Bitcoin Adoption and the Scalability Problem. What can normal users do to help?

[Oulay]

I have reached a conclusion that Bitcoin has almost got to the highest adoption it can sustain and we can't get to a higher adoption without solving the scalability problem first. As:
Higher adoption ----> more transactions per second ----> higher tx fee/time ----> inability to do smaller transactions ----> less adoption.

We can see this happening when Steam stopped accepting bitcoin in December last year after the high surge in its transaction fees.

What I find weird is how slow things are going. SegWit adoption is low and LN is not activated yet. Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

What can we do to help?
What comes to my mind is that we should start using SegWit addresses for all our transactions. I think if more bitcoin users show interest in SegWit and LN it would encourage their adoption among wallets and other services.
Any other suggestions on how we as a community can help solve the scalability problem?

PS: Though technically it's not a technical question but I preferred to post it here and get useful replies rather than posting in bitcoin discussion and having to deal with all the spam.

[BillyBobZorton]

Have you looked at the mempool lately?

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,1y

It's as empty as it can get. So no, we are far from having real scalability problems. These big ass peaks were obviously abnormal behaviour, either be by exchanges not properly batching transactions, Roger Ver and Jihan Wu spamming the network, and so on. Add in segwit and the mempool is empty. Transactions are now fast and cheap.

We don't need to rush things in order to accommodate a "mainstream demand" which simply doesn't exist, otherwise BCash would have full blocks as well Bitcoin itself. Censorship resistant and robust of the system > rushing things scaling wise.

If you want to help learn to code and drop good BIPs, get nodes running etc.

[buwaytress]

We don't need to rush things in order to accommodate a "mainstream demand" which simply doesn't exist, otherwise BCash would have full blocks as well Bitcoin itself. Censorship resistant and robust of the system > rushing things scaling wise.

If you want to help learn to code and drop good BIPs, get nodes running etc.

This has been the oft repeated reality, and one I understood only after many months of using Bitcoin - there is always going to be a need to scale, but the network is far from reaching its capacity with real-world use. Even so, with everything slotted for upgrades, bitcoin's well equipped to handle spurts of growth when it does eventually happen.

As the cypherhunk manifesto says, yes, learn to code... I'm embarrassed that I don't and cannot contribute in this way, but I'd like to think that using bitcoin - paying things with it, accepting payments for it, sending it to people for their very first coins... these also help in small ways. Encourage people to consider using Bitcoin, the way you were encouraged.

[Carlton Banks]

LN is not activated yet.

It's not a soft fork, so it doesn't activate. Your statement therefore doesn't make any sense

Lightning is already running, but still in a beta form. The UX is fairly clunky and there are potential bugs in the various implementations. It's not ready for mainstream use yet.

Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

The transaction capacity of Lightning is only really limited by it's BTC capacity & it's routing resolution. As long as the incentives work out, it could be so widely used that scaling will rival incumbent payment networks (Mastercard, Amex etc) and completely eclipse SWIFT. How much more capacity could Bitcoin need than that?

[Oulay]

Have you looked at the mempool lately?

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,1y

It's as empty as it can get. So no, we are far from having real scalability problems. These big ass peaks were obviously abnormal behaviour, either be by exchanges not properly batching transactions, Roger Ver and Jihan Wu spamming the network, and so on. Add in segwit and the mempool is empty. Transactions are now fast and cheap.

We don't need to rush things in order to accommodate a "mainstream demand" which simply doesn't exist, otherwise BCash would have full blocks as well Bitcoin itself. Censorship resistant and robust of the system > rushing things scaling wise.

The last "peak" lasted for months, even being from spamming the network, it did negatively affect bitcoin, and increasing the tx capacity would make such spamming attacks harder to achieve and less effective. I'm not asking for bitcoin to handle as many transactions as paypal, but I am hoping for such peaks to never happen.
I have near to zero technical knowledge so I can't say if LN development is going faster or slower than it should be. But I can't see how a faster adoption of SegWit would be "rushing things". SegWit is fully developed and it's the responsibility of wallets, exchanges and other services to start supporting it.

If you want to help learn to code and drop good BIPs

I might actually do it :p
I have some knowledge in programming languages like C++ and java, but I don't know what you meant here by "learn to code", do you know where can I start?

[Oulay]

LN is not activated yet.

It's not a soft fork, so it doesn't activate. Your statement therefore doesn't make any sense

So what's the right term to use here? And why the term 'activate' can only be used for soft forks?
English isn't my first language so I want you to help me a bit here :3

Lightning is already running, but still in a beta form. The UX is fairly clunky and there are potential bugs in the various implementations. It's not ready for mainstream use yet.

I get that, if it was ready it would be "out?" (since I can't say activated :p ) already.

Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

The transaction capacity of Lightning is only really limited by it's BTC capacity & it's routing resolution. As long as the incentives work out, it could be so widely used that scaling will rival incumbent payment networks (Mastercard, Amex etc) and completely eclipse SWIFT. How much more capacity could Bitcoin need than that?

I read that:

Lightning is 180 times (17,900%) more efficient than basic Bitcoin.

But please help me with this question, will LN be available for the normal user with a small internet bandwidth? or does it require certain setup?

[Anti-Cen]

It's not a soft fork, so it doesn't activate. Your statement therefore doesn't make any sense

Lightning is already running, but still in a beta form. The UX is fairly clunky and there are potential bugs in the various implementations. It's not ready for mainstream use yet.

It's a system of mini banks, we have gone over this time and again but you love on-block, then off-block because
you are a member of the party faithful here and resort to insults when faced with facts.

Currently they are just testing LN inter-bank transfers and then we might get a wallet but it's going to take a year or
so before Jaxx or Exodus wallets are going to implement LN (if they ever do) and the voice from developers like me
will only grow stronger in the mean time.

The blind faith card has been played, fees went to $55 using this "Market Forces" argument so take both TN transaction fees and
interest fees out of Lightning and fudge the "Off-block" divide and conquer for now whilst a scaleable on-block solution is found or face the very
real prospect of Bitcoin being confined to the history books and i am not alone in saying this but others that step forwards here get chased
away.

[Kakmakr]

The non-technical side of the community can help with their support. The wallet providers and exchanges will only make decisions to implement new technologies, if there is a huge demand for it. You can write emails to these third party services to ask for these technologies. When there are enough people doing this, they would not have a choice in the matter, they have to go with the demand or they will lose market share in a highly competitive market.

Leave the technical side for the experts and concentrate on the things that you can change. <Consumer demands>

[Carlton Banks]

LN is not activated yet.

It's not a soft fork, so it doesn't activate. Your statement therefore doesn't make any sense

So what's the right term to use here? And why the term 'activate' can only be used for soft forks?

Lightning is already running, but still in a beta form. The UX is fairly clunky and there are potential bugs in the various implementations. It's not ready for mainstream use yet.

I get that, if it was ready it would be "out?" (since I can't say activated :p ) already.

Activation implies a binary state, "on" or "off". With Lightning, judging "readiness" is more complicated than that. Lightning works now, there are (I think) around 1000 lightning nodes. But don't use it yet if you're neither technically adept, or willing to lose money.

As for when it's "out", that doesn't make sense either really. The Lightning protocol has been "out" since version 0.1 was published, but it was then (and remains now) a bad idea to use mainnet BTC on Lightning. Don't try to use it until at least 1 of the different Lightning wallet software developers officially submits finished client software to the public.

Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

The transaction capacity of Lightning is only really limited by it's BTC capacity & it's routing resolution. As long as the incentives work out, it could be so widely used that scaling will rival incumbent payment networks (Mastercard, Amex etc) and completely eclipse SWIFT. How much more capacity could Bitcoin need than that?

I read that:

Lightning is 180 times (17,900%) more efficient than basic Bitcoin.

But please help me with this question, will LN be available for the normal user with a small internet bandwidth? or does it require certain setup?

Bandwidth will not be noticeably different to using your regular Bitcoin wallet software, if you have the internet connection to handle Bitcoin wallets now, you'll be fine.

[hugeblack]

Higher adoption ----> more transactions per second ----> higher tx fee/time ----> inability to do smaller transactions ----> less adoption.

Let's assume the worst scenario: all the world uses Bitcoin technology.
7 billion people use betcoin, 1,000 transactions a year ----> 7T tx (192 byte for every transactions) ---> 1.3 petabytes/year.
when using LN  "the total global payment volume can then grow well above the 10T/year estimation, at no additional cost."[1]

Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

will solve.

It's a system of mini banks,

No, lightning network does not keep your money, but its a channel based on the bitcoin blockchain.
Please spend an hour of your time reading -----> a flash of insights on lightning network you will be learning everything about the LN.

Source:
#1https://fieryspinningsword.com/2018/03/13/a-flash-of-insights-on-lightning-network/

[Oulay]

The non-technical side of the community can help with their support. The wallet providers and exchanges will only make decisions to implement new technologies, if there is a huge demand for it. You can write emails to these third party services to ask for these technologies. When there are enough people doing this, they would not have a choice in the matter, they have to go with the demand or they will lose market share in a highly competitive market.

Leave the technical side for the experts and concentrate on the things that you can change. <Consumer demands>

Thanks, that's exactly what I was asking about.

Please spend an hour of your time reading -----> a flash of insights on lightning network you will be learning everything about the LN.

Thanks for the good read. It's definitely going to be a new era for bitcoin if Lightning Network is as perfect as described in this article. I hope it's adoption won't take so long when it's out of beta, which I know will.

[Anti-Cen]

No, lightning network does not keep your money, but its a channel based on the bitcoin blockchain.

Yes they are banks, they charge transaction fees and interest on the BTC used by the bank to finance the ledger
and you admit this yourself in the link you provided.

Time value of funds locked in channels: This is hard to calculate. With proper fee adjustment, I believe the LN can work well with each intra-hub channel having capacity equal to a tenth of an average person’s salary. This would mean that, Alice can pay Bob a total of 5 months salary before saturating all routes between them (if she wants more, she can always pay on-chain). Note that this would not saturate the intermediate channels between Alice and anyone else, though it might saturate Alice’s own channels. If the average salary is $1000, this means a total of ($1000*4M*4K/10) = $1.6T locked. Since Bitcoin is non-inflationary, the time-value of money is low; we will use a generous estimate of 5%/yr for the time value and cost of security. This gives a cost of $80B per year, much more significant than setting up channels.

One cent per transaction you say because the running costs of the hubs are so cheap so lets revers engineer maths
here and account for how miners were able to charge $55 per transaction two months ago if no one is out to make
profits that you ignore in the document.

$55 per 250 bytes, well lets call it $200 per K and this put the price of a gigabyte needed for a movie at about a billion squid !

I tend to get my information from the official white paper https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf or the
current network map https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ of lightning and each fork is inflationary, doubles the money supply and Lightning
really turns the bitcoin block-chain into a central banks for the hubs and this is required for anyone to trust the hubs.

off-block single point of failure banking hubs is not the solution and we are being feed problem-reaction-solution here.  

[Clara.Wilfred]

If you have the technical ability one of the best things you can do is set up a lightning network node. If not that just run a node on your laptop. Every little helps. It has a compounding effect

[buwaytress]

Yes they are banks, they charge transaction fees and interest on the BTC used by the bank to finance the ledger
and you admit this yourself in the link you provided.
~snip
off-block single point of failure banking hubs is not the solution and we are being feed problem-reaction-solution here.  

Saw one or two of your other posts throughout the forum and you have this theme of Lightning Network consisting of banks... charging transaction fees and interest. At first I dismissed the "bank" term as your oversight, but now I am reading this, you're saying they're charging interest? So I have a few questions:

1. Where did you read about interest charges? I tried looking it up myself but perhaps I fail at research. Even the link hugeblack provides, which you say acknowledges this... doesn't?

If I understand you correctly, you mean to say that these hubs will charge people who connect it interest... I don't get the concept though. You put coins in a channel, why would you be charged interest? You pay interest on loans you take. As everyone's coin is in the LN channel, and any party can open a channel, who's the borrower/lender in LN?

2. Tx fees? Whomever makes the spend pays the fee. What's the issue you have here?

[JoshuaBlack1]

Help your family and friends open a wallet and then send them a little crypto. Let them watch it over time. Also don't force it downtheir throte. Lead by example, get them interested, don't preach

[bob123]

If you have the technical ability one of the best things you can do is set up a lightning network node. If not that just run a node on your laptop. Every little helps. It has a compounding effect

While i agree with setting up a lightning network as an 'input' towards scalability through testing, bug reports, etc.. is a good idea for an individual to help,
running a full node doesn't contribute at all towards adoption/scalability.

Using segwit wallets are a good way 'contributing' to the health of the network for standard users.
And definetely stop using web wallets. They are less network-friendly with their hot->cold storage (and vice versa) transactions, even if segwit.

[nicosey]

The less you use the network the less load you put on 

[Quickseller]

Have you looked at the mempool lately?

https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#1,1y

It's as empty as it can get.[...]

Some of this is the result of things like SW adoption, batching withdrawal transactions (reducing privacy), and the spam attack stopping. However I think a large part of this is the result of many people moving their coins onto exchanges, and exchanges no longer subsidizing withdrawal tx fees. Evidence of higher balances on exchange accounts would include lower lending rates across multiple reputable exchanges.

Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

[...] As long as the incentives work out, it could be so widely used that scaling will rival incumbent payment networks (Mastercard, Amex etc) and completely eclipse SWIFT. [...]

This is unlikely.

If there are exactly 1 million participants in the LN network, in order for every participant to be able to make a payment to any other participant in the network using no more than 6 "hops" (the last hop being the person you are paying), then each participant must, on average have at least 6 open channels with distinct participants.

If Alice needs to pay Bob, and the shortest route between the two is 6 hops, then all 6 LN nodes must be online at the same time, and if any one of the LN nodes are not online (or otherwise fails to sign the necessary transactions), the payment will fail. If LN resembles anything close to a mesh network, the majority of the time participants will be unable to transact with the majority of the network if you assume each LN node has 67% uptime (each node is turned off for 8 hours per day -- a mesh network would mean that most LN nodes would be compromised of "home users").

If the LN network were to resemble something closer to a 'hub and spoke' network, the issue of LN nodes downtime would not be as prevalent, however there would be other issues. Each hub would have an outsized influence over the network, and would have the ability to wreck havoc on the network either by raising fees substantially, censoring transactions of those directly connected to each hub, and downtime of a small number of hubs would have the potential to fragment the entire LN network. Also, running a hub node would be incredibility risky because private keys would need to be kept effectively 100% online (on a computer connected to many other people), and the hub's private keys must control a large amount of bitcoin. If you assume that hubs collectively control 25% of bitcoin, then hubs must collectively keep ~$34 billion worth of bitcoin online.

Let's assume the worst scenario: all the world uses Bitcoin technology.
7 billion people use betcoin, 1,000 transactions a year ----> 7T tx (192 byte for every transactions) ---> 1.3 petabytes/year.
when using LN  "the total global payment volume can then grow well above the 10T/year estimation, at no additional cost."
[...]
Source:
#1https://fieryspinningsword.com/2018/03/13/a-flash-of-insights-on-lightning-network/

What is a LN network with 7 billion people using it supposed to look like?

[Wind_FURY]

It's not a soft fork, so it doesn't activate. Your statement therefore doesn't make any sense

Lightning is already running, but still in a beta form. The UX is fairly clunky and there are potential bugs in the various implementations. It's not ready for mainstream use yet.

It's a system of mini banks, we have gone over this time and again but you love on-block, then off-block because
you are a member of the party faithful here and resort to insults when faced with facts.

"A system of mini banks"? I do not understand. Can you first give us your definition of banks and apply that to why you think Lightning is a "system of mini banks"?

It is a system of payment channels on top of the Bitcoin network.

Currently they are just testing LN inter-bank transfers and then we might get a wallet but it's going to take a year or
so before Jaxx or Exodus wallets are going to implement LN (if they ever do) and the voice from developers like me
will only grow stronger in the mean time.

It will be officially released when it's ready. But there are beta releases out there from Blockstream and Elizabeth Stark's team.

The blind faith card has been played, fees went to $55 using this "Market Forces" argument so take both TN transaction fees and
interest fees out of Lightning and fudge the "Off-block" divide and conquer for now whilst a scaleable on-block solution is found or face the very
real prospect of Bitcoin being confined to the history books and i am not alone in saying this but others that step forwards here get chased
away.

"Scaleable on-block solution"? There will not be one. But if you propose a 10,000gb per block size then you are welcome to be on Roger Ver's Bitcoin Unlimited team. Hahaha.

[Carlton Banks]

Even when LN is activated I don't know if it would solve things up.

[...] As long as the incentives work out, it could be so widely used that scaling will rival incumbent payment networks (Mastercard, Amex etc) and completely eclipse SWIFT. [...]

This is unlikely.

If there are exactly 1 million participants in the LN network, in order for every participant to be able to make a payment to any other participant in the network using no more than 6 "hops" (the last hop being the person you are paying), then each participant must, on average have at least 6 open channels with distinct participants.

If Alice needs to pay Bob, and the shortest route between the two is 6 hops, then all 6 LN nodes must be online at the same time, and if any one of the LN nodes are not online (or otherwise fails to sign the necessary transactions), the payment will fail. If LN resembles anything close to a mesh network, the majority of the time participants will be unable to transact with the majority of the network if you assume each LN node has 67% uptime (each node is turned off for 8 hours per day -- a mesh network would mean that most LN nodes would be compromised of "home users").

If the LN network were to resemble something closer to a 'hub and spoke' network, the issue of LN nodes downtime would not be as prevalent, however there would be other issues. Each hub would have an outsized influence over the network, and would have the ability to wreck havoc on the network either by raising fees substantially, censoring transactions of those directly connected to each hub, and downtime of a small number of hubs would have the potential to fragment the entire LN network. Also, running a hub node would be incredibility risky because private keys would need to be kept effectively 100% online (on a computer connected to many other people), and the hub's private keys must control a large amount of bitcoin. If you assume that hubs collectively control 25% of bitcoin, then hubs must collectively keep ~$34 billion worth of bitcoin online.

You're suggesting that only 2 possible patterns in node topology can exist. That's false.

And you've chosen 2 topological examples that might cause a certain rate of failure. You've painted an incredibly biased picture by assuming there are limits that don't exist.


If only handful of well connected nodes with high up-time were to open channels with each other, both your scenarios won't happen.