Quote from: VeritasSapere on March 20, 2016, 04:43:48 PM

Quote from: pereira4 on March 20, 2016, 04:37:12 PM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on March 20, 2016, 03:04:16 PM

Quote from: Lauda on March 20, 2016, 10:01:20 AM

Quote from: VeritasSapere on March 20, 2016, 02:41:52 AM

It is almost as if the very idea of a settlement layer might even be antithetical to a world where cryptocurrency becomes the dominant form of currency, rendered obsolete like many of the other functions that banks carry out today.

Everyone keeps talking about it yet nobody mentions the differences between P2P Cash and a settlement layer.

Cash is money for the people, a currency that everyone can use cheaply, directly, easily and quickly. A settlement layer is what large financial institutions use to settle balances between them. It is exclusive, elitist and reinforces or recreates the power structures we have today. Settlement networks would become obsolete if people chose to use cryptocurrencies on mass as currency.

By attempting to turn Bitcoin into a settlement layer you are turning it into the very financial systems Bitcoin was meant to counter. I find the entire idea to be unrealistic however, the large banks and financial institutions would be much better off if they designed their own systems for this purpose, even Ripple is a better settlement network then Bitcoin, I do not think these large financial institutions would even adopt Bitcoin because it is not in their interests to do so, the only way I see that happening is because they are "forced" to do so in order to stay relevant, and that could only happen because of mass adoption of Bitcoin as a currency. Not increasing the blocksize undermines Bitcoins ability to be a currency as was always intended, the whitepaper even describes this in its title, Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer Electronic Cash System.

Increasing the blocksize goes against the idea of decentralized peer to peer cash because it centralizes the nodes, so we need additinal layers like LN.

If the core of Bitcoin is centralized (and it's impossible to not end up with massive centralization if you want to scale everything on chain) we will end up a paypal 2.0 (not cash)

Increasing the blocksize by hard forking every now and then because the blocks keep getting full is the dumbest thing I've heard. We need additional layers like LN, the sooner you understand this reality the better.

The blocksize limit can be increased as our technology increases, using off chain solutions to scaling Bitcoin is not a solution to scaling Bitcoin directly at all. If Bitcoin does not scale its blockchain directly then it will simply just be out competed by alternative cryptocurrencies that can and are willing to scale. Using off chain solutions also adds another layer of abstraction that is not good for the user experiance compared to just transacting on the Bitcoin blockchain directly. Furthermore decentralized off chain solutions do not even exists, so far we only have federated side chains and the lighting network does not have a decentralized solution to routing yet. To restrict the growth of Bitcoin because you think we should use these other off chain solutions instead, which do not even exist yet is crippling Bitcoin. If this continues I would expect Bitcoin to lose its dominant positions to cryptocurrencies that are willing to implement Satoshi's original vision.

You should question your rhetoric a bit here, increasing the blocksize to two megabyte would not turn Bitcoin into paypal 2.0, that is a completely unqualified statement, such propaganda is not helping your case. It might scare people that do not know better, but if you have access to any decent computer equipment and internet connections you should know that two megabyte blocks are not a big deal and most people in the developed world will still be able to run full nodes out of their homes. Not to mention that the node count has been rising over the last year disproving some of the theories around node centralization.

You are delusional by thinking just because Moore's law say that X technology will be cheaper by X year, we can indefinitely be hard forking all the time.

You also don't realize that it's not about the total count of nodes, but how widespread they are across the globe. There's a lot of people struggling to run nodes on their countries, if you double the blockchain size now it's over for them, this will increasingly centralize nodes.
The node count has decreased, most of those nodes that raise the total count are the fake VPS Classic nodes.

You can't have security encryption backed by tons of power (the biggest network on the planet) in a decentralized way if you want to scale everything on-chain and pretend to ever compete against centralized solutions like VISA

The end user will not have any problems, this can be easily solved with a good and clear layout. Dealing with banks it's way more complex than Bitcoin will ever be (

1 opening up a bank account,
2 signing up into a website,
3 typing user and password,
4 typing the code in your physical card that the bank gave to you (and typing it by clicking on a virtual keyboard, and this code changes every time)
5 do the former again quickly enough because your login session was automatically closed for security measures
6 waiting for the transaction to be processed...)

This is bullshit compared to what we'll have with Bitcoin. LN will be more decentralized, cheaper and faster than any other alternatives.

If you are waiting for a coin to ever have the level of encryption Bitcoin has, backed by the hashing power Bitcoin network has, have the transactions per second VISA has, and have nodes decentralized... take a seat and keep waiting, because that just means you don't understand physics.