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Comment by chasil | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin has extreme scalability and privacy problems.

Over the course of 20 minutes, the maximum number of people who can engage in transactions is somewhat under 50,000. This is obviously unworkable as a global currency; if the user base and transaction volumes rise, you might be waiting hours or days for a transaction to complete.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem

The blockchain also records details of your transactions forever, and unless you carefully obfuscate your activity, every bitcoin user will have the entire blockchain and your entire history on it. Forever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_and_blockchain

This certainly gives me pause.

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Lightning network (which admittedly has its own set of flaws) does a reasonably good job of improving privacy and increasing scalability. It's reasonable to assume that Lightning and other "layer 2" technologies will continue to develop if the Bitcoin user-base continues to grow.

Bitcoin and Lightning solve many of the issues in the article and will improve.

As a society we should encourage both the use of physical cash and decentralized cryptocurrency as alternatives to the centralized banking "cashless" system.

As far as I can tell LN has been failing 18 months at a time for like 5 years now. Its never going to work is what people seem to be saying.

Satoshi had the simple solution from day one, it is just to incrementally increase the block size as needed, like the BCH fork is doing, its really no big deal.

No, it doesn’t have scalability problem, neither privacy issues. I’m tired of saying always the same stuff.

Do. Your. Own. Research.

You already have did it, so that’s just bad faith.

Please enlighten us; how is this statement incorrect?

"The maximum throughput is the maximum rate at which the blockchain can confirm transactions. Today, bitcoin's maximum throughput is 3.3–7 transactions/sec. This number is constrained by the maximum block size and the inter-block time."

Google "Lightning Network". It allows for "off-chain" transactions that aren't included in the "7 tx/sec" limit.

The Lightning Network is in the Wiki's Stage 2 section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem#%2...

"The Lightning Network requires putting a funding transaction on the blockchain to open a payment channel."

Now, if we put the whole world on Bitcoin, how long does it take to open that channel? Days?

Valid point, but we are decades away from putting the whole world on Bitcoin. In those intervening decades lightning alternatives and/or derivatives will likely be developed that can allow the entire world to use Bitcoin.

Yes, LN is a pretty dead idea from first principals since Blockstream hijacked the GitHub repo.

But of course LN makes no sense if you just did what Satoshi said and incrementally increase the block size as needed, but then of course Blockstream cant sell you their SideChain(tm) products.

The whole thing became really convoluted and dumb once Adam Back got involved.

You should’ve started the discussion stating your personal drama with Adam Black so we wouldn’t waste our time.

Satoshi had the "solution" from day one, just incrementally increase the block size as needed, the road map BCH has chosen to follow, its really no big deal.

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