Topic: Will Bitcoin scale in 5-10years? - page 3. (Read 1028 times)

I'm okay with "cheap". "Free" means they have no incentive to do it, or have alternative motives like advertising.

Diskspace is much cheaper than it was when Satoshi created Bitcoin, just as Satoshi anticipated.

Bitcoin is now like a bodybuilder skipping leg day: all money is invested in hashrate, and nothing in diskspace. Just one transaction adding 1000 bytes to the ledger costs about the same as a harddrive that can store the complete ledger many times. If I could choose between high fees and a large ledger, I'd instantly spend the money I safe on fees on a new disk drive.

If LN will really be a final scaling solution, it would lead to less onchain transactions when it's ready. From that logic, blocks could temporarily be bigger now, so Bitcoin can grow further until other scaling solutions are available.

- Most of us will just wait till network back normally [from Jan till June].
-50% will use Segwit as a temporary solution [2018-2019].
- LN will be the final solution for scalability problem.

While those are nice goals to aspire to, I think most people would be perfectly happy with transaction times of a few minutes, and most special uses would be satisfied with a few seconds.

And scalability doesn't need to be infinite. Currently Bitcoin definitely needs a more immediate bump, but generally a gradual growth would suffice, as long as it doesn't lag much behind demand.

BTW: The social sharing box in your site covers the text on low resolution displays.

Although we may be able to get by with these patches, the growing size of the 'replicated' ledger will eventually create elite mining communities who control the network, akin to the banking system of today.

As is, it will not be able to achieve what Cryptocurrency was designed to achieve - to supersede the flawed banking system, Cryptocurrency should achieve the following:
- sub-second transaction times
- sub-cent transaction costs
- practically infinite scalability
- controllable price stability
- control being democratically vested in the community
- simple and accessible interface to laymen

Bitcoin is unlikely to achieve this however many patches are made. We need to think anew and that is what we are creating at Noble Nation, as part of an integral solution for how nations should evolve in the future.

With CPFP not exposed in Core's GUI, which is a pity.

The erosion of expectations... why cheap and not free?

And yeah, the fee expectations at the end of 2015 look funny/sad now.

For those who don't see LoyceV's linked images (I didn't initially), the Core team had said about $0.75 or less in fees:

And gave this example:

I created two wallets, and can send funds from one wallet to the other. But when I try to buy a Blockaccino, it doesn't work:

With Bitcoin payments, I don't rely on one specific node to make a payment. If the Lightning Network relies on centralized nodes, wouldn't that make them easy DDOS targets?

The Roadmap ends in 2017. A screenshot from that FAQ, the last sentence shows how far off their predictions have been:

Meanwhile they spend resources implementing RBF and CPFP, which wouldn't have been needed without capacity problems. When blocks are full, every transaction that gets a higher fee pushes out another transaction with lower fee, so RBF and CPFP are, in the end, only generating more revenue for miners.

I can't wait to see a solution though, and I can't wait for Bitcoin to claim back it's market share if that happens, but I'm afraid it's going to be too little too late if it takes much longer. I already use altcoins to transfer funds between exchanges, and I seen other people do the same.
USD can now be transfered through Tether (USDT), I was kinda hoping some exchange would create a similar side-chain for Bitcoin: a BTCToken that can be used to make transfers at very low fees. The exchange that creates them can easily proof it's funds by signing a message, and we can use cheap transfers again. I already trust exchanges with money, I could happily trust them a bit more if it means I can make cheap transactions again!

Segwit has already been activated and will give Bitcoin ~2x capacity increase as adoption for this new type of wallet and addresses grows. You can track the adoption rate here: http://segwit.party/charts/ Once we reach 50+% we would have an effective doubling of transaction capacity.

Shnorr signatures. This basically combines multiple signatures into one, compressing the transaction sizes potentially by a large degree, especially if you lots of smaller ones coming in. Capacity increase is roughly ~25%+, in addition this will increase privacy. This can be implemented via soft fork.

Lightning Network is a second layer solution that will basically create an 'internet of payments'. It will allow organizations and individuals create payment hubs and channels which will find a route between sender and receiver like an email. This will increase transaction capacity 1000x, but it will require people to lock up their bitcoins in channels. On the plus side it will allow instant and virtually free transactions (no miner fees). This will free up on-chain capacity a lot because there are certain users who use the blockchain heavily with dozens of hundreds of transactions a day. These would all be moved to this second layer for speed and efficiency. This will come out later this year, but likely will take another year to materialize for a significant portion of users.

Rootstock is another second layer solution. It's basically a clone of Ethereum, that will be pegged to bitcoin. Rootstock will be able to have Ethereum level scaling (and smart contracts) promised to be ~2000 tx/second. This second level chain could serve as a checking or debit account for Bitcoin users, while the regular bitcoin will serve as their savings account. Rootstock has been promised to come out by the end of the year as well.
There are more projects, but I don't know enough about them to describe them. I hope somebody else can help me out...

Thanks for this. Great summary with links for further reading!

There's a nice talk by Andreas Antonopolous on the current scaling issues of Bitcoin and that obvious solutions are not always the right ones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AecPrwqjbGw I like his books and talks in general.

I agreed that scalability is one of the biggest challenge being faced by bitcoin as large volume can't be supported, that is why there we have been having recurrent hardfork hence SigWit has been activated which will invariably increases the speed in transaction capabilities.
More so, Lightning Network is another option if fully adopted will also increase transactions capacities all these will not take more one year to be fully adopted hopefully before the end of this year (2018).

The one good thing about Bitcoin is the comprehensive roadmap to adress the network capacity to handle more transactions and to plan for the future. They have been working on this for years and everything is tested and validated by Peer review.  https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/

People should just accept these changes and implement them, so that we can go forward.

There's a lot in the works.
We already have Segwit that gives us a 50% increase.
Bech32 segwit transactions with standard 1 input, 2 outputs are already 38% less than "legacy" transactions.

Also, assuming everyone used Segwit, with the smallest block transaction type of 1 input and 1 output, the block would be able to contain 12.195 transactions / block compared to legacy transactions of the same size that will fill the block with 5,208 transactions.

There are also Schnorr signatures that allow for the signing of multiple inputs with just one signature.
This will bring about another 25% block size.
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2017/03/23/schnorr-signature-aggregation/
https://medium.com/@SDWouters/why-schnorr-signatures-will-help-solve-2-of-bitcoins-biggest-problems-today-9b7718e7861c

There's also mimblewimble, a radical bitcoin architecture change that gives total privacy, reduces blockchain size and increases performance.
https://scalingbitcoin.org/papers/mimblewimble.txt

And of course, the coup de grâce, the Lightning Network.
Everyone should be familiar with the lightning network and how it allows for quick, instant, transactions without having to confirm immediately on the blockchain, while yet leveraging the security of the blockchain itself.
https://medium.com/@subhan_nadeem/future-of-bitcoin-cc6936ba0b99

If you want to see how it works then get a testnet wallet here: https://htlc.me/
And buy a block of coffee at starblocks: https://starblocks.acinq.co/#/

If you want to do the whole thing by opening a channel then Download the eclair wallet from the Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.acinq.eclair.wallet

Get testnet bitcoins here: https://testnet.manu.backend.hamburg/faucet

And top up at Bitrefill: https://lightning.bitrefill.com/steam-eur-voucher/

https://blog.bitrefill.com/test-instructions-lightning-on-bitrefill-ef6db8714b00

https://news.bitcoin.com/first-real-bitcoin-lightning-network-payment-completed-via-bitrefill/

Can somebody explain their vision as to how Bitcoin(and scallability issue) will exist in say next 5-10 years?

As we know, currently there are only few transactions per second at maximum, the question is, HOW is it going to scale? Is the solution still just a myth? Or is it still an experiment and it may never scale? With LN you'll be able to transact "freely" once the funds are committed, but still a on-chain fee will have to be paid to open and close the channel...

So what's your vision in 5-10 years. Will bitcoin have 100k/tps scallability, or will it be too expensive to use for payments(and only usable as gold) and can never scale?