BIG BLOCKER nutjobs REEEEEEEEE!
Suggest a better (implementable in the real world) alternative for getting more throughput. Any of you.
"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin
Just replace Safety with Throughput.
Be patient, people! The scaling problem
will be solved, and it will be solved in the right way, and for the long term. Nobody wants a temporary "patch" that requires a hard fork and compromises decentralization. When there are valid reasons to increase the block size, it will be done.
Except that's not even an analogy, that's just replacing one word with another in an unrelated sentence.
Also define "valid reason". We dislike sophism around here.
It's not a sophism. The key word here is "liberty". Are you willing to compromise Bitcoin's decentralization by
HARD-FORKING it to a bigger block size, so that you can buy your coffee at Starbucks and keep a
permanent record of it in the blockchain? Bitcoin's enemies will still exist, and will still spam the network. Then what? Increase the block size even more, to accumulate more garbage? Another hard fork? Where does it end?
What's needed is a solution that is inherently scalable
by design, such as the Lightning Network (or better ones that will surely come). It just doesn't make sense to do a hard fork that merely alleviates the problem
temporarily while compromising decentralization, when a much more elegant solution does exist, has already been tested and is almost ready to implement. After LN is implemented, there may be a need for a moderate increase in block size. That's the "valid reason" you are asking. A reason that comes from scientific method, not from a thoughtless "bigger is better" mentality.
The blockchain simply cannot hold every little insignificant transaction that is ever made. It is a waste of resources and totally inefficient. Back in the days when transaction volume was low/moderate, this could be tolerated. Not anymore. Have you kept every little note you've ever made in every little piece of paper since you were born? Do you keep all the shopping lists you make every time you go to the supermarket in a log book for future reference? Should every blackboard on every classroom be made to permanently preserve everything that's written on it?
There has to be a garbage collection mechanism in Bitcoin. We've reached a point where the garbage has become too much for the network to keep storing. The solution is NOT to make more room for even more garbage, but to find a way to destroy them and keep them out of the network. That's what LN does. Thousands of "coffee-sized" transactions aggregated to a single transaction that only takes a small fraction of a block instead of flooding the network. No loss of significance of information, because such information is not significant.
No hard fork needed! Want to do an important transaction on-chain? You can, just like today. And you will pay much less fees than today, because LN will free the network from all those millions of petty cash transactions that would otherwise flood it.
Sorry for the long post. It just infuriates me when people fail to see the moon and keep staring at the finger pointing to it...
