I try to imagine the consequences. Thousands would have rushed to buy BTC, price would jump, which would make even more new people eager to join the party, raising the number of transactions so much that the network couldn't handle it... New Hampshire's not ready yet, BTC neither.

No, men are not like that. The car I'm driving today is much more fuel-efficient than the one I was driving a few years ago, and gas is cheap. So I could afford to drive much more, but I don't. Changing conditions have given me extra purchasing power, but I'm spending my money on other things. Now if I were a miner and electricity suddenly become cheaper, maybe I would just be happy that my mining has become more profitable, and I'll look for other ways to invest my growing income.

The guy's trying to save BTC. I hope he will be successful but it's hard to be optimistic. He failed last year because of rats who don't want to change anything which would reduce their domination. Gavin's brave! Without him, or people like him, BTC would be dead already. What is going to happen when there will be 300,000 transactions each day? Then 500,000. I'd like to dream there's one million transactions everyday, but that's impossible at this stage. Too many miners just don't want BTC to grow.

Instead of speculating over the price, we should speculate over the capacity of the network. If changes are made to allow up to 10 millions transactions each day, BTC's value will skyrocket. If nothing changes, BTC's price will not change much either. Sorry to point it out, but the 2 are linked.

Exactly. There's nothing to be excited about. If BTC wants to be a world currency, it needs to handle way more than that. More than that, for the safety of the network, you'd want it to have some kind of safety margin. BTC's running close to its limits. I don't like it when my computer runs at 100% CPU. It means I need to upgrade.

No. Some people may just fed up by the lack of progress. The scalability problem, most commonly seen as the block size issue, has been around for more than 8 months, and no solution has been found yet. Many early bitcoiners are from the start-up world where big decisions are made in a few minutes in front of the coffee machine. Greed isn't a factor. The people who were looking to make a quick buck have left a long time ago.

I don't like the idea of forecasts based on power usage per transaction, or cost per transaction because nothing's fixed. Computers may become much more efficient in the future. When Intel launched its latest microprocessor for laptops, it was saying exactly that, giving users more autonomy when running on battery.

Coming increase in block size will also change a lot of things.

I can't imagine BTC to disappear. My worry is that it will stop growing. That it will remain very small as it is today, where nobody wants to invest in it because the future is uncertain. No governance, no solution to the scalability issue, unless something changes, and big changes are needed to allow the network to accept ten times more transactions!

I didn't the like the movie where he played Howard Hughes, but why not?

I remember the movie with Robert Duvall playing Stalin. My only hope is that this movie, if it gets the go-ahead, sticks to proven history, and doesn't venture into politically-motivated fiction.

Hey, wait! Let' not rejoice, yet. We don't know the difference between monitoring and regulating. It might not be a big one. Anyway, that meeting proved useful to show that all noise about BTC being used by terrorists, or for money laundering, is just that: noise. There are no proven facts.

There are some big fish out there.

In a few minutes, I found 2 10,000 BTC transactions made exactly at the same time. Obviously, it was the same person.

https://blockchain.info/address/18SwPkgUHFo8QLh5fMcchKvmUVrFNxXF6B
https://blockchain.info/address/1HSV4NUkCtJ4wdK79peu2wGjAxEe3N6Yu3

You need to have a lot of trust in the network. I can't imagine myself doing such a large single transaction. I would be too afraid something would go wrong and I would loose a fortune.

This comparison is quite valid. This is saying that AT&T is getting a bigger share of the market, and this is what's happening with Paypal. it's getting a bigger slice of the pie, meaning that compared to it, BTC is shrinking. No good news, really, but I understand it so well. With the block size issue unsolved, nobody wants to bet on BTC.

Bitcoin Heaven, really?
Come on, the scalability problem is far from over. And we are still at a low level, only 200,000 daily transactions.

Let's imagine 1% of humanity making one BTC transaction per week. That would make 2,800,000 daily transactions. We're very far from that, and the network couldn't even handle this modest goal. So this isn't heaven.

Well, maybe they were thinking that BTC is about to crash, so they abandon the ship. This is what I see. They could have keep their coins, but they chose to spend them. Actually, I think they were wrong, a new car is sure to depreciate way more than BTC.

Let's be clear: that's the goal! We want all miners going in the same direction. I understand it won't be easy to convince everybody, but all miners shall understand that not going the way of the fork (soft or hard) is taking the risk to be left behind.

Billionaires? Who.

Donald Trump? Warren Buffet? Bill Gates? I have yet to hear of a billionaire investing any money in BTC. With all the dark clouds over BTC, with unanswered questions about how it will scale, there are many reasons for a billionaire to be scared. Even small people get scared!

No, my friend. We want much more than that.

BTC is working quite well right now, but to feel confident towards the future, we need to be sure that BTC can scale. If we look at social networks, snapchat or instagram, those services have seen their users grow exponentially, millions new people, in only a few weeks. BTC is very, very small at this time. Barely 200,000 transactions per day. What would happen if this jumps to one million each day? Imagine 1% of all Facebook users doing one BTC transaction every day? The network couldn't handle it.

The fact that BTC works today hardly matters, if it's going to fail tomorrow.

I'm surprised with this. I know it's impossible in a Muslim country to go in a cafe and play poker, but I've seen people playing checkers. It's only gambling, playing with money, which is forbidden. Chess, or checkers, have never been associated with money. Why is that mufti saying it is?

Have you met a banker recently? Or asked for a loan? The network's quite adequate at this time, but this hardly matters. This is only the basic prerequisite before an investment shall be considered. And every eventuality shall be taken into account before money is to invested. It's like getting an insurance for your car. If there's a 16-year old in the house, it will cost more.

I know and understand that several talented programmers are working hard to make BTC better, but they've been doing that for over 6 months! I want results. Investing in BTC today would be like investing in a company where the CEO is paralyzed.

I don't see the relation.


That's my idea. There seems to more bitcoiners concerned about short term profit, that is a rise of BTC's price, than long term, which means upgrading bitcoin core, the network, everything so that the number of transactions can be increased exponentially without hiccups. The network handles 200,000 transactions each day, this is small. Very small considering there are over 7 billions people on the planet.