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461  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 08:14:37 AM
The only from that list that I'm concerned about at all as realistic problems for the long term success of bitcoin are 4 and 7.
I concur. I don't see the other points as problems (e.g. volume moving to sidechains). I also think that point 4 is more of a problem than 7. I might make a longer post about it later.

I would like to hear your opinion, I think it is a very large topic
462  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 08:06:18 AM
I think mining income is the most important incentive that has to be maintained, all the bitcoin frenzy started from the following:


Mining will likely keep itself profitable or near profitable for many years still. The block rewards will still be there in 10-20 years and with the speed technology is advancing, we will likely see more effective miners, a higher bitcoin price and more transactions.

The transaction fees will cover part of the missing block value. The higher value will keep up profitability even with smaller block rewards and the increased efficiency of miners will reduce operation costs.


The reason that mining attracted so many smart people is just the thought in that image: If I could get as much as x% of the total money supply at early days of mining, then in future when this system become widely used, my holding will worth x% of the value of this whole ecosystem

However, with lower and lower block reward every 4 years, the hope of acquire x% of the total money supply quickly diminish. People are not stupid, because the participation is voluntarily, they won't join a system that give early adopters too large advantage

Of course it is still better than fiat money, which everyone continuously lose their share of total money supply every day. But if you can make the system more balanced, e.g. anytime you can mine 25-50 btc per block, then it is much more long term sustainable and can defeat any other cryptocurrency competitors, people won't suspect this is a pump and dump game where early adopters trying to push mass adoption just to dump their coins mined at very low cost, like most of the other alt-coins
463  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Could someone explain what is happening with Bitcoin development? on: January 13, 2016, 07:48:42 AM
Why we have Bitcoin Ultimate, XT, Classic? What does it mean for normal bitcoin? Is very confusing.

Are they compatible with each other, i.e, can I switch from normal Bitcoin to XT or to Classic and keep my current bitcoins?

They are all potential president candidate, so far no one wins majority vote
464  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 07:28:46 AM
I think mining income is the most important incentive that has to be maintained, all the bitcoin frenzy started from the following:

465  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 03:57:23 AM
6. The lack of a central authority prevents the protocol from progressing.

“Bitcoin has this one thing which is both a blessing and a major hindrance to it as a technology,” says Hudson — and that is its decentralized nature. “The fact that it’s decentralized has allowed it to develop, but it also means when problems happen, it’s hard to see how they’ll be resolved,” he says.

Jonathan Levin, cofounder of Chainalysis, a Bitcoin compliance company, says that this leads to some inertia, even around uncontroversial changes. “It [took] ages to get all the miners to upgrade their software to protect themselves against transaction malleability [which made it possible for people to perpetrate fraudulent transactions]. You need human consensus, to distribute software all over the world, to go through what has to be a rigorous governance process to get these changes made and you’ve got tons of people using the Bitcoin network and making sure that the changes are a value add for everyone.”

The challenge that governance poses for Bitcoin was evident in 2015, when one question roiled and divided the community: how should the network capacity be increased to accommodate more transactions? Currently, each block of transactions, which gets processed every 10 minutes, can contain up to 1MB of data, which allows it to process seven transactions a second. (In contrast, Visa’s network is capable of processing 65,000 transactions per second.) Blocks need some sort of limit because otherwise, the network would be flooded by spam transactions, but the Bitcoin community — which consists of actors with roles as varied as miners, core developers, full-node operators (who propagate the transactions to be placed into the next block), Bitcoin companies as well as others — has been divided over whether another method could be used to increase the number of transactions processed on the network, or, if the block size is increased, how to increase it and what size would be appropriate.

Whether this one debate gets resolved — and if it does, how — could give a glimpse as to whether the currency will be able to resolve problems in the future. While it hasn’t been very promising so far — “There’s been lots of fighting and very little progress,” says Hudson — if the community not only settles the block size debate but then also comes up with a process for dealing with future questions, that would bode well for the continued growth (and therefore increase in value) of the currency. However, it’s not yet clear whether or not the larger question of governance will be worked out or if only the narrower question of the block size will.

“Open source is extraordinarily good at replicating on the existing design pattern, where everybody can see what it is that they’re supposed to be building,” says Hudson. “[Such projects] tend to stall more when they have to do something new, and especially in this case, where lots of participants have a vested financial interest in the outcome of what’s done, there doesn’t seem to be a good approach being taken by almost any of the participants.”

For instance, he says that a good engineering practice would be to build simulations of the system that would allow the developers to change various parameters to see how it would affect the network.

“Unfortunately, the things that’s very surprising is that nobody seems to have stepped up to make that happen,” he says. “The core team seem to have spent far, far more more time arguing about how they’d like things to work rather than actually trying to find a framework that everybody could actually do their work within, to try running what-if scenarios … It is very disappointing from my perspective that there is no concerted effort to try to resolve this by doing things that would be considered good engineering practice anywhere else.”

So far, he says, when there have been minor forks of the software, “that’s generally been resolved by people having to get in touch with some of the mining consortiums, some of the larger ones, and basically saying, please put this back the way we want it.” However, no process has been established for preventing or dealing with such issues in the future.
466  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 03:53:53 AM
The only from that list that I'm concerned about at all as realistic problems for the long term success of bitcoin are 4 and 7.

I don't think 7 to be a real threat, it takes time and resources to build value. Any other cryptocurrency, no matter how technology advanced, are in a very disadvantage position when it comes to store of value. Since biggest advantage of bitcoin is its limited supply thus anti-inflation, investment in other cryptocurrencies unavoidably result in inflation, e.g. added money supply in total crypto currency ecosystem. So even technically it could be interesting to invest in another cryptocurrency, but economically it is wrong
467  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 03:34:38 AM
And also a worth reading white paper from ARK

http://research.ark-invest.com/bitcoin-network
468  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Some good concerns against bitcoin on: January 13, 2016, 03:11:39 AM
This is a good article with lots of research and observation

http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2015/12/28/should-you-invest-in-bitcoin-10-arguments-against-as-of-december-2015/#2715e4857a0b4841a9f54669

1. The parameters of the currency could be changed.

2. There could be an attack on the network.

3. Transaction volume moves off the Bitcoin blockchain into side chains or permissioned chains.

4. The system does not successfully transition from being subsidized by the block reward to being paid for by transaction fees.

5. The Chinese firewall or another Internet issue causes the global Bitcoin network to be split for a few days.

6. The lack of a central authority prevents the protocol from progressing.

7. A competing protocol could overtake it.

8. World events prompt a crackdown.

9. Government regulations in one part of the world put the whole network at risk.

10. People get burned by it as an investment.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Among these concerns, 4,5 and 6 should be the most relevant currently, and it seems they are all related to the block size limit debate

It is interesting to see the author put the possible change of money supply as the biggest threat, I guess that's also the reason that the money supply is prohibit from being changed in bitcoin wiki
469  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: The Chinese firewall and Bitcoin split on: January 13, 2016, 02:39:28 AM
I'm not sure if a mining node must physically exists in china

Take pooled mining for example, you can setup the mining pool server outside of china, and just dispatch mining jobs to large mining farms in china and get result back, no need to send any bitcoin transactions in the communication, so the amount of data involved is only a little for stratum protocol

https://mining.bitcoin.cz/help/#!/manual/stratum-protocol#why

I think the reason that chinese mining pools do not want to locate their servers outside of china is more of a security aspect that they don't trust a 3rd party outside china to maintain their server which handles large financial transactions. But if Chinese government start to crack down on bitcoin traffic in china then they have to move all the pool server outside of china but mining operation can still remain in China

Correct me if I'm wrong since I have not run any mining pool
470  Economy / Economics / Re: Mining cost $9.51 per transaction! on: January 13, 2016, 02:08:44 AM
https://blockchain.info/stats shows that during last 24hrs Total Miners Revenue is $1,888,197 and there where 198618 transactions.

So Mining cost $9.51 per transaction! Of course I undestant, that majority of mining revenus is coming from blockchain reward, not from transaction fees. But to my opinion this tells that mining revenue is high/transaction.

This is a really strange way of calculating transaction cost  

FED just printed 3 trillion dollars, and you made some transaction, would you say that it costs 3 trillion dollars to do those transaction with USD?

Similar to miners digging out gold from the ground, money creation has nothing to do with transaction cost. Most of the bitcoin miners do not process any transaction at all because what they are interested is the money creation

471  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: [poll] What do you currently use Bitcoin for? on: January 12, 2016, 09:36:41 PM
It will be good to have the word "mostly" or "mainly" to see the focus

As a localbitcoins dealer, I mainly use bitcoin to make some money, is that one of the option?  Grin

- Why do you need bitcoin
 - To buy mining rigs
- Why do you buy mining rigs
 - To mine bitcoin
 Cheesy

I use bitcoin to do any kind of things except as a payment medium, the reason is simple: Why spending precious bitcoin when you can spend fiat money? I have tried a couple of times spending bitcoin to purchase some electronic components, but the amount of work to refill the wallet with same amount of bitcoin is just too much hassle, it does not worth the effort. It is enough that there are exchanges providing conversion 24/7 to your local currency. I treat it more like a foreign currency

There is another thread here with much more reply: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1242938.0
472  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Can Bitcoin make Banks disappear? on: January 12, 2016, 09:26:43 PM
I think average people's intelligence has not reached a level that they can live without banks
473  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 12, 2016, 05:27:41 PM
Can't belive this thread is hotter than that Wall observer thread Grin
474  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 12, 2016, 04:23:18 PM

The only way to truly determine whether big blocks or reduced utility will kill bitcoin is to run the damned experiment.


It is not possible to do any kind of test on test net, because the most important thing we want to observe from a change is its economical impact or its value (if bitcoin worth 0, no one cares about how brilliant its technology is, and it will be useless), this can only be done on live traffic

But because bitcoin is the only meaningful cryptocurrency with enough serious traffic, you can only run the test on bitcoin live traffic, which means you have to reach consensus first. A hard fork is inflation and will kill bitcoin's biggest promise of limited supply and will crash its value, thus will not be accepted by any rational participant

So I think the best test is first let 1MB block fill up, and see what happens, how many people complain and how is each one impacted. If there is no real serious impact or people find work around for their problem, then 1MB can stay for a while. If there are some serious issues popping up, then it proves that 1MB is not enough, so you can raise the limit and everyone is convinced

However, if you start to test with a large block size before 1MB limit was reached, then you would never have the chance to test 1MB full block at later time, and if 1MB is really a brilliant and agile solution, you just forever missed the chance to test it

475  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 12, 2016, 03:44:22 PM
Mining nodes are all already in data centres. We are already far past this point, so I would not consider that to be a good reason not to increase the blocksize. Miners can not "raise the fee" they simply just choose what transactions to include and not to include, collectively this creates a free market for fees. With an arbitrarily small block size limit it has more in common with a centrally planned economy.
This is back to Peter Todd's famous question: If it is already centralized then why make it worse

The relay network that miners are using right now are a perfect example of now we are relying on private company to provide the bitcoin network necessary service. Following this route, in future all the mining nodes will operate on a private company's network, so that a couple of phone call can shut them down right away

Small block size does not preventing you from inventing fee-free transaction services off-chain. In fact, limited at 1MB or limited at 8MB is the same effect
because bitcoin is never going to scale indefinitely. So, if you sooner or later have to limit the block size, then why not do it now when bitcoin core software is still relatively light weight. It is the direction that matters, not parameters
This is the engineers nirvana fallacy, just because Bitcoin does not scale efficiently it does not mean we should not scale Bitcoin at all. I think this is wrong and even small increases to the blocksize will bring massive practical benefits to both people and the protocol as a whole.

Even if one megabyte is the practical limit of the network today, which I do not think is the case, in the future this limit should still be increased in order to reflect the true technological capabilities of the time.

I can agree with the principle that we should not increase the blocksize limit more then our technology will allow, even if one megabyte currently represent this limit which I find hard to believe that this is the case. It does stand that this limit should be increased in the future if we want to see Bitcoin bring about as much utility and benefit as possible. This whole one megabyte forever idea really does not make any sense, I also doubt that Satoshi somehow magically choose this number which would reflect this technological limit now and for all time. Satoshi was actually quite clear on this subject, he thought that the blocksize should be increased when the need to do so arose.

Quote from: Konrad S Graf
The protocol block size limit was added as a temporary anti-spam measure, not a technocratic market-manipulation measure.

So your idea of the block size limit is the technology, but technology can be very different for different parts of the world, you can not expect everywhere in the world have 1GB fiber. Besides, there is the great firewall of China. Just try to open some chinese website like tudou.com or youku.com you will see how slow it is. If most of the cheap electricity and chip manufacturing exists in china, then other miners are limited by the chinese connection speed. A larger block in western will just make it orphaned more frequently by the chinese miners since they have higher hash power and you don't have enough time to broadcast your block to them before they mined their next block
476  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 12, 2016, 12:33:57 AM
Mining nodes are all already in data centres. We are already far past this point, so I would not consider that to be a good reason not to increase the blocksize. Miners can not "raise the fee" they simply just choose what transactions to include and not to include, collectively this creates a free market for fees. With an arbitrarily small block size limit it has more in common with a centrally planned economy.

This is back to Peter Todd's famous question: If it is already centralized then why make it worse

The relay network that miners are using right now are a perfect example of now we are relying on private company to provide the bitcoin network necessary service. Following this route, in future all the mining nodes will operate on a private company's network, so that a couple of phone call can shut them down right away

Small block size does not preventing you from inventing fee-free transaction services off-chain. In fact, limited at 1MB or limited at 8MB is the same effect
because bitcoin is never going to scale indefinitely. So, if you sooner or later have to limit the block size, then why not do it now when bitcoin core software is still relatively light weight. It is the direction that matters, not parameters

477  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 12, 2016, 12:15:42 AM
If the blocks become larger it implies that there is increased adoption and use of Bitcoin. A high volume of low fee transactions over the long run would actually pay out more for the miners compared to a high volume of low fee transactions. The idea that if we increase the blocksize over time as the technology allows as it improves would lead to the network collapsing is not supported by the facts.

If we had a sixty four megabyte blocksize limit for instance with the same fees per transaction payed out today it would already exceed the present block reward. It is not impossible to have blocks this large, in a decade from now it might even seem trivial. It would even take BIP101 eight years to reach this point, and the newly proposed Bitcoin Classic more then twelve years. Most of the other blocksize limit increase proposals are even more conservative then this, which is fine. My point being is that a high volume of low value transactions can pay for the networks security and this would not lead to the network collapsing as you claim, especially as the limit is slowly increased as our technology improves.
As I explained HERE, as long as the blocks are not full, the fee income will always be a small percentage of the block reward, and it shrinks every 4 years. A reduced block reward + fee will make future miners only be able to mine a fraction of a bitcoin per each block (even fiat wise that means lots of money), greatly reduce the mining incentive, especially when most of the coins were mined

25-50 BTC per block fee is a much better incentive, and maybe the best incentive for the miners to continuously expand their operation, since it keeps every miner feels like an early adopter. But that is impossible to reach if we don't have block size limit
I think that you are wrong in this conception, It has been shown that we can have a fee market without a blocksize limit.

https://scalingbitcoin.org/papers/feemarket.pdf
http://www.bitcoinunlimited.info/1txn

Peter_R's paper made the same mistake as mainstream economists that they tried to use a simple formula to describe the complex real world that have millions of different actors, thus lost focus on the most important aspects. The supply and demand curve in his paper are all different for different miners since their cost structure are different

If there is no block size limit, when facing a rising orphan rate (e.g. large number of transactions), a miner's best approach is not to raise the fee, because that will make his node receive less and less transactions in a free block relay market, he would just move to large data centers to benefit from increased performance, thus he can use a low fee to attract more transactions, and this is exactly the centralization we don't want to see
478  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 11, 2016, 11:53:53 PM
If the blocks become larger it implies that there is increased adoption and use of Bitcoin. A high volume of low fee transactions over the long run would actually pay out more for the miners compared to a high volume of low fee transactions. The idea that if we increase the blocksize over time as the technology allows as it improves would lead to the network collapsing is not supported by the facts.

If we had a sixty four megabyte blocksize limit for instance with the same fees per transaction payed out today it would already exceed the present block reward. It is not impossible to have blocks this large, in a decade from now it might even seem trivial. It would even take BIP101 eight years to reach this point, and the newly proposed Bitcoin Classic more then twelve years. Most of the other blocksize limit increase proposals are even more conservative then this, which is fine. My point being is that a high volume of low value transactions can pay for the networks security and this would not lead to the network collapsing as you claim, especially as the limit is slowly increased as our technology improves.

As I explained HERE, as long as the blocks are not full, the fee income will always be a small percentage of the block reward, and it shrinks every 4 years. A reduced block reward + fee will make future miners only be able to mine a fraction of a bitcoin per each block (even fiat wise that means lots of money), greatly reduce the mining incentive, especially when most of the coins were mined

25-50 BTC per block fee is a much better incentive, and maybe the best incentive for the miners to continuously expand their operation, since it keeps every miner feels like an early adopter. But that is impossible to reach if we don't have block size limit
479  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Is your bitcoin safe in cold wallet? on: January 11, 2016, 08:45:32 PM
so this is just a bunch of silly no-sense, because in th remote case this is true(which is not) it would not benefit the hacker also, because they would lost everything too, simple logic

so it would be utterly stupid from their point of view to destroy their own "hacked profit"....

What if they only steal Satoshi's one million coins, not any one else's? That is a large enough motivation to push out such a change

but i would not lost the coin, but only the value in this case, either way damaging bitcoin like that when you have a fortune that can be worth more in the future, still look very stupid to me

whoever has bitcoin should support if because by supporting it he can increase the value of his coins, by damaging it, he just damaged his fortune at the end

this assuming that the consensus of 90%+(faik it's not 51%), is in favor of a change that can put a risk everyone else...

Not if a hacker who just want to steal some coin and sell them. The motivation becomes increasingly large when bitcoin price rise another several times
480  Bitcoin / Bitcoin Discussion / Re: Analysis and list of top big blocks shills (XT #REKT ignorers) on: January 11, 2016, 08:35:15 PM

Quote from: /u/Ilogy @ reddit
My fear is that people who want the settlement layer to be more like a payment layer are like people who want to build computer games out of an assembly language. We need payment layers, not to turn the settlement layer into something that it is not.

I suppose it is good PR to say that this is all a debate over whether we should make Bitcoin usable or not, but let's be honest, this debate is about how we think we should make bitcoin usable. Do we try to make bitcoin itself super-usable at the potential expense of its reliability and trustworthiness? Or do we try to create layers on top of bitcoin that preserve bitcoin's trustworthiness and yet also provide usability via those layers? (A common analogy, do we try to improve the internet to the point where everyone suddenly gets that it is useful, or do we develop layers on top of the internet, like the Web, that make its usefulness obvious?)

My argument is this: Money systems depend on trust and usability, one cannot exist without the other, just as the OP said. However, if we try to merge trust and usability into one system, we risk a situation where the system lacks both. It will still be difficult to use, and yet people won't feel it is a safe place to put their money either. In other words, it will remain exactly as it is today. Modern money systems don't work that way and neither should bitcoin.

Layered tiers of a monetary system is foundational to how modern money works. The "M"s designation of different types of money --m0, m1, m2, etc -- is meant to represent these layers. The further up you go in layers, the faster the money becomes, but also the less dependable and trustworthy the money becomes. Likewise, base money, like cash, is slow and cumbersome, yet it is the most trustworthy form of money in an economy. In the modern economy, cash is considered real money and more real and dependable than bank credit. If the banking system experiences a crisis, bank credit could become worthless overnight, whereas cash will only rise in value. So there is an intrinsic tradeoff to having fast money and that is that it becomes less reliable money. Same was true back in the days when banknotes were backed by gold. The physical note was a faster, more liquid form of money. Gold was cumbersome and slow but more trusted and dependable.

"Settlement layer" is just another way of saying "base money." They are really the same thing. The reason a layer is the settlement layer is precisely because it is made out of base money, i.e., real money. If I went to you and said, "look, I promise I'll swing buy and pay you $100 in cash tomorrow" that would be the payment layer. It is fast, but it lacks trust because ultimately real money hasn't been transferred until I actually pay you in hard cash. When I do pay you in hard cash, that is called settlement. Settlement layer simply refers to people or institutions concluding all promises to pay with actual payment. So the settlement layer is actually just base money. In the modern financial system, when you pay someone with cash, you are using the settlement layer.

A settlement layer is the fundamental monetary force behind the economy. In the modern system, the settlement layer is institutionally controlled by the central bank. They are the ones who have the sole right to create cash, and as such money held in the central bank is considered as good as having cash. Only commercial banks are allowed to hold accounts with the central banks and all settlements between commercial banks are mostly concluded by transferring money held in accounts at the central bank. That is to say, for all intents and purposes, the central bank is the settlement layer in the modern system.

Bitcoin functions as a central bank. It could, in theory, replace central banks. It prints base money, called 'bitcoins,' which is then hands out to the miners who are the equivalents of the commercial banks. In the Bitcoin system, miners are bankers. The central bank, Bitcoin, then is ultimately controlled by the collection of those miners who can decide to set Bitcoin policy. This is exactly how the modern banking system works, the bankers collectively decide on how the central bank should set policy.
Many people think of banks as a place people store their money for safe keeping, and then the bank uses that money to make more money and spark growth in the economy through lending. However, what people forget is that the power of banks comes not from the fact that people give them money, but from the fact that they hold base currency. Today, most base currency held by banks comes from the central bank printing it and handing it to them, not from people depositing it. In fact, most people don't deposit cash into banks anymore, they just move bank credit around. By having large sums of base currency, banks can settle with other banks and neither bank needs to be concerned with the internal affairs of the other.

In other words, banks allow consumers and the larger economic system to use money off-chain, so to speak, that is their function, always has been. Then they settle accounts at the end of the day on-chain, that is to say at the settlement layer. It is precisely this power that allows them to lend (i.e., create broad money) and creates the varied payment networks. If all transactions had to be done through the central bank then that one bank would control everyone's money and decide who deserved loans and who didn't. It would be a centralized economy on steroids, the financial system wouldn't exist. By not trying to let the central banks do everything, the monetary system was allowed to become robust. (Obviously, it is corrosive and needs to be replaced by something better, but one can't deny that the modern financial system has been a huge success even if it is nearing the end of its days.)

Furthermore, a global central bank, Bitcoin, is simply not going to work unless it is trusted by everyone. And it won't be trusted by everyone unless it is considered fair. Trust in a global central bank is not going to be there if it is perceived as being controlled by someone untrustworthy. If someday the majority of miners work for the Chinese government, how much trust can there really be in bitcoin by people living in other countries? Decentralized control is the only way to achieve a global central bank. But my understanding is that increasing the block size can potentially lead to increased incentives for mining centralization, precisely the opposite of what we want. And once a high degree of centralization occurs, since the miners must approve future changes, what can get us to reverse course? This would weaken the inherent trust in the base currency that comes from the decentralization of control. Put simply, raising the block size limit threatens to undermine the foundation of the bitcoin system which is decentralization, resulting in a less trusted base currency. Since trust is the most important feature of base currency, this isn't something people should take lightly.

Off-chain transactions, payment layers, allow for the growth of a more decentralized ecosystem around the base layer as well as the emergence of cryptocurrency banking and lending, and more widespread use of 2.0 tokens and currencies built on top of bitcoin. By creating payment layers you will far outstrip what base bitcoin can ever achieve in terms of usability left to its own devices. This is because the whole role and purpose of payment layers is to increase usability, and if that is how they are financially incentivized, they will come up with the best solutions and thus open the doors for mass adoption. You get both a profoundly trusted base layer, and a decentralized, competitive market for payment layers and usability, all rooted in a non-state, non-institutionally controlled currency. By not constricting the system to ONLY base money, broad money creation can allow for an explosion in the bitcoin ecosystem and innovation around the use and control of that broad money.

On the other hand, raising the block size limit increases mining centralization, reducing trust in the base currency, but doesn't increase incentives for profiting from innovation around increased usability solutions, thus limiting banking and lending innovation. Essentially, it keeps bitcoin where it is today, stagnating under the weight of the fact that people don't really need it and it is not really a safe place to keep your money. The killer app for bitcoin hasn't been invented yet, raising the block limit helps to assure that it never will be. This is precisely because the future killer apps are the payment layers and all that comes with them. When Bitcoin achieves a profound level of usability from the payment layers, and a high degree of trust from its decentralized base settlement layer, it will be completely unstoppable. But if you water down the decentralization and think the current system, just with a larger block size limit, is good enough as a payment system ... we will never get past where we are today.

This is a quite bit of overview here

It is very attractive and simple that anyone can just download a software and start to use bitcoin. That part of user experience has to be maintained. Lightning network could be an approach since it still uses blockchain, not entirely offchain. But I'm afraid the level of complexity will preventing people from reaching consensus, besides that it still requires blockchain to handle 100MB blocks. If we go for offchain solutions then 1MB blocks will be more than enough

New users are all directed to hundreds of web wallet and exchanges, so they can have low fee and fast confirmation, what is the problem with that



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