Non-technical solutions :
1. Adaption by Merchants. BTC adoption slowing down while few merchants decide to accept altcoin such as Bcash & LTC
2. The community actively promote Bitcoin usage as currency/payment method
3. Bitcoin Legalization by government, upcoming G20 Submit will be one of important even and could be written/mentioned in Bitcoin history if it's going well
4. Remove stereotype about Bitcoin bad usage
Technical solutions :
1. Increasing block weight, even LN whitepaper mention we will need to raise block weight. But this solution should be discussed/researched well or we might see another Bitcoin drama
2. Native SegWit (Bech32) and LN adoption once more wallet support both features and LN is ready for-end user
3. Remove max bitcoin supply and replace with tiny inflation (0.1% or less). But i'm sure this won't happen since it's controversial opinion.
I agree with much of this.
Adoption is the
most important factor to any mass-scale payment method, of course. Once something is trusted as money, it has to be able to be used as money. Scaling a blockchain is very difficult, there are many more considerations to be taken into account than many believe. Off-chain solutions such as LN, and probably others, are needed to handle transaction volumes that can overtake credit and debit cards, etc. These take time to build, perfect, and then scale (fixing whatever problems arise along the way). Promotion as a payment method is absolutely important, but if we get too far ahead of ourselves and create a situation where the network is maxed out due to scaling problems, that could blow it. Consumer confidence is not always easy to get back once its lost. Slow and steady wins the race.
Legalization of bitcoin is assured, the question is how many hoops will they make us jump through. My focus is to make those hoops as little as possible. We have to remember that huge vested interests, centuries and even millennia in their entrenchment, are only "with us" to the extent they can find a market for themselves. Some of that we can work with (i.e. legalization overall), some of that we're going to have to fight against (i.e. making regulations draconian). A good factor we have in our favor is that some countries are seeing the power of Bitcoin and overall decentralization, distributed ledgers and are making good policy choices. Other countries won't want to be held back. It will take time, but expect the overall outcome to be positive for the new paradigm. Advocacy at all levels of government is needed. I also believe that common-sense, industry-supported voluntary standards are needed to show that the industry (yes, industry) can self-regulate. Regulators work with responsible industries, and work against what they perceive to be "bad actors". They look at things through the eyes of a regulator. Does this industry cooperate with us? Or are they a bunch of outlaws? Do they really think they can escape ME, the all-powerful SEC/CFTC/IRS/FinCEN/etc/etc/etc? Cooperation when possible gains you credibility. The ostrach approach ("sticking your head in the sand") doesn't work in the long run.
What people do with their Bitcoin is their business, absolutely. And I am most libertarian at my core, but I also know how this system works, and a pragmatic view is that cooperation to make some standards that are voluntary, but if applied, will reduce things like ICO fraud, ridiculous code exploits, KYC fraud, etc., can go a long way in the eyes of a regulator. That's why I believe that BTRIC Institute is going to offer real benefits to the industry with advocacy as well as standards maintenance, IETF style. We just made a commitment to the Blockchain Defensive Patent License yesterday, even though we do not yet have any patents. But it's the right thing to do.
The technology we all use to build a better world is too valuable to be subject to restrictive controls on its usage.On the technical side...
I am in favor of rapid adoption of innovations such as SegWit, LN, and bech32. The market must demand this from those they transact with. Coinbase, or any other business, is not required to do anything more than what is necessary for them to keep the profits rolling in. If customers say, implement SegWit or I will go, they'll implement it.
(And they just have.) Same goes for other improvements and innovations. In my view, best practices is that an exchange should be implementing in testnet what is being developed in core, so they can launch it on their production servers/mainnet as soon as possible after a launch. That requires engineering resources but it would set yourself apart from many of the other exchanges. It's what I would do if I ran an exchange, but I understand why others cannot afford that sort of engineering for something that may eventually get scrapped. That's part of what we hope to do with BTRIC Labs, R&D projects that can be used by many people, as soon after things launch into production as possible.
Regarding increasing block weight, I'd be in favor of some type of scaling block weight that was a reasonable increase over the current limit. But I believe that any increase should be sliding/scaling, based on the size of the mempool. To me, that seems a balance between the need to have blocks of a reasonable size for propogation purposes and the need to uncongest the network. I am not a blockchain expert, so perhaps I'm missing some important consideration, but that's my view based on what I do know about Bitcoin. I imagine Bitcoin nodes in places with crap internet, I think about what Bitcoin would be like on dial-up. Bitcoin is everywhere in the world and there's places out there with pretty bad internet. I want Bitcoin to be accessible by those people too.
I am not sure how I feel about an increase in the max supply of Bitcoin. I've never thought about it, I'd have to spend some time thinking to come up with my personal view on the subject. Regardless, we are some time away from having to decide about that.
What I do think would be something that should be considered is some sort of non-profit, decentralized backbone of a mining pool. It should not be controlled by any one entity, it should not be based in any one country, on any one continent, etc. It should be decentralized as much as possible. This means that some places that are mining would be paying more in electricity than others. The costs would be shared by everyone, it would be a non-profit venture, any profits would be put back into development or increasing the decentralization. It is not a good idea for an important global currency to be dependent on a cheap source of electricity, and have mining power concentrated in those places alone. It gives power to governments to make tax-incentives or offer to subsidize electricity and then abuse that power. So I envision a collective where some nodes are just breaking even or even going backward a little bit, but it's more than made up for by the other nodes. In this way, the overall network is protected by a concentration in mining hashrate, government action, a single company or organization, etc. I think that type of resilience can increase the quality of the network.
Well, that's my two Satoshi worth.
Best regards,
Ben
