Quote from: gmaxwell on June 05, 2016, 02:32:15 AM

Quote from: johnyj on June 04, 2016, 02:47:25 PM

Similarly here, by putting all the transactions on-chain, you have to strive to find the best possible on-chain scaling technology, like thin blocks doing right now. But if you start to become lazy and try to use the old centralized financial models like payment channels because they can provide millions of transactions per second, then you just drag bitcoin into the old banking model, which will dramatically reduce its usage and increase its risk, especially when there are many other alt-coins provide on-chain scaling

I can't agree at all.

Payment channels are _nothing_ like old centralized financial models. Who is the trusted third party? No one.

When you go on and on about "on chain" you're confusing a technical mechanism for a social or business business goal. Everyone being able to transact with everyone else at low cost and without the risk of censorship or exposure to extraneous counterparty risk is a laudable goal. "On chain"-- meaning transacting in a lock-step synchronous world wide flooding network-- is a technical mechanism. On that, to the best of our current understanding _cannot_ deliver that business/social goal. Fortunately, we do know ways to deliver it.

It's like walking up to some aircraft engineers and demanding that the next design be exactly the same but have a wingspan twice as long, when really your goal was to double the number of pounds of cargo it could carry. Maybe the change lets it carry more cargo, or maybe it just makes the plane unstable. Regardless, a particular _mechanism_ was confused with the business goal, and as a result an end-run around the science and engineering that could, potentially, have actually met the goal if given a chance and allowed to make the required tradeoffs.

Of course, there is always someone out there that will tell you that you can solve any complex problem with this one weird trick. But there is a word for them: Scammers and their patsies. And right now, there is a whole clique of the Bitcoin old timers who were bamboozled by Craig Wright and his 419 scam which predominantly featured a ton of magical scalablity claims... it's going to take a while for their wide and greedy eyes to blink and realize they've been tricked, and that maybe these magical scaling claims were just as fraudulent as everything else.

Not knocking you at all, but this is a really poor example of what going on. In the real world, you dont just walk up to an avionics engineer and say "hey I want the wingspan to be twice as large" with the assumption that larger wingspan = increased load. What really would happen is that the avionics engineer is flowed down a set of detailed requirements from the program manager and systems engineer, which they would get from a RFQ/RFP (request for quote/request for proposal) from the customer. If its an internal development and the product is being sold as is, a group internal to the company would develop requirements and those are sub-allocated to the various engineering disciplines. Either way, there is a large list of requirements that as they are flowed down to each discipline, they are refined more and more.

Need larger wings? Sure, you can carry both more load and fuel. But the engines would need to increase in size in order to achieve lift. Larger engine sizes could also provide more prime power internal to the plane as well, powering some sophisticated and high power radar systems.

Start with "plane needs to carry 5 tones max internal load", and work from there.

This is the inherent problem that I have argued ever since this scaling issue became apparent. Bitcoin, and every other coin (with maybe the exception of a few) lack bare bones requirements. There is a significant gap and lack of proper skill sets with the lead developers of most coins that would have put the scaling issue to bed years ago. Not saying that developers are not skilled (all of you are very skilled at software engineering), but software engineering is software engineering. Software engineers are not program managers, engineering managers, systems engineers, business managers, and so forth. Yet at the same time those with the proper skill set can be ostracized from conversations for lack of coding skills (per the comment made to Lauda about not knowing C++).

Back to Bitcoins requirements, the entire multi year conversation can be summed up with one question. Is Bitcoin a means of storage of wealth, or is it a payment system? If the developers of all coins can answer this, than the quest for real solutions can start. Right now Bitcoin is hobbling along and will continue to do so with half assed attempts to fix an undefined requirement.