Quote from: phoenix rises on December 23, 2016, 06:55:53 PM

Quote from: pereira4 on December 23, 2016, 06:38:36 PM

I want to get back into Monero, I invested originally back in the day but eventually sold. It seems they are finally making it more user friendly with the GUI. But I still have problems with the scalability problem. Some people complain about Bitcoin's blockchain being too heavy but we already got it figured out with segwit, lightning network etc to scale for the next years. Now my question is, how is Monero going to deal with its blockchain which as far as I remember is a couple times heavier than Bitcoin or grows at a faster rate? Also how fast is Monero nowadays compared to Bitcoin?

I guess for its niche that is not an important but its still good to know how thinks are going to be dealt with in the future.

Yes, blockchain will be bigger, but I dont see many people complaining about BTC blockchain size - it's the block size and subsuquent congestion that is the real issue, and we have that covered with adptive blocksizes, so we will never have to have the debate that is going on with BTC now. At the end of the day its just data storage, and the price paid for XMR privacy is a bigger chain. Sure, that will likely lead to more node centralisation in the future, but that seems an unavoidable part of this tech.

AFAIK, and from what I have read, there is absolutely no reason why the 2nd layer solutions being proposed for BTC cannot be applied to XMR in due course, so I don't see any problems there tbh. It's not like we need them yet, and the tech will be more mature by the time we do.

Pure speculation : As the Aeon project has been taken on by Smooth, is part of the monero stack exchange, and XMR tech is going to be implemented there in due course, it would not surprise me to see Aeon playing a role in XMR's future as a slightly less private, but very related coin that one could keep smaller balances in for day to day stuff. It is a 'lighter' version of Cryptonote and intended to be mobile-friendly, with some compromise on privacy levels to achieve that. That may play a part in scaling too ...
EDIT : Disclosure - yes I have bought a bunch purely on the basis that Smooth is involved, it looks like it will be developed alongside XMR, and its being virtually given away at the moment ...

Centralized nodes will happen only if the blocksize is too big for the average computer a particular time. Like right now, 1 MB seems like a good enough sweet spot to keep for Bitcoin. On top of this, you can build a second layer and still be safe with a network core that remains decentralized.

Now, if the blocksize is too big, it doesn't matter what you build on top, you are already fucked since the network is centralized, therefore all the anonymous technology is useless.

So I would say that a conservative blockchain sized BTC + LN is more secure than XMR with a centralizing tier blocksize...