If BTC can't perform the role of cash due to scaling it's unlikely that cryptonote coins would become e-cash without some kind of breakthrough in scaling - as they are way worse than BTC (at least in that aspect).

Of course cryptocurrencies are emerging technologies and we have no idea how far this is going to go into the future.

A web page in 1995 was designed with considerations like "will it download fast over a 2400 bps modem?", "is this gif *really* necessary? the load times are slow", etc etc... but fast forward 20 years later we have 1080p and 4k videos / 60 fps through our browser.

Perhaps bandwidth, network speeds, processing speeds, storage, in say 10-15-20 years will be so dramatically improved that even "heavy" blockchains are quite normal for everyday use without anyone even thinking about it.

The willingness to pay a fee to conduct bogus txs can be a differentiating factor. But that affects only a certain group of actors, not the whole spectrum. Still better than nothing though.

Happy new year

I provided an explanation, not a definition.

You can't examine people's intentions because, in a sense, that's the core of the issue here. Does the person initiating the transaction actually want to send money, or does he want to spam the blockchain? How the hell can I know that? If he uses non-dust amounts he can camouflage his spamming as seemingly "legit" txs, and they all may be between his own wallets. But if he had to pay a good fee for doing that kind of spamming, which would eventually deplete his BTC after sending them back and forth, well then he might opt out of the scheme.

But even that is not 100% accurate. A big player with deep pockets might have no issue in paying the fees + spamming / congesting the network with bogus txs. It depends on the actors involved really. Normally, a script kiddie would be different than a legitimate user in that the kiddie wouldn't want to pay for each of his 50.000 spam transactions, while the legitimate user might include a small fee to get his 1-2-5 txs included. So, in that sense, the fee could serve to differentiate between one who wants to transact for real and one who doesn't. But an evil corporate entity would be able to afford paying for the 50.000 spam transactions, or double, or tenfold, if, say, network capacity increased. So in that case, the fee would not be able to serve as a differentiating factor between the serious & legit tx and the bogus one.

Some miners might process junk for free* or near-zero cost. Others won't even process higher fee txs. As it stands, the answer is "it depends".

* I recently consolidated some of my dust into one address for free.

It's not like people will be rushing with their BTCs to buy cheap coins at cryptsy.

I meant the seller I'm not talking about fees here.

A very simple or simplistic explanation:

If I want to buy something, I need to pay. That's a valid reason for making a transaction so that transaction isn't bogus.

Now, if I start sending dust between my wallets, in thousands of transactions, in a meaningless way (as far as real-life transactions go), just to generate spam, clog the network etc => that's plenty of bogus transactions right there.

All the "evidence" the "large blockers" seem to require is whether the blocks are full or not. If they are, they say the fullblocalypse is coming, even if the blocks are full with bogus transactions.

So, from a social engineering perspective, the system is pretty vulnerable.

1. Spam the network to fill the blocks
2. Show some useful idiots that "blocks are getting full"
3. Have the useful idiots think the apocalypse is coming, due to the junk txs
4. Let the useful idiots propagate the idea that the developers are crazy for not seeing the same thing and that since the devs are not seeing the apocalypse, they are inadequate and not up to the task, or have ulterior motives to bury btc, or (insert any other conspiracy here).
5. Force devs due to social engineering pressure to increase block size (which reduces fee competition and allows cheap spamming of the blocks) against fundamental reasons not to.
6. Re-spam the enlarged blocks, now at cheaper rates

It's a "GOTO 1 - repeat - fill blockchain with junk - make BTC centralized in the process - leave it vulnerable to other attack vectors as well", situation.

But it could also play out differently... miners might decide that it's not even worth the risk of including 3-4-5-10mb of txs, as the 25 BTC or 12.5 BTC reward is much better than gaining an extra half btc (with an increased orphan risk). A 30s, 1m, 2m advantage could be significant in finding a block. So at that point we'll have a network that only processes very high fee txs to ensure the fastest propagation possible and that the miner has an advantage over the other miners who actually want to include txs in their blocks. At that point, the same people who were asking for much larger blocks, will be crying at how inadequate bitcoin devs are for creating a situation where miners do not even want to mine regular transactions but rather opt to mine only the block reward (and/or some very high fee txs). I mean this is already happening with 1MB empty blocks. Empty-blockers (miners) will be saying "haha those idiots mining the 4-8-10mb blocks full of txs are shooting themselves in the foot, while we are having a tremendous edge over them with our empty blocks". What then? Start forcing miners to mine the transactions?


Asking someone to pay a fee for transacting is not killing utility. It's the intended design anyway as time progresses and rewards slow down. Fees must compensate.


You fail to grasp a very simple concept:

If you make a free, or almost free crypto, that can do tens of millions of TXs per day, what's stopping someone from abusing it and getting the network to its capacity limits, triggering a priority queue through fees?

If I can have many free txs then I can make a script and fuck the system up for peanuts. Hundreds or thousands of nodes will be paying bandwidth and storage costs for junk that took me a few seconds to generate through my script. The game theory of such a system doesn't add up.

Now, if someone finds a groundbreaking solution in scaling, and this is by some kind of open-source decentralized crypto, then, perhaps, BTC can copy that solution (if it works) and apply it to increase its own scaling potential. Open source works both ways.

If *everyone* uses litecoin, it won't be.

The chances of that happening is near zero for a long list of reasons.


The fee market dictates the transaction type. If you have, say, 1$ fee, you can't perform 1-2-3$ txs. You can however perform 50-100-1000-1mn USD txs.

When you have a network that does like 500.000 txs of an average 1.000-10.000$ (acting like the "SWIFT" of crypto), you are at 0.5 to 5bn USD per day.

And if you have a network that does 10 times the number of transactions, say 5mn txs, but for "small" values, like an average of 1 to 10$ per tx, it will only be at 5 to 50mn USD tx volume.

One would say "but why wouldn't people keep their money on the second coin with the many txs etc". The answer is: because it is a disposable coin / a joke coin, that will be unable to preserve functionality in the long run.

It is impossible for a low-fee coin to survive blockchain abuse, which, in the long run, will render that coin unusable. If there is no new mechanism that allows for scaling, all the reasons that prevent bitcoin from going into huge blocks are also there. And they are exploitable. Imagine you have an altcoin that tomorrow gets all the btc load for near zero fees. What's stopping script kiddies from inserting tonz of transactions for the lulz to see the network get clogged? And then people will say "oh fuck that, I came to this altcoin to escape higher fees and now I'm queued for ages and I have to pay fees again, and then, as the attackers are willing to pay even very small fees, I must now pay even higher fees, etc, etc... it's all fucked up". LTC, DOGE are affected in the same way. We'll see how DASH goes because it actually will try to do something different, through the masternode network, but anyway. If you can get many txs for free you can also spam for free and abuse the system (and then the devs will have to "react" by increasing fees to stop the abuse, etc etc). Monero got attacked that way last year I think, and they had to raise fees to prevent the blockchain from getting bloated to DOA levels.


If that altcoin has very low or near zero fees, it will be exploitable - no matter who creates it. Btw, the scenario of a Wall-Street-coin or Silicon-Valley-coin, is not a real threat due to being centralized. As I told you yesterday, these will be competing in the centralized space with visa and paypal, not with BTC.

If they are an alternative player with a decentralized currency and they arrive on the scene claiming that they can supply millions of txs for free, I can make a script to add gigabytes per day for the lolz into its blockchain. At some point, when people will not be happy with this, and the network will be threatened for its long-term sustainability, the devs will have to "react" and raise fees in order to prevent me from spamming it.

Big money will not necessarily solve the scaling issue. Code will (scaling improvements, new compression algorithms, etc). Or technology will (more storage, faster processing, greater bandwidth etc). Things that apply today, in terms of technological restrictions, might not apply in 3-5-10-15 years. But even if you have a far more capable network in terms of tx capacity, it will always be subject to abuse in a zero to low fee scenario. And thus it will need to be protected. This applies to both BTC and altcoins.

What will happen, at most, is that shitcoins will be used for low-value txs and btc will be used for high value txs. You want to gamble for a few cents => you use a shitcoin. You want to buy a chewing gum => you use a shitcoin. You want to transfer 500$ or $5 mn, you use BTC.

You nailed it. That's the reason why btc is 50% down from ATH. Not the unrealistic 2013 pump & dump where price went from $10 to $1000. Obviously "smallblockers" crashed it back down to 100-200$.... 


Market prices tend to rise with increased demand. That is a market function. And when you are still lower than your closest competitor, people will still prefer your service over theirs. If a bank wire costs 10$ and takes days and a btc transfer costs 1$ and takes minutes, why would I use SWIFT instead of BTC?

In terms of industry, or services, prices tend to lower when there are economies of scale benefits. But are there economy of scale benefits in our case, or is there a proportional cost increase when you go from, say, 1mb to 100mn blocks, to accommodate 100x in demand?

The application name is irrelevant. Someone would argue "why should Bitcoin make it impossible for my app to store the x, y, z data sets into the blockchain? I want bigger blocks and cheaper blocks, otherwise Bitcoin is preventing innovation".

Bitcoin, as it is, can't even scale to serve its primary purpose of e-cash in order to rival paypal, visa, etc. And then you have people who want to store all sort of stuff in the same blockchain - when these things could be stored in other blockchains. And you also have spammers who like to fill the blocks for the lulz, paying peanuts.

Obvious priority is obvious. Or isn't it?

It can't be crippled. The cat is out now. But it will be "problematic" in people's perception if some try to put everything into one blockchain. Then some will say "ahhhh, as it seems this is too bloated to work... the blockchain was a stupid idea in the first place, we are better off with centralized systems - besides as this is configured right now is not much different than a centralized piece of shit...".

As for the "at this point in time", if you start using BTC's blockchain right now for other uses, against the warning that it won't scale, then what? At some point you'll have services that will need to stop altogether. Isn't it better to have a continuity plan by starting them in an alternate blockchain that is better suited for your own dataset needs and cost requirements (btc fees will eventually skyrocket, by design, due to diminishing subsidy).

As for security, there is always the possibility of merged mining to benefit from BTC's hashrate.

Apparently billyjoeallen is a true visionary, unlike cripplecoiner Satoshi who put there the 1MB limit and only wanted Bitcoin's fate to be "restricted" into a much lesser role instead of wanting to include every possible dataset that can be "blockchained", into BTC's blockchain.

As an inventor, Satoshi would likely get enormous credit for creating something that could be used for 100 or 1000 stuff simultaneously instead of 1, 5 or 10. Yet he was quite open and honest about whether that would actually scale.

Satoshi showed the way: The invention of the blockchain could be used with parallel blockchains for different data sets. It was not necessary to put every single data set into the same blockchain.

But billyjoeallen knows better...

May/June 2014 volumes were probaby five digit...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-12-29/china-suspends-foreign-banks-fx-trading-offshore-yuan-spread-signals-massive-outflow

...
"To put it another way - China just unveiled 'open' capital controls... and the last time they did that Bitcoin soared."

Bitcoin Difficulty:   93,448,670,796
Estimated Next Difficulty:   104,797,211,650 (+12.14%)
Adjust time:   After 100 Blocks, About 14.4 hours

The most mind-blowing "co-incidence" in the sky, is the moon itself.

It is too massive to be caught in the earth's orbit while also being so far away. Yet it is located at exactly the same distance required so that its diameter (as seen from earth) will be the exact same diameter as the sun's, creating phenomena like the full eclipses. As far as I know, this is unheard of in the entire known universe.

The chance of the moon being ~400 times closer than the sun, but also being ~400 times smaller, to produce the full eclipse phenomenon, is ridiculously low (and if you factor the size of the moon and distance of its orbit, it becomes ...impossible).

NASA has this to say:

http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/review/dr-marc-earth/moon-general.html

"The Moon's size and distance contribute to a wonderful coincidence for those of us who live here on Earth. The Moon is about 400 times smaller than the Sun, but it also just happens to be about 400 times closer. The result is that from Earth, they appear to be the same size. And when its orbit around Earth takes the Moon directly between Earth and the Sun, the Moon blocks our view of the Sun in what we call a solar eclipse. "

"wonderful coincidence" 
"just happens".... 

Yeah I mean, it just happened man. Just a coincidence. Sure thing.

You seem to be missing the point of why we are here.

BTC is not first mover in the ...centralized payment systems or centralized currencies space. The systems you mention, if they are ever created, will compete with visa, paypal, etc: Centralized stuff.

Bitcoin Difficulty:   93,448,670,796
Estimated Next Difficulty:   105,042,722,011 (+12.41%)
Adjust time:   After 570 Blocks, About 3.5 days
Hashrate(?):   846,369,830 GH/s