively increased the block size was because it moved some data outside of the transactions, but didn't change the block size limit. I could also be very wrong.

oh yes so next time I will use the number $30-55 to ensure I cover today fees up to the max we have seen

But if you owe money then you end up paying $30 tx fees to close the channel on top of fees to hub/bank
as settlement is done on BC so good incentive to people with money coming in but not going out. T&C for all I know
between client (me/You) and bank could prevent you passing the $30-55 fee on to the hub/bank and needs a deposit to
cover this situation.

I am not sure quite what you are saying here, competition between banks/hubs is what I think your
getting at so please clarify


No you are wrong and from your comment it is clear you did not watch it so save the speculation and lets deal in facts please.

Sorry but insults from you just pushes the point home that your line of thinking does not have any legs to stand on.

I think you are right and it sort of compresses the block but not by using Gzip but moving some of the data
to what they call an "extended block" so maybe the files will look more like

BLK000001.dat
BET000001.dat

Here I am guessing but from a coding perspective it will make it more complicated having to read/parse two files
and will break existing code so I suspect I am missing something key here.

Who's going to make money out of a p2p network if there are nodes on it charging zero routing fees? You can charge as high a price as you like, nodes will simply route around your node.

There's no incentive to charge high fees (or any fees) if it makes your node less well connected. And there's no cost to running a node if you have a home and a computer. So your talk of centralised hubs is complete nonsense, they'll be sat around routing nothing (and costing the same amount to run as the nodes who do route traffic)



It's true, you're incoherent and rambling alot of the time

We are going to need changes to the protocol, eventually.

Perhaps the Lightning network is going to enough - I'm sure the devs are going to know best what to do.

How does anyone find a hub if we don't have coordinators which is semi-centralized not that I object
but they should admit this instead of pretending otherwise.

Routing is fine, like relays on Tor network and these nodes don't hold private ledgers and therefore do not
need to settle accounts. Yes no trouble but now we get to banks/hubs that hold private ledgers "Off-Block"
and charge fees like in the little diagram I did you.

Lets deal with settlement of hubs as channels close please instead of going around the houses


I deal in facts, logic and reason and I provide links in a lot of cases plus I earn a good living in software
so maybe I have trouble talking to people that are slot-machine bandits, have vested interests and cannot
get the point across using "Facts, logic and reason"

In the beginning, like five years or more ago I would agree with you but that's not the game being played
out today because money and greed has taken over so lets look at a case history of ETH !

Ticking along fine, Crypto-Kitties went basaltic using ETH "Smart Contracts" and the network became
unusable so did the miners put the fees up via "Gas" to reduce load to silly prices or do they all work as
a team to deal with the problem that seems to have been resolved in no time.

Contrast this with Bitcoin as the development teams tries to hide behind "Consensus" and pretending they
are skinning LN out as Rome burns.

  

Increase cost in running nodes, and would hinder decentralization, usual and still hypothetical reasons they give out.

The real reason lies on the "head maintainer" of the core github repository, Wladimir Van der Laan. He decides which software changes will go in the official core releases. Here's what he thinks about this issue:

The block size allready increase, after SegWit

Carton, would it be fair to say that the Lightning Network would function like Ripple but with a few differences like, Lightning channels are backed by real Bitcoins while a Ripple "trust" channel is backed by nothing but an IOU?

I would like to add that OP looks like a Ripple supporter.

Can't agree more with this. What we need to do is education and awareness on what exactly LN is. OP itself thinks Lightning Network increases fees. All the transactions occur off-chain and once the payment channel is closed you settle it in the main chain. It is similar to how you open a debt account in the local grocery store where lets say the paper that records your debt is stored in a box with two padlocks and each of you has the key.

Are you saying that BTC is backed by something else like gold and not just IOU's

Ripple is fantastic apart from it being owned by bankers but lets face it the BTC miners
and development team are taking us for dick-heads with the speed and fees so maybe
your being a little bias towards XRP with all due respect

Are you joking because just now we are so decentralization that we have 20,000 nodes processing a mere
seven transactions per second and the development team have been happy for these miners to all share the cream
on top of the cake and charge us silly fees.

From another perspective we have 90% of mining pools being owned by ten big names
See https://blockchain.info/pools

Lightning network also becomes centralized around hubs that charge fees, maintain private ledgers
and therefore are know to the rest of the world as banks and what about this fantastic concept of
"Public block-chain" we have been sold for the past eight year or do you not see the contradiction here.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpfvhiqFw7A but you will need to watch this to the end

No we don’t. On chain scaling won’t solve anything. Solution we are looking for is lightning network and hopefully will be ready soon.

So "On-Block" was god until it didn't scale like they knew all along and now "Off-Block" is cool

if others can manage to keep it all on block then maybe there is something wrong with the
development team but this statement excludes all BTC clones because they all suffer from the
same bad foundations and will hit the same problems.

Read up about Block-Matrix to deal with scaling which includes a degree of centralization
but so does LN anyway and also introduces lots more problems too.

Developers are eating the cream on the cake with miners, Anti-cen is asking the development team for considering a change in Bitcoin.
Miners are against any change, why change if you can earn more money? why do you think *devs are in charge?
Lightning network will stop manipulation of fees, if miners get to charge high fees on their hubs, people would use the hubs with the lowest fees.

But we can do that now and set the mining fee low and wait for ever and a day for a miner to pick the block up
so maybe your talking about the fees charged by the larger LN hubs or what I visualize as international banks in which case
market forces might apply not that i see the need for this approach

I don't know, all these developers working for nuffin, well i wonder how they make a living  ;)

Who is others? BCash? Ether?
Vitalik said transaction fees will never go above 1 cent, now its like 5$ or even more.
Only difference is that the volume on others is a lot smaller.
‘’On-Block’’ is obviously not a solution.

Yes correct in the case of Bitcoin due to the way it has been implemented and all that happens is
20,000 nodes all need to keep 200gb of data in sync so it's one big set of files that is replicated however
this is not what you call distributed processing which would be more like 50 sets of nodes working in small teams
teams with each team being responsible for 1/50th of the data.

Ist year students studying computer science in university could had worked out that one big fat data
structure would reach a limit and when it would be reached but i think what has happened with Bitcoin is that
cryptographic experts (Yes i say they are good) have been allowed to take over from computer programmers
and academia has been allowed to run wild, hence each stage has been over engineered with the basics being
forgotten.

Ripple presents data as if it "On-block" and can do 50,000 transactions per second and not just seven but
I would guess it uses a tree type structure much like DNS servers work but this is far from the only configuration
and you can have a star structure and you need to understand that centralization is not as black and white as
they are making out and Lightning to some degree uses it anyway

I mean mining to see who's got the fastest processor, how did us true professionals ever manage without it
for all these years and believe me I have a lot more to say about the architecture then I can discus here and
it's not me that's cocked up and cannot decide in two years if we should be using Segwit or not     

 

Yes, I know they are different. But if you bother to study how they both work, on the surface, you would see some similarities between the two. But let us wait for CarltonBanks to answer my question.

Yes, we need the block size increase in other to decrease the block difficulty and to aid low network fee and fast transaction confirmation. But due to the way bitcoiner choose side the change cannot happen... However, if you check Satoshi mail list right before bitcoin implementation, James A. Donald ask him question about block size (https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09963.html).
 

First things first: I do a little study of Lightning, but wouldn't be considered any kind of expert on the subject. I certainly don't know anything about today's Ripple, which has no doubt changed since I first checked Ripple out (many years ago).

But your assertion that Lightning channels are backed by real BTC is correct. Lightning takes advantage of a protocol designed to make it safe to use un-broadcasted Bitcoin transactions as they guarantee ownership of the funds in those un-broadcasted transactions, if the transaction is broadcasted on-chain (which is what closing a channel entails).


Maybe an analogy for this would be the various payment processors that exist in the internet age: Square, PayPal, Moneygram etc. PayPal, for instance, has just one regular bank account to which all PayPal customers send money. PayPal then has a separate accounts system that tells them who owns what amount of the balance in that one bank account, so people with PayPal membership can send each other money without ACH or SWIFT or any other mainstream system.
 
With Lightning, you can open your own decentralised Bitcoin payment processor (a channel) that lets you forge the Bitcoin transactions you would have use on-chain, but just without sending them, in the full knowledge that you can send them should you wish to send that money on-chain instead. So it's like letting everyone open up a private payments processor for Bitcoin, but with the difference being that there's a protocol for all the individual payment processors to send BTC between each other, i.e. Square can send to Moneygram using the same system. And you are your own independent peer-to-peer Square or PayPal, you are still your own bank in the same way you are when using the blockchain, no one has different rights or abilities than anyone else on Lightning.

From what I remember about Ripple, you don't own anything. Banking corporations control the Ripple payment gateways, and can accept or deny your transactions for any reason they choose. So it's not peer-to-peer at all (despite being endorsed by the so-called p2p foundation), because there are privileged nodes on the network that can dictate what you can and can't do, no different to the regular banking system.

I've been reading a lot about the lightning network, trying to understand if this is the solution to the scaling problem.

However, it is still unclear how secure the transactions will be and there will still be the issue of high fees when you open/close a channel.

Bitcoin is at the chasm, for those who are familiar with the Technology Adoption Lifecycle. In order to cross the chasm the Early Majority need to see and feel that the technology is not only safe and secure, but that it will handle major adoption. The technology will not cross the chasm until this is proven.

Some people say and believe that there is ample time to prove and test the Lightning Network, however, there was a major momentum happening with the technology entering the mainstream before the end of 2017. This momentum would have provided great leverage to cross the chasm, if the technology had been ready to scale.

I would like to explore a solution that is not increasing the block size, which has already been done via Bitcoin Cash, but instead to decrease the difficulty. Not the number of confirmations required, but to find the lowest difficulty while maintaining the stability of the network. I understand the bottleneck will become how quickly the nodes are able to communicate with the network.

I have started to write up a rationale for this solution, but it requires a bit of editing. I will post it as soon as it is ready. The solution acknowledges the fact that 80% of Bitcoins have already been mined, how to create a fair economic valuation method, and the need for a global public good fund.

If Bitcoin is to enter the majority and become a global store of value for the trade of goods and services then it will disrupt how governments operate, which will have an effect on our infrastructure and welfare. These are things that need to be discussed as we find a new form of communication and governance.

The Internet is a tool for communication, but forums, wikis and Facebook are not the ideal solution to communicate our self-governance.

The majority adoption of Bitcoin and a new system of communication and governance may go hand in hand, along with a method for distributing funds to the public good as a function of our new economic system.

Will increasing the block size permanently solve the problem of high mining fees and unconfirmed transactions ? No .
Block size increase will only give some relief for a fixed amount of time . That would be highly expensive to increase the overall block size .
After some time , ( analyzing the number of people joining the bitcoin world ) the increased block chain would again fall short of size , thus making this problem unstable and temporary .
The Lightening Network is the best way of solving this problem that would use Peer-to-peer transactions and would also be a big relief to the unconfirmed transactions and high mining fees by not disturbing the overall functioning of bitcoin . The fees would drastically decrease through LN .                                             

Transactions are fully secure, there are no security problems to worry about as far as transactions go. The largest security problem with the Lightning Network is that nodes are required to have an unencrypted private key in memory to allow for accepting payments at all times.

Technically, you don't need to close channels. You can refill them through the lightning network, and so you would only ever make one last transaction on-chain.

But in Ripple, the last time I tried it some years ago, the Bitcoin you own is deposited in a gateway and that is what "backs up" the amount you have in your Ripple wallet. In the wallet, you old Bitcoin in the form of something called "gateway.BTC.IOU" with the "trust channel" amount allowed only up to what you have in that gateway.

This is the interesting part, you can also open a "trust channel" to another gateway allowing you to send your gateway1.BTC.IOUs to gateway2.BTC.IOUs, and the clearing goes through Ripple's orderbook.

In a way, Lightning and Ripple are the same, but without the 3rd party trust on the gateways included.

A very superficial way.

Ripple is a 2nd layer network to all the systems it interfaces with. Lightning is a Bitcoin-only 2nd layer. That's where comparisons end.

You can refill channels? What does that mean?

It means that you can receive lightning payments even if all your balance in a channel is spent. So, instead of buying Bitcoin on exchange and withdrawing it to your wallet, you can withdraw it to your lightning wallet if it has at least one open channel. This means that most users will probably have to just pay one on-chain fee to create a channel and then use that channel for a very good time - there's no need to frequently open and close channels and pay higher onchain fees.

YESS!!  Even in the Lightning Network Whitepaper they were looking for a mininum of 133mb block size and never imagine there would be SOO much resistance to a gradual increase in block size.

Yes the damn' blocksize needs to be MUCH larger to bring down these transactions fees which are discouraging even wider usage (and don't give me, like this one jerk on Reddit did, the argument that transactions aren't high). 

Try buying a cup of coffee with bitcoin and see how THAT goes!

No. That was to accommodate billions of users, not millions. Bitcoin only has millions of users right now.



Lightning will let us do 10's of millions of transactions per second with the 4MB block weight Bitcoin has right now. And it was only increased to 4MB less than 6 months ago. That's going to be enough for now.

Hard forks need to be planned very carefully, there's a whole lot more to consider than just the block weight. There are so many changes that could or should be made, and hard forks are so delicate that those changes should be taken with exceptional care, otherwise we may invite chaos to destroy Bitcoin's reputation (and value). I think we can all agree that stable limited utility and slow consensus building towards a sensibly planned hard fork is much better than the chaos of big blocks fork-of-the-month shouting matches.

I am so happy that you of all people raised this point  :D

Channels were according to some only going to be open a few days, not years so lets agree on calling it a month
and correct me if I am wrong but any party to the contract can have the channel closed

You see now we have this middleman, you know the hub thing that's not a bank apparently and the remaining balance in
the off-chain private ledger held by a middle-man  :D :D :D is a credit to you because your mum just sent you a $2000 gift
and you need the money back on block (Real BTC public block-chain) because you want to buy $100 Ripple and spend $100 as cash.

Question

Why on earth would this middleman act as a conduit for Bitcoin because it does not scale be happy to send you
your $2000 and then be forced to pay $30 fees to the BTC miners for the privilege ?

if it looks, walks, talks and acts like a bank it probably is a bank   

As it's being sold these banks cannot fake BTC in theory but you will have to wait for that debate
another day but to be honest I don't think your able to answer and sad to say but here you cannot
use that old trick of "Poster can remove any comments he does not like" because it upsets him

Billions they say on top of Bitcoin will be worth a billion $USD soon but in the real world you will have to address
the issue of channels and intermediary channels storing private ledgers with each other and these transactions on top
of the ones we already have hitting the block-chain on settlement.

Sure hypothetical I could open a channel with you and we both agree to deposit $1 in the account (Locks it on BTC-BC)
and send $0.10 backwards and forwards a million times to each other but in the real world that's not going to happen
and we know it 

let me draw you a picture of what they have planned where anyone with a wallet can become a bank, err .... sorry,, hub

You---------->Sub branch<><><><>Main Branch<><>Int Bank<><><>Int Bank<><><>Fanny-May<><>MadOff<--------Me
Deposits $100                    $20,000                       $10m               $1bn                  $50m                     $1m              $100

See lightning Network routes, read the document and now tell me that I am wrong and can you not see that
the current miners are going to be the banks because not only do they have the hardware but they also have
the BTC to be used as seed money for the channels.

Anyone in the USA can become the president so long as their name ends in Bush, Kennedy or Clinton so
please bro debate me if you think my version is wrong and Bitcoin is not being programmed to become a central bank
much like the IMF or FED just to make it scale but don't go working for the banksters will you bro!

Centralization is not as black and white as many people are making out and having the "Lightning Network" with
it major banking hubs is a step down this road anyway which then becomes a single point of failure to anyone
that does not want to open more than one channel because closing a channel can be mightily costly when it
comes to BTC mining fees.

A cluster of specialized nodes in a star configuration acting as route managers is perfectly acceptable to me
and could be quite logical as well and it does not mean that Bill Gates gets to pull the plug on Bitcoin

Quite simply the "Every node for himself" is a system that does not scale and the development team knew that
eight years ago but have now all seemed to have cleared off to live it up in the sun.

The lightning Network creates more problems than it solves so look at the picture I upload here
http://forum.cryptolivecap.com/posts/t31-Lightning-Network
and let me know if you think it is wrong