All that drama, its "just" 60-70k on my node, we hit 80k last month ~10/27. Bitcoin with 1 MB blocksize and no further additions like e.g. SegWit will be unable to handle the demand from time to time. Get ready to pay even higher fees or learn to be patient. (Bitcoin) Black Friday and Christmas are coming, this is just a hint at what will come soon.
If there is consistently demand for >1.01 MB worth of transactions every 10 minutes, then users will either pay enough to get their transaction confirmed within ~1 block or their transaction will likely not get confirmed at all, as the required fee to get a transaction of a particular size will be increasing.
increase the blocksize. duhhhhhhhhh. idiots
I have yet to see it proved that it does actually have anything to do with the block size and not miners deliberately postponing confirmations, for whatever reason. Whoever is going to challenge that point, you know what to do. Basically, you should provide a list of the blocks mined since about time this congestion started with their respective sizes. The list is not going to be long, there are only 144 new blocks mined daily on average, and we will easily see who is right and who is not...
Anyone willing to compile such a list?
It is in the miners' best interests to confirm transactions that pay the largest fee on a per unit of size basis. In other words, a miner will confirm transactions in their found blocks that maximize their total block reward.
I think it is generally fair to say that blocks have been generally full as of recently.
No one other than cultist bitcoiners will ever download the entire Blockchain. Hell, even I won't ever do it again. I lost my copy of the entire chain a little over a year ago, waited two days for it to never catch up and quit. I'm an SPV kind of guy forever after that. Pruning mode in the new clients is a joke and if you want to revert to a full node you need to redownload the whole thing again.
What are you going to do about laptop people? Over half of the people I know only own a laptop, believing it stupid to have both a desktop and a laptop when the laptop does everything they want to do. Most, if not all, of these "laptopers" have less than a 500gb SSD drive. Which would you prefer to do? Make them rearrange their lives to accommodate bitcoin by purchasing a dedicated bitcoin desktop or make Bitcoin the only thing on their laptop and run only a client with the prune=<500> switch set? Both options are not only ridiculous but will not happen because no one will do it when they can just use ApplePay or a debit card instead.
Really big blocks - when is that happening again?
Not that I argue with your logic, downloading the blockchain is a painful process for many people and they will use SPV clients. However,
Bitcoin is primarily used precisely because people can't use ApplePay or a credit/debit card. Not always because they need to buy something illegal with Bitcoins. Many use cases are areas like gambling that can't be funded with a credit card but these areas are only illegal in the eye of police states. These people are willing to take some pain to learn Bitcoin and download the blockchain. But yeah, given that Bitcoin is a pilot project of cryptocurrency and competition tirelessly working on more manageable and flexible alternative designs, the current status quo of Bitcoin is not going to be forever.
The reason why I like to use Bitcoin is because using Bitcoin is
cheaper then using a credit card. The ~$0.20 transaction fees necessary to get a transaction confirmed may not be enough to make using a credit card more economical, however if Bitcoin transaction fees rise enough, then using Bitcoin will no longer be cheaper then a credit card.
100GB every ten minutes isn't possible for any domestic connection today.
A blocksize of 100,000 times the current would enable 100,000 time more transactions than we are currently processing. Why the hell are you talking about this value in the context of what domestic connections
today? Hyperventilate much?
Right now we have 250k transactions processed daily, increasing that by 100k times will give us a figure around 25 billion transactions daily. If we divide this figure by the total number of humans currently living (about 7.5 billion), we will get only 3 transactions per person daily. Some people may make dozens of transactions on a daily basis, some only maybe a few a week, but on average we should get quite close to that number (perhaps, it should be somewhat greater than that). And note that I'm not counting business transactions altogether. Now show me a really existing networking technology, domestic or whatever, that would be able to transmit data at or over 100 gigabytes (bytes, not bits) per second farther than a few miles...
And we would need such speeds across continents, dedicated entirely for the support of Bitcoin infrastructure
Why do you think that each of the 7.5 billion people on the planet will suddenly start using Bitcoin? Adoption (and in turn transaction growth) is not going to explode overnight, but will rather grow over time.
As transaction growth (and in turn the necessary -- and actual -- block size, and the blockchain size) increases, hopefully the capacity of various technologies necessary to run a full node will increase, and the unit cost of such technologies will hopefully decrease. Based on history, I have no reason to believe otherwise.
