Sorry, I may be a bit noob here, but wasn't it urgent in 2017? I recall that transaction fees skyrocketed... Seems to me that it could've used with a few more MB then. What would've been the big deal to have sort of an soft cap/hard cap sort of thing? Surely 1mb is unreasonably small?
By my calculations, 1 year of full 1mb blocks would be 52.5gb of chain growth. At that rate, it would take ~20 years to fill up my 1 TB SSD... that's nuts! I also live in an area with good internet and I can download at 100mbps, so it would only take me a few minutes to download it.
I just don't understand why it's kept so small? I see HUGE industrial scale mining operations throwing everything they have at such a stunted network... I just don't understand, sorry. I am not trying to FUD or whatever, I am honestly wanting answers.
Also I am not sure if this Lightning Network thing is going to be the saving grace we're all waiting for. Can someone explain to me how lightning network is supposed to fix everything? I have read a bit about it, but I am left with more questions than answers! I have a few below... but there are so many more that I have, some technical but mostly philosophical... I am trying to imagine what things look like in 10, 20 or even 50 years from now, with the expectation that the Bitcoin network becomes the only one that everyone is on (in one form or another).
1. How can you use lightning network when you're offline?
2. It looks like the most efficient evolution is a network where everyone connects with only a few, big, stable nodes?
3. What happens if everyone wants to get their bitcoin out of the network at the same time?
4. What happens if the big nodes decide to just go offline??
5. If it doesn't end up being the hub/spoke type network i mentioned in 2), would there be issues with routing or are there ideas on how to make routing a non issue? (appreciate some learning materials on this if anyone has them).
6. If the Lightning Network ends up being what everyone uses, who will use the main network? Also, does that mean that mining might be impacted?
7. If block rewards keep reducing but transaction volumes don't increase, will that impact mining? Or is the idea that fees will high enough to pay miners? Does this also assume that the value of Bitcoin must be high?
I also started thinking the other day about what it means to have my bitcoin locked into a lightning channel... is there some sort of asset conversion taking place? To me it seems like a core feature of my bitcoin is temporarily removed (the right to pay a miner to inscribe something on the ledger). I went further to imagine that, perhaps I cannot afford the fee to bring back that feature of my bitcoin, so I am essentially left with an IOU that can never be claimed... which is scary to think about. I am sure that that isn't possible though.
Anyway, I'd really appreciate some thoughts from someone that has all of this stuff worked out so I can understand it more and perhaps even get my own lightning node and start fooling around!!
Cheers