Quote from: Torque on Today at 01:38:03 PM

Quote from: nullius on Today at 05:51:41 AM

Increasing base-layer capacity to, what, maybe 30–40 tps tops would be a sick joke at a cost that would surprise people. It would not solve any problems, and it would create many. We need technologies supporting tens of thousands of TPS or more; a doubling (or whatever) of the current blocksize is insufficient by orders of magnitude, too much and not enough all at once.

Do we though? I keep seeing people, big blockers and some OG's alike, banging on this proverbial drum, year after year after year, as if it such a dire, imminent need.

Yes. It is.

Quote from: Torque on Today at 01:38:03 PM

But if most bitcoiners see Bitcoin as 99% SOV and and 1% or less as a transaction medium, then no, it's not. And we don't. The current TPS limit will continue to serve just fine.

Forget bigblockers. To stick one’s head n the sand with that type of thinking is to cede the field to altcoins, in the manner of philipma1957’s signature:

Quote from: philipma1957

I see BTC as the super highway and alt coins as taxis and trucks needed to move transactions.

In the long term, that devolves to an altcoin replacing Bitcoin altogether: Why use one currency as a store of value, and another as a medium of exchange? It’s better to use the medium of exchange as the store of value, too. The money that can be used for both will be the most valuable money. Whence does Bitcoin derive its value, after all?

Quote from: Torque on Today at 01:38:03 PM

And Gresham's Law will continue to prove that out.

Exactly: If Bitcoin does is not useful as money, then...

I put it in such terms because candor is good and necessary for Bitcoin. “Rah rah, we’re the best!” is a losing argument at market; and telling people just to “HODL” their money, rather than using it for economic activity, is a foot-shooting way inadvertently to advocate for altcoins. Whenever I see altcoiners say that “Bitcoin is only a ‘store of value’, not good for transactions”, I call that out as untrue; and when they couch that as a Bitcoiner argument, I call it out as a strawman. But from you, it is not a strawman; it is your argument for Bitcoin!

Objectively, altcoins don’t have so much of an advantage as it may seem to the naïve newbie who just wants to buy a cup of coffee. Altcoins only seem to offer inexpensive transactions, because:

Many them simply aren’t used much. Bitcoin also had negligible fees, when its blocks were empty. Low demand = low fees.
Many of them have low security against 51% attacks (or similar attacks in POS-land). They may be adequate for toy money, but not for your life savings—and not for a trillion dollars (and growing) in total value on the network.
The few altcoins that can actually support high TPS with some sort of adequate security make trade-offs to achieve that. The price of reasonably secure high TPS on-chain is that to run a node, you will pretty much need at least an octocore Xeon with 32 GiB of RAM, 100 Mbps dedicated bandwidth, and terabytes of fast SSDs. Accordingly, the coins must become more centralized, less private, and less censorship-resistant. Bitcoin still runs just fine on a Raspberry Pi, on the type of home Internet connection which is commonly available in most developed countries. Because of this, Bitcoin is the money that nobody can control—thus, it is still the most secure cryptocurrency, after all.

As I said before:

Quote from: nullius on Today at 05:51:41 AM

Never forget that the blockchain with the Nakamoto Consensus is the world’s most inefficient database. That is the cost of decentralization.

It is a problem that cannot be magicked away with hype and handwaving.

Better idea: Transact off-chain, and use the blockchain as a global, public synchronization layer for what are effectually private local ledgers. Why does every cup-of-coffee tx need to be permanently archived in the world’s most inefficient database!?

Quote from: Torque on Today at 01:38:03 PM

There is a reason why the acronym "HODL" is so identified with Bitcoin, but certainly not with fiat.

Well, for my part, I thought that the reason for that is that Bitcoin is a good investment even through downturns—and moreover, it’s good for savings. Inflationary money is detrimental to savers. HODLing $/€ that slowly loses value is not smart!

IMO, ideal money would retain exactly the same value in perpetuity. You could set it on a shelf for a thousand years, then find that one unit of it still buys exactly the same amount of (say) milk and eggs. Bitcoin is definitely not ideal by this standard; but given the choice between inflationary versus deflationary money, I prefer the deflationary money, thank you very much. (People who never save, and especially those who live a lifestyle of perpetual indebtedness, may actually prefer the inflationary money; now, there is a depressing thought.)