Here is what I'm thinking: considering you are hell bent on selling the world on the value of the Bitcoin payment network, do you reasonably believe that Bitcoin is gonna make it to Paypal's level of TPS only in 2024? What if we get there less than 5 years from now? Is this really "unlikely"? I honestly don't think so especially if you and others have your way and attempt to fit every single transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain. Remember that "supply creates its own demand".
My concern is that I'm not sure it is safe for the decentralization of the network to try to handle 32mb per blocks within 2020, much less 64. In my mind this would necessarily imply an important if not dangerous decrease in the range of entities who are able to run full nodes. I don't want to hear anything about the amount of nodes as it is not a reliable indicator. As much as cypherdoc would like to believe that an individual running multiple nodes improves the decentralization of the network this is obviously not the case. Finally I'm also worried we would find ourselves in a much worse spot than we already are in regards to mining centralization.
My point is this reliance on block size increase as a scaling solution is a slippery road. One that if we do not travel through cautiously could seriously hinder the security of the network and ultimately result in turning Bitcoin into pale copy of Ripple.
Thank you for this response. I think it is was valid and I can appreciate your concern. I also think it serves to illustrate the ideological divide between you and me.
Me, I think the most probable way that Bitcoin fails is by lack of adoption and growth. I see the 1 MB limit as the greatest
technical blockage in this regard.
You, on the other hand, seem to be most worried about failure via centralization, and see a larger block size limit as contributing to the very failure mode you see as most likely.
And therein lies the problem. Although we both want success for Bitcoin, what I see as a panacea you see as a poison.
For the record, here's my take: we probably all remember the first time we received a real bitcoin transaction. I do. I was using the blockchain.info wallet on my iPhone and had purchased about 0.4 BTC from canadianbitcoins by depositing $20 cash into their RBC bank account. I remember a couple hours later my phone made a funny noise, and sure enough, boom, there was $20 of BTC in my wallet! I thought that was pretty amazing!! I then sent coins back and forth between different wallets, watching the transactions nearly instantly propagate, and the enormity of what was happening really sunk in: these transactions were being relayed to every node across the world, double, triple, quadruple checked, and then being logged to an unforgeable ledger that was stored redundantly at nodes all across the world. And all this was happening--not because of some bank or government initiative--but because normal people came together to make it happen. And because it was a peer-to-peer initiative, access was so affordable that even the poorest of people on the planet could participate.
I think more people need to share that experience. And for that, we need bigger blocks.
While I share your nostalgia, I happen to think that the experience of the users of tomorrow, the mainstream public you would like to see adopt Bitcoin, will be so unlike anything we are experiencing it makes little sense expecting this on-boarding process to remain "the same".
You might disagree with me but my opinion is that the masses, as they exist right now, will never approach the level of direct engagement we currently experience with Bitcoin, the blockchain and the related ecosystem. By that I mean that you can forget about them ever being introduced or interested in the concept of nodes, transaction propagation, redundancy, block explorers. A regular person is not approaching or trusting a blockchain.info wallet, much less trusting it with their money.
Now, as for the last statement, that may change. In fact I expect it to and that is why I am very confident (to the dislike of some perhaps..) that customer focused approaches such as Coinbase, Circle, BitReserve and others will have tremendous success. These customer experiences will not only surpass the one you described but make it look ancient & obsolete by its abstraction of almost anything Bitcoin and the presence of familiar user experience. As much as you'd like to convince yourself of the contrary, the existing popularity of such services confirm that most people simply do not care whether or not their transaction is settled directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. We should all hope this will eventually change and I too share the dream of "everyone being their own bank" but this is frankly a dangerous utopy at this point
There is a whole world of abstraction needed before ever pretending to a potent mainstream consumer adoption of Bitcoin.
My advise to you is to start looking at growth in another light. While it seems reasonable to track "adoption & growth" by an increase in the userbase, I have recently come to the conclusion that what might be even more preferable is a growth in capital.
I guess this comes back to our different idea of Bitcoin's value proposition but to put it shortly, my opinion is that more expensive transaction fees on the blockchain will hardly hinder the adoption of capital looking to buy a spot and park their money in the unforgeable ledger. That is because bitcoins are a unique collectible unlike anything the world has seen since gold. Unfortunately much like gold some characteristics limit its direct use as a mean of exchange. Gold's shortcoming is in its physicality, Bitcoin's own is the decentralization tradeoff.
Fortunately Bitcoin being digital, the technical solutions to this problem are unlimited and will only improve in quality, reliance and decreasing need for trust. I understand this is not a popular position but let me make it clear: I absolutely propose that in the future any Bitcoin user will have to consider the cost of transacting on the blockchain and perhaps opt for other options if they feel there is no need to have their transaction validated under the "ultimate" trustlessness of the blockchain.
