Quote from: hatshepsut93 on Today at 05:12:54 PM

Bitcoin is money. Why would you want to mix database and money? Do you want to add random pictures to your PayPal transactions?

Quote from: unsigned_long_long on Today at 04:40:19 PM

I totally get why they don't want tons of data going on to the BTC blockchain and inflating transaction fees, possibly causing the price to tank as it did in the 2018 crash. I strongly believe that this crash was mainly due to the fees, as it coincided perfectly with the upper TPS limit.

Wrong. Bitcoin crashed because it was a speculative bubble. The $20,000 price mark existed for some minutes, and above $13k existed for only days. There's nothing strange with it crashing the way it did. The fees started getting high long before the price reached it's peak, so fees were definitely not the factor. No one was thinking "wait a second, with such high fees Bitcoin is not suitable to be a currency, sell, sell, sell", it was all pure speculation - buy low, sell high, get out.

Nobody disagrees with you that it was a speculative bubble. I think even my dog knows it was a speculative bubble. But there's a lot of data to suggest the pin which burst that speculative bubble was the fact that once the 1Mb limit was hit, the fees just went fucking crazy and people were like "fuck this, I'm out". If the 1Mb limit was not there, the bubble could have gone a lot higher. 30k, 50k, maybe even 100k.

Take a look at these charts:

Block size
GDAX BTC/USD market
Media transaction fee
Pending Tx fee chart (denominated in sats/byte

If you look at the block size chart, from October to November 2017 it was getting close to the 1Mb limit, then for virtually all of November it was consistently at ~960k (and never below 940k) and in December it was almost always above 960k. It was running very hot at this stage. In late November the median fees were ~$5 (0.0007). At this time BTC was trading at around $5k (VERY conservative estimate), and the fees actually weren't too bad, they were a median of around $3. so 3/5k = 0.0006 BTC / Tx. In early December there was a massive pop in the price where it rose from about $10k to about $17k, and there's a corresponding jump in dollar fees from $3 to about $15 = 0.0009 BTC / Tx. 50% increase in fees.

But then look what happens. On 16 Dec (a Saturday) the price shoots up to $19,500 and during the following week (close to Christmas), the money starts rolling in and the blockchain gets very busy, and the median price per tx shoots up to $33 (Dec 22), by this time the price had started to crash a bit, but nobody knows it's already peaked. So on Dec 22 thee price was down to around $14k, but the median tx price was $33, $33/$14k = 0.002 BTC / Tx =a 2X increase in dollar terms and more like 2.2X BTC terms.

So the fees were basically doubling every few days - not just in dollar terms due to the rising price of BTC. But in satoshis too. It's pretty damning evidence and hard to argue with. The 1Mb cap was hit.