Topic: How much better placed are we capacity-wise for future spikes in use? (Read 248 times)

Although, lightning network is not full activated but it doing fine and gaining more users. Meanwhile, it ought to be fully activated before another high traffic happen again and if it does happen faster than expected, with my research I find out that almost 50% of bitcoin transaction now use SegWit which is still good to handle any bubble.

LN is the worst place to be , if bitcoin suffers a massive spam attack,
as their is a vulnerability if the ONCHAIN does not have enough transaction capacity.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/here-s-how-bitcoin-s-lightning-network-could-fail-1467736127/

LN is no solution to bitcoin's onchain limits, if those onchain limits are pushed to the max,
in fact it would make matters worse if LN users starting closing channels as the onchain fees increase.
Segwit only gave a ~1.7 megabyte size increase from the 1 megabyte.
Using LN is only safe, if bitcoin onchain limits are not being exceeded.

Which is why using litecoin with LN is safer than using bitcoin with LN, as litecoin has onchain transaction capacity to spare.
*Onchain Capacity Matters*

Open a topic about your issue in the section you think fits your question best. ...?

Somewhere between half and 2 thirds of larger bitcoin services allow segwit depositing, and all support sending (as all support any P2SH address). Which is not ideal, but at least most of the way there.

Segwit isn't going to help if someone is determined to spam the network, but it will push up the price: the price of the attack increases (as there is more space to fill in a block), and the BTC price may get pushed up too, as the spammer might run out of BTC if they overestimate natural demand. Defining spam is hypothetical to some extent; a sophisticated spammer will craft their spam to be indistinguishable from regular use by individuals (although there were cases in the past where a BTC output was repeatedly spent to the same address in a chain of dependent transactions, which would be a very simple way of scripting some spam, and of no other conceivable purpose)



Lightning can take some of the load now, but not that much (there's about 100 BTC on the LN as of today, October 28th). There's probably a small amount of people using lightning for which a big spike in on-chain transactions would be unnoticeable; they've already got as much money as they need into channels already, enough to ride out the spike until it dies off. In the end, Lightning will help to relieve the impact of on-chain transactions queues far more effectively, but not yet.

you are asking about two separate things.
1. whether services such as exchanges are using SegWit, batching,...
which is easy to measure SegWit adoption since you can simply check the wallet they give you or their announcements to see if they support it. but it is harder to see if they support batching, etc since you have to do chain analysis to see if they use it for all their transactions.

2. whether bitcoin can handle its demand.
in my opinion the answer is no. if you check the mempool and fee spikes you can see that they are becoming more common and fees spike to as high as 30-40 satoshi/byte. for instance about an hour ago it went as high as 5. and this is happening while price is the most stable!
with a tx surge it will be high again, this time we may not need a spam attack to see 2017 repetition.

Does anyone have an overview of how many exchanges, wallets and services have fully taken on Segwit and batching compared to the previous fee squeeze? If we were to have similar transaction demands, is BTC now considerably better placed to cope with them?

It's hard to tell of course how much of that was Bitmain and others spamming to make a point, but by the time another bubble comes around demand will be that much larger again. What would be the likely outcome if there was a stampede right now?