When Alex talks, just shut up and listen. It's a great post and it deserved to be bumped.
So which is it? You want smaller block size so we only use bitcoin for settlements or you want people to be their own banks? You can't have both.
I'm just pointing out that even with not so many transactions, you don't simply "die" - and evidence of that is the marketcap and mobility of gold, because bitcoin is not simply a payment system, but also a store-of-wealth system.
BTC's transaction capacity was always small, and even with 8 or 32mb blocks, it's still small.
If just 10% of the global population used BTC, and they did an average of just 1 transaction per day, we'd need blocks larger than 1 GB.
Suppose we make it 1GB per block, to "scale". What will happen then? Will it "scale", or will it simply become unusable? It's a bullshit argument that "bigger is better" in this case. It isn't.
And what if we take the scenario of the entire population using it, with an avg of 2 tx per day, which requires >20gb per block?
Bitcoin will not scale to the level you want it to and definitely not by simply increasing the block size. It needs smart methods to do so.
The fact that BTC requires a lot of resources to scale, should make it expensive to use those resources. Seeing dust transactions that take up space for minimum fees, is already too painful to watch.
This is like the people who worried that browsers would clog up internet traffic back in the early nineties. or worries about picture files. or sound files. or video. 1TB hard drives are cheaper than a carton of cigarettes. Next year 10 TB drives will be. It's a bullshit argument.
Nobody in the Elite would benefit from abusing network resources back then. However, the situation is different with the blockchain which, if you supply the tools to abuse it, it will be abused and bloated and rendered unusable.
Have you asked potential bitcoin users, whether they are interested in downloading TBs of blockchain before using it?
We'll send all these potential guys to use online wallets or online-based wallets, meaning a centralized ecosystem?
Besides, the cartel in the HDD industry, reminds me of the stagnation in the CPU industry after AMD lost the plot and Intel didn't rush things much in terms of evolution.
I think it was early 2011 when I bought my WD 1TB for like 60 euros, and it still costs nearly the same: I'm not seeing any serious price reduction. So HD prices don't scale as much as we'd like.
The urgency isn't even in block size or scalability. The urgency is in fixing the goddamn decision-making process among the core devs. You think Hearn was wrong about that?
Yes he was. There wasn't any urgency or crisis that demonstrated a breakdown of the decision-making process. The dev team acknowledged that scaling improvements can be done, they issued BIPs and were debating what's the best.
Is it some kind of best practices when someone comes along and says, yes, we'll do this, and if we don't, we'll fork it?
If Hearn's dictatorship plan passes, there will be no core devs remaining to even have a decision process. I doubt any will stay to be ordered by the "dictatorship" of Andersen/Hearn. Who will maintain bitcoin then? Hearn -who isn't very active- and Andersen? That's not going to work and it's extremely bad for the future of Bitcoin.
In the end of the day, if you ask me what Bitcoin-dev-team will do the best for the currency, it's a no brainer that current core-devs are far better, active and responsible than XT's devs.
Poll
