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The lighting network completely undermines the entire purpose of bitcoin, and blockstreams seeming desire to sabotage bitcoin for daily use coincides suspiciously with their outside “investment”.

If you read the original bitcoin white paper it is clearly evident that the purpose of bitcoin was as a currency. These insane fees, wait times, and rediculous technical decisions by core have made it such that bitcoin is becoming “bank coin” aka only used for settling between large groups and useless for individuals (unless you’re a speculator).

This has to change



If you believe lightning undermines the whole purpose and is the product of sabotage (or whatever core is being accused of these days), there are multiple forks to choose from that don't use it.

No need to attack Bitcoin, just go all in on Bitcoin Cash , put your money where your mouth is, and move on.


Yea! And I wish all these American liberals would stop complaining about Trump policies. Put your money where your mouth is and move to Mexico already! /s


Terrible analogy. To be more accurate, you would copy america and change the policies you want. Then the market decides on what they believe in and want.


Yea, no. Lightning network still depends on the bitcoin network. All it means is any two parties can transact off chain and settle up later. Not sure what the problem is.


That the Bitcoin network is being crippled in favor of these solutions.


You’re upset the core devs didn’t let Bitcoin become a centralized coin? If you refuse to acknowledge the benefit of SegWit or the other scaling solutions then I can’t help you.

Big blockers have their Jihan and Roger coin now. Stop trying to steal the bitcoin brand. If there was consensus for big blocks then Bitcoin would have activated. Jihan and Roger couldn’t convince the educated people that their proposals would work. Now they’re throwing a tantrum.


Sigh. Increasing the block size to 2MB nor 8MB for that matter will not make a centralized coin.

Segwit (besides being a crappy implementation) is by far not enough scaling.

That you blame Jihan and Roger is typical stupid propaganda which doesn't belong here.


According to actual research here: http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23...

Each additional kb results in an additional 80ms of delay until the majority learns about a block. Increasing to 8mb means you’re adding a 9min delay in propagation. That is pretty much guaranteed centralization.

Perhaps you have some research you can point me to that demonstrates otherwise?


Which does not take into account xthin/compact blocks which cuts down propagation time a lot. In the future graphene will further reduce the time necessary.

How you can conclude a 9min propagation delay for 8MB blocks is beyond me as miners are basically directly connected to each other. This is the only thing that matters decentralization wise.

Bitcoin Unlimited are successfully testing 1GB blocks: https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-unlimited-reveals-gigablock...


Your link is a news article and not actual research. The details of their specific test are barely provided. Please provide actual research as I have provided you.


This overcautious, "let's test everything for 10 years before trying it" approach is exactly what Bitcoin doesn't need when it has 0.001% of world transaction throughput.


Bitcoin is the conservative approach to any change that decreases the keystone of decentralization that allows it to survive. The market is deciding what it values.


The market is reacting to the fact that Bitcoin is in the public consciousness, and that is a result of years of advocacy done for Bitcoin, when its advocates (e.g. Roger Ver, Coinbase, PayPal, and all of the other signatories of the SegWit2x agreement) still believed that it would scale with large blocks and thousands of transactions on-chain per second.


Is there any data available on how long BCH blocks take to propagate? It's testing big blocks out in the real world so we can see how much delay that introduces and whether that leads to a significant increase in centralisation.


The BCH blocks are all very small. Go look at their blockchain stats. Most blocks are 10kb in size. The network is barely used. Once they start actually mining big blocks we’ll get some real data. I think it’ll be very interesting to see, tbh.


Ah that's a shame it would have been really interesting to see how that worked in reality.

I wonder if it could be measured the _other_ way around - i.e. are the sustained tiny blocks on BCH _increasing_ decentralisation compared to BTC right now? I can't find any good information on block propagation time though :(


I am not sure why it matters what the original purpose was. It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value. there may be other cryptocurrencies that act more like currencies


> It seems that current consensus of bitcoin is to be a competitor to gold for store of value.

Only made by the incompetent/corrupt developers. Regular users just don't want to pay outrageous fees.


what outrageous fees? you can send a billion dollars for 10 bucks.


I'd be surprised if you weren't aware that the fee isn't proportional to the amount being transacted. A $10 fee on a $10 transaction is outrageous.


right, but you can set the fee to 20 cents, if you are willing to wait for a confirm


This you may not be aware of, but there have been periods where the fee has remained in excess of over $1 for over 72 hours. A 20 cent fee will not cover you there.

Looking at my transaction history, of my last 10 transactions, all had fees in excess of $1, one as high as $14.

I'm not losing any sleep over it, but I'm also not going to call the fees reasonable.


I agree, bitcoin is not good for micropayments. But that's not the only use case that matters.


It depends on your definition of "micro payments" ... With a fixed number of bitcoin ever in existence for it to ever become a real world currency two things have to happen A) it's value inflate to a value that is an order of magnitude of all the value of the world .... B) be cheap enough, and fast enough that you can buy gum at the corner store

Without micro payments it's stuck in a niche paying ransoms and doing drug deals


it's one of the only usecase that matters if you're talking about using it as a general-use currency...


Yes, but my original point is biggest holders of btc are talking about it as a digital replacement for gold, not as a general use currency




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