21 million coins.
No censorship.
Open-Source.
Permissionless.
Pseudonymous.
Fungible.
Irreversible Transactions.
To me these are the fundamental principles of Bitcoin. If any of these was changed I would find it hard to continue to call the network Bitcoin. As Bitcoin grows many newcomers will have their own ideas and want to change even these all-important aspects. What can we do to set them in stone? Or at least to make them last as long as possible? |
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Esto me parece especialmente destacable: La primera inversión importante será permitir la compraventa de bitcoins en los 51.000 cajeros de la red 4B. La segunda, no menos importante, será la construcción e instalación de 75 cajeros bitcoin nuevos en España, Portugal, Argentina, México, Dubai y Grecia. Espero que lo consigan. |
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-Open, permissionless system. If you have the token, you can use it.
-Mere Possession of the token is enough. No extra proof is required.
-Payments are simple, fast and have low transaction costs.
-Tokens are fungible.
-Payments are irreversible and final.
1) Correct. Bitcoin is censorship resistant. 2) Correct. Owning the private key is everything that is needed. 3) They current are (fees have an unknown/undecided future). 4) Somewhat fungible (unknown?). 5) Correct. ...and for it to be P2P:
-Only the voluntary interaction of the 2 parties to a transaction is required. No third party can block the transaction.
Correct.
Do you agree with my statements? Of course I agree. Bitcoin can currently be used as P2P Cash. However as the network grows from 2 million users to 20 million... there are engineering choices to be made which could change some of these qualities. There will be trade-offs between speed, cost, simplicity, fungibility, etc... That's what this thread is about. |
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Actually.. thinking a bit more about this.. if Bitcoin can become good money... that is if it can perform effectively the 3 traditional functions of money (store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account) it will have to be as easy to exchange as cash and as hard to confiscate or devalue as gold.
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People keep saying that yet nobody provided a single definition of P2P Cash. I'm still waiting for a clear definition so that discussing would make sense.
OK... let me give it a shot: - Cash: A token of value used for exchange. eg: a coin. - Digital cash: A digital token of value used for exchange. eg: 1 BTC- P2P Cash: A form of cash in which the token's value does not require a third party to the exchange. However the above definitions refer to bitcoins as the units of value or tokens in a cash system... but for the Bitcoin Network to be an effective P2P Cash transmission system which can be used in a way analogous to how we use physical coins and notes today face to face... it would need to have certain characteristics: -Open, permissionless system. If you have the token, you can use it. -Mere Possession of the token is enough. No extra proof is required. -Payments are simple, fast and have low transaction costs. -Tokens are fungible. -Payments are irreversible and final. ...and for it to be P2P: -Only the voluntary interaction of the 2 parties to a transaction is required. No third party can block the transaction. |
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in short by summer 2017 bitcoin can handle 10million people doing similar daily transactions like they would using bitcoin or visa today
give it 4 years there wont be an issue with 20million. (ONLY if people don't stupidly use confidential payment codes extra feature by default)
I like those numbers.  |
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Well... I don't want to be dismissive... but that is definitely not what I mean.
I've already told you that if you want a definite answer that you'd have to provide a definition. What exactly is P2P cash? What features does it have? How does it compare to a settlement layer? Once we have answers to those, then we might be able to come to some sort of conclusion. Sure... but I don't want to constrain or bias the poll by limiting it to my own definition. Other people will probably disagree... |
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It does not matter what people want if it is not possible. The real question is what is achievable. Do you want Bitcoin to be digital P2P cash?
How do you define P2P cash? Is it not P2P cash right now? If you define it as a system which everybody in the world can use a the same time, then you won't like the answer. the OP means. do we want bitcoin to be fast instant transactions like visa. or a reserve/store of wealth secure like a bank savings/investment account Well... I don't want to be dismissive... but that is definitely not what I mean. Visa is not Cash. And I don't consider bank accounts a secure store of wealth.... so if I had to pick an analogy (imperfect as they all are) by cash I mean something similar to how cash payments work now with coins and notes: final, irreversible, P2P payments (but online.. obviously). By settlement I would mean something similar to gold (as it was used between central banks to settle international balance of payments before 1971 and by regular people before 1913). |
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So... let's say that we want 20 million people to be able to use Bitcoin as P2P cash regularly (say once a day).
20.000.000 tx/day --> 232 tx/s or 13.889 tx/min --> 138.890 tx/ block
Currently txs are on average 250 bytes... but let's say that we can somehow get that down to 100 bytes... (I've see discussion on several ways of doing this).
140.000 txs x 100 bytes = 14.000.000 = 14MB
What would be the big tech constraint in 2020 preventing 14MB blocks?
Memory? Bandwidth? latency?
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The theoretical n2 traps only affect a few aspects of tx confirmation and validation.
That's what the worst case scenario is, and one has to be prepared for it. Agreed. But if that worst case scenario proves unfounded and there are solutions... we should make the most of them. |
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If billions of people can share selfies, videos and other media online.... I have to believe that we will be able to find a way to send a few million txs a day and have the Bitcoin Network process them.
This is a very bad analogy. You're comparing uploading/downloading data from centralized servers and uploading/downloading data from a P2P decentralized network. It is not meant as an analogy... that is why it is immediately followed by this: I understand the argument that Facebook, YouTube or Bittorrent don't have to have every node independently validating all the data that they transmit... ..so I am not ignoring the argument. Just trying to inject some perspective. |
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If billions of people can share selfies, videos and other media online.... I have to believe that we will be able to find a way to send a few million txs a day and have the Bitcoin Network process them. The theoretical n2 traps only affect a few aspects of tx confirmation and validation.
I understand the argument that Facebook, YouTube or Bittorrent don't have to have every node independently validating all the data that they transmit... but if you think about it, neither does Bitcoin.
How much data do you need about a tx to really validate it? can you validate txs in the mempool and then just check that txs in blocks are ones that you had already validated? can you torrent the mempool? can you delegate validation of certain parts of the blockchain among collaborating groups of nodes? Can you separate parts of the tx data (as SegWit proposes) to reduce the amount of on-block data? Can you make validation modular so that different types of nodes focus on different parts of the process (just like mining specialised by separating from full nodes)?
The truth is that Bitcoin has less than 100 significant contributors on GitHub. It is a tiny project with tiny resources. Once we get to 1/100th the size of Linux and there is significant more brainpower put into this... we will find all kind of solutions that right now seem far fetched.
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I actually agree with you. Still.. given a choice I would like to see enough on-chain capacity for Bitcoin to be used regularly by millions of people. If we then need a second or third layer to reach billions of people.. I'm OK with that.
The amount that can be reached on-chain is very questionable. Look at the network now, we're still not sure what the exact block size limit would be considered safe (a maximum). Currently the network is able to do around 3 TPS on average. Even if we had 10 MB blocks, that's only 30 TPS and nowhere near enough for it to be used regularly by millions of people. It might be enough to be used occasionally by millions of people. However, wouldn't this make it some sort of settlement layer as well? I am not talking about millions of people now... but in 5-10 years time. Sure, there are technical hurdles. I don't think that these obstacles are larger than what the Internet had to overcome in the 1990s to become what we use today. I still remember WebCrawler and Mosaic... |
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So within what you believe is achievable... what would you want Bitcoin to be?
I would say that a mixture of both is achievable by raising the block size limit (only conservative and safe time) and developing a secondary layer (e.g. Lightning Network). I do not think that Bitcoin can become "mainstream cash" on a single layer. I actually agree with you. Still.. given a choice I would like to see enough on-chain capacity for Bitcoin to be used regularly by millions of people. If we then need a second or third layer to reach billions of people.. I'm OK with that. |
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I did not participate in the poll because the question presents a false dichotomy.
Bitcoin is what it is.
I want the consensus rules to remain the same. If they change for anything that is not near 100% unanimous then that means that a majority can dictate to the minority and steal their funds away from them. That undermines trust in all cryptocurrency, not only bitcoin.
Maybe it's a false dichotomy... that is why there is the "Other" option... but still a fair point. Bitcoin is what it is... but it is not a finished product, it is still evolving. I would at least want to make explicit what direction we want it to evolve in. There are many choices and trade-offs in development.... so it would be nice to know what priorities existing users have. |
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