But if we want Bitcoin to succeed as the financial backbone of the planet, what are our choices?
1) SV's openness to storing arbitrarily huge amounts of data may lead to a small number of players at each task within the system, governed only by open competition. As a bonus, in the huge data scenario it becomes the backbone of the Internet.
2) BTC has already abandoned being the default money for the world, being utterly unable to even onboard the world to LN in less than a quarter century.
3) BCH is headed towards unlimited numbers of txs, albeit each one limited in size. At the cost of the perhaps unforgivable sin of centralized checkpointing.
So far, SV still looks like the preferable route forward to me. Current market share notwithstanding.
1) Significantly altered bitcoin's game theoretics
2) Significantly altered bitcoin's game theoretics, but those changes can (will?) be rolled back by miners
3) Significantly altered bitcoin's game theoretics
You missed one:
4) The Real Bitcoin
As in TMSR, or pre-(what was it)-0.85 Bitcoin? OK. Add it to the list. Again, I believe its tx per unit time will be its downfall, just like BTC.
YMMV. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. Not to be used for the other purpose. This furniture product is not a gateway to Narnia. Keep chain from testicles.
eta: If rollback occurs upon 2), then it collapses into 4), no?
Pretty much - it's based on 0.5.3.
Thanks. I had lost track of the specifics.
And as to that question - yes. I was hesitant to give TRB a new number. We could call it 2.5.
As for more TX/s, I'm leaning toward the TMSR/Shelby school of thought that the 1MB blocksize is an immutable part of the protocol. Do you think Bitcoin was intended to scale to the masses?
Yes. Public utterances by Satoshi tend to corroborate that postulate. Though I admit that it is impossible to know what is really in the mind of another.
We may never know for sure. Dan Held made a pretty good thread laying out the argument that Satoshi intended bitcoin to be a store of value, first and foremost:
https://twitter.com/danheld/status/1084848063947071488?lang=enFurther edit: in regards to 'Significantly altered bitcoin's game theoretics', specifics would be helpful. Up until the blockalypse, Bitcoin was utterly unaffected by any block size limitation (+/- a day or two). Something else you're thinking of?
The lock limit is not a limitation that was manifested within the protocol (i.e., on the wire). It was strictly a limitation of Bitcoin's client SW implementation. As a professional protocol developer, I look at things that are not enforceable 'on the wire' as not being part of the specification. As a system that works only to the extent that it ingeniously and carefully balances incentives, it is absurd to consider aspects that could be overridden by another client SW implementation as being intentional design decisions. We know (or surmise) from other suboptimal threading aspects of the SW that the original implementation suffers from the programmers' poor understanding of multithreading dynamics.
That's a good point. Technically you're correct about the blocksize limit not being part of the protocol, of course.
Though if everyone is running a client with a different blocksize, the network will become a clusterfuck. That's why BCH and BSV forked away, and created their own networks, after all (argument about who forked away from who notwithstanding).
The immutability of the 1MB blocksize still stands if we throw out the word "protocol". Satoshi knew that once he slipped that blocksize limit into the core client, it would be there forever, and become the de facto standard in all bitcoin software implementations. That's why Garzik and the others were opposed to it at the time. Satoshi said that it was temporary, but he knew enough about game theory to realize 1MB blocks would become a Schelling Point within the bitcoin network if it was left in the core client long enough.