pull down to refresh

Genuine question, please be respectful. Is Bitcoin ever going to attempt to scale on the L1? or is it just going to count on institutions/third parties to distribute paper bitcoin to the world?

I know Bitcoin is infinitely divisible and limited in supply. These strengths make it one of a kind, but does it really matter if it can't be distributed to the whole world fairly and without censorship? Is there any innovation planned or are we forever stuck on neutral gear for the L1 from the moment Satoshi left and forever into the future?

I know Bitcoin is infinitely divisible

Bitcoin is not divisible at all, it is not floating point, there are no decimals.. it is 2.1q sats

Given that, non-0 fees for unilateral use, dust minimums, large holders... maybe 100-200M people can use it.

Scaling is not limited by throughput, lightning is already infinite throughput, the only limitation is supply and that will never change.

reply

I see the supply limit as a feature in bitcoin onchain, and with infinite divisibility I was referring to the millisats available in the lightning network.

If one day we rech to use it to price items will be a good win! 1sat = 1,000msat

reply

Millisats are not real, they don't settle on chain, they're an internal accounting abstraction to LN.

Since they are not real, and you need actual on chain footprint to use Bitcoin, the scaling limit remains a function of supply.

reply

they are not real on-chain but yes they are on Lightning. They are irrelevant now for normies but they will become more relevant in the future if we really want to ride the LN

@remindme me in 84 months

reply

No they aren't. You can't use lightning without chain representation. They're internal only. They literally don't exist.

reply
lightning is already infinite throughput

that's why BCHers and monerotards will never understand that through a single LN channel you can pass through infinite amount of sats.

And I see that most of the people still don't know how swap services works and why did they exist.

reply
BCHers and monerotards

What these guys have to do with my question?

reply

you are one of them

reply

What makes you think I'm one of them? I'm only presenting a problem and your answer bring the topic in a different direction, but it's OK because centralised entities already took over...

People should go back to the white paper and to the cypherpunk manifesto https://www.activism.net/cypherpunk/manifesto.html

reply
centralised entities already took over...

That's exactly the excuse of a BCHer.
Nobody is forcing you to use Bitcoin.

reply

I find your lack of fait disturbing

reply
Is Bitcoin ever going to attempt to scale on the L1?

It already did.

Respectful question back: which part of your Phoenix setup the other day was making you feel like you were dealing in paper bitcoin?

reply

For me bitcoin still, and should continue, having the cypherpunk value and that''s what I feel playing with my bitcoin toys like Phoenix #1508424.

When I look outside, I see the masses upset about price, about MRST going down... and that's make me wonder how misunderstood, or even ignored, the white paper is today.

reply
13 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 12h

Bitcoin doesn't have any values, it's as agnostic to a shitcoiner as it is to a maxi. Some ossification is good in that regard, because we need it to retain agnosticism. Luckily ossification is the default outcome, and recent drama has reinforced this where I expect to see that "not changing anything" is going to be a winning hand. Conservatism is on the rise within Bitcoin, which is good, because Bitcoin is the innovation, and it has not even reached 1% of its potential.

I think that you just need a better "outside". The prices people complain about when I go outside are those of coffee, chocolate and beef. Not so much Bitcoin.

reply

I agree! anyone else can just fork off :)

reply
which part of your Phoenix setup the other day was making you feel like you were dealing in paper bitcoin?

epic snark <3

reply
Is Bitcoin ever going to attempt to scale on the L1? or is it just going to count on institutions/third parties to distribute paper bitcoin to the world?

False dichotomy. It can scale in ways that isn't paper bitcoin.

to answer your question: No, it no longer has the cypherpunk goals... we lost them when Mr. Saylor became God Savior Saylor.

reply
13 sats \ 1 reply \ @Ge 20 Jun

Might just be stuck on L1 do i see building sure but can accept the reality maybe it is perfect already?!?

reply
it is perfect already?!?

Jeee... you are so right!

reply

Compare with in the 1950s people would not have been able to imagine that everyone would have a room-sized computer "in their pocket".

I have come to peace with the idea that Bitcoin is probably not for everyone. However "It can't scale to the whole world" is an incorrect all-or-nothing argument that skips everything in-between and is short-sighted.

Ideology alone was never going to make everyone use Bitcoin. The more realistic way to approach this is: When the conditions necessitate Bitcoin, people will use Bitcoin.

  • In an age of KYC and strict controls, how do you move your money around the world without permission? Bitcoin.
  • Where do you put your money when the market is YOLOing into stonks, real estate, etc and you want a safe haven? Bitcoin.
  • How do you get the attributes of gold without having to manage physical custody of metal? Bitcoin.

Price always figures into the conversation, but if you had a choice between 100% of your funds being frozen in your bank, or having non-KYC Bitcoin, what kind of discount would you be willing to take to get the money out? Start thinking about that and the price drops and volatility stop seeming so important. Even if you only get ~10% of your $$$ value out and across the border that is still better than nothing.

As these use cases become more valuable and useful to people the technology will be improved for questions of scaling. But building a network to scale for billions of people right now is not the phase we are in.

reply

Has Bitcoin drastically changed since it's inception? Some may say taproot and segwit

Proposals like bip110 and others in the future that we haven't even seen yet are a necessary part of Bitcoin's growth

While Bitcoin can be proven mathematically, what cannot be tested is humans trying to change the rules, this is something that is a necessity for Bitcoin to be continually proven

Taleb said, An antifragile system doesn't merely survive stress; it can become stronger by revealing weaknesses and forcing adaptation

Although constant civil wars would likely be harmful to the long term prospects of the protocol

The biptards might be an annoyance or a threat but unfortunately they are a necessary part of Bitcoin's future, there will always be egotistical humans who suffer from main character syndrome

As far as I can see Ln is the scalability of Bitcoin but as with on chain proposals, Ln is suffering from the proliferation of ark and spark, again testing the antifragility of true lightning

reply

Nice try BCHer

reply

The cypherpunk goal was never only the money, it was resistance to correlation and surveillance, and the money was one instrument of it. Bitcoin shipped the censorship-resistant-payment half and mostly outsourced the privacy half. The surveillance front has since moved off-chain, to metadata and model training, where most of the original threat model now lives unaddressed. The goals are intact. The coverage moved and the building didn't follow.

reply
1 sat \ 5 replies \ @gregtonoski 20 Jun -5 sats

The best scaling solution is a chain without spam so set the parameter datacarrier=0 in the bitcoin.conf file and run Bitcoin Knots: https://github.com/bitcoinknots/bitcoin/releases/.