how do you determine on-chain transations to cost so much?
He cant. His post is just a roundabout way of saying, Bitcoin cannot scale, and will thus become a bankers toy as bone-crushing transaction fees force everybody into the next generation of Paypal. Baloney.
Almost all bitcoin transactions in the future will be done on exchanges, between bank accounts, or through digital warehouses without any bitcoin moving on chain. I'm not holding mine like that but you know most people and companies will, out of fear or because they don't know any other way.
Nice list. You are basically describing a centralized shitcoin thats like meta-Paypal 2.0 with magic blockchain pixie dust sprinkled on top. Who needs it?
(Not the banks, who do not like transparent blockchains for their own use! There is a reason why JPMorgan Chase (!) paid the erstwhile Zcash Company to adapt zk-SNARKs to their own bigbank confidentiality requirements. See also Greg Maxwells discussions of bigcorp interest in Confidential Transactionswhich are accordingly implemented in Blockstreams Liquid. Only idiots make their own finances publicly transparent; bigcorps are not so stupid.)Notably, you omitted Lightning Network, and other off-chain things
not under the control of banks and other regulated corporations.
The end game is bitcoin becomes the settlement layer for the world. Transaction costs are going way up in the future, you're not going to want to do on-chain transactions when it costs $1000+ to do so, but if you're settling a billions dollars, that's a tiny price to pay.
I could see perhaps something on the order of magnitude of $100 (in todays current value) on-chain transaction costs, but $1000+? Smells like FUD.
Bitcoin needs to be accessible to even relatively poor individuals for long-lived channel management on a future L2: Scrape together $100 to open a channel that runs for years. That would be less expensive overall, amortized over the channel lifetime, than the ripoff fees that regulated money transmitters charge to the unbanked in many regions. Proportionately, the poor always get ripped off the worst!
Speaking from experienceif I had back all of the money that I have ever paid to move small amounts of money without a bank account...That is not some bleeding-heart egalitarian hogwash. It is simply a functional description of what is necessary to be something other than just another bankers tool.
$1000+ tx fees would mean that Bitcoin is destined to failor worse, to become an abomination against financial freedomand that I should dump it and get out right now.
Fortunately, I do not believe you. On-chain scalability improvements, combined with off-chain layering, should and must keep BYOB
financial independence within reach of ordinary individualsincluding those who were
not early-entrant Bitcoin rich. Just look at the excellent work in Segwit v1, soon nascent, and then consider what the same types of incremental improvements will bring to the baselayerand what types of new protocols they will support.
The fact is, whether we like it or not, very few individuals (other than those of us here) will hold private keys in 10 years. The transaction costs alone will ensure it.
That would turn Bitcoin into a bankers wet dream: The totally controlled, centralized, regulated basis for a cashless dystopia in which everybody can be tracked, traced, and forced to ask permission to use money.
That is not a new allegation, and its not true.
The fact is, whether
you the bankers like it or not, cryptographic cleverness will continue to enable technologies that
put the individual in direct control of his own money.