Quote from: dinofelis on January 05, 2017, 05:21:41 AM

Quote from: thejaytiesto on January 04, 2017, 04:21:17 PM

As we know, bitcoin has the problem of making us choose between

1) A network that has conservative blocks in order to stay decentralized (so nodes can be run by common folk instead of big pockets, corporations and whatnot, which would be fatal for the network) + a secondary layer on top like LN to facilitate fast velocity, cheap transactions then wrapping them up on the decentralized network, but making on-chain transactions expensive and slow for those that want to use it. (This is the best we have now)

2) A network with big blocks, that is centralized at its core, since the blocks are too big for common folk to host nodes = centralization of nodes spiral begins and it ends up as centralized as mining is nowadays.

Option number 2 is out of the question, which is why Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Unlimited etc have been failures that get next to no support. Bitcoin Core with conservative blocksize increases (devs and all experts say they its best to increase the blocksize after segwit so we will get 2MB after segwit) + LN is the best we got. All other methods have been proven to be smoke and mirrors. Unrealistic and deceiving solutions.

I think this is a big mistake to think that option 2 is out of the question. This sounds like Bill Gates thinking that "640 KB is more than enough memory for a PC", and hard-coded a limit in DOS, because when 4KB machines were selling, that sounded like a reasonable proposition.

At this moment, and with a projection of a huge adoption, it is true that "all financial traffic of the world on block chains" doesn't seem to be feasible due to network and storage limits. But that financial traffic is a finite amount that doesn't grow exponentially like network and storage capacity is. What seems to be "a big block chain" may very well fit on a cheap device a few decades from now, and what seems to be a serious network congestion may be like nothing special a few decades from now. Bitcoin's block chain, of transmitting 1 MB per 10 minutes, was eating up a lot of capacity when people had 28kb modems. Now, 1MB per 10 minutes is peanuts for most home amateurs and get this in a few seconds. In the 1990ies I still had such a modem. That's 20 years ago. Scale up 20 years from now, and you'll find a few orders of magnitude more network and storage capacity that make these "huge block chain" discussions sound ridiculous. However, good immutable crypto, especially if it has large world adoption, cannot change its protocol any more. So we're doing a "Bill Gates 640K" if we hard-code limits in block chains because of technological capacity, which will cripple the system in a few decades at most.

The problem with proposing centralization as a solution, is it simply doesn't scale in terms of ecosystems, for the same reason that closed source doesn't scale but open source does.

The world doesn't want to invest in a system that is controlled by China. Centralized control is not anti-fragile.

Bitcoin has a limited lifespan. It will be the stepping stone from fiat to something that really works.

Sorry. My project is very important. I know my white paper is worth $billions. But i need to be able to actuate it into code in order to monetize my invention.