Re: P2P Cash or Settlement Layer?

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.