If Bitcoin were to scale on-chain at a similar rate to natural hardware and bandwidth improvements, thus keeing the feasibility of running your own node fixed over time, do you feel that would still somehow lead to additional centralization? Running a Bitcoin full node today is considerably less resource intensive (relatively) than it was back in 09'. Plus, once regular users are priced off the main chain by way of excessive tx fees, why would they run a node in the first place? Shouldn't the cost of transacting on the chain be less than the cost of running a node? What happens when that ceases to be the case?
If Bitcoin were to scale on-chain at a similar rate to natural hardware and bandwidth improvements, thus keeing the feasibility of running your own node fixed over time, do you feel that would still somehow lead to additional centralization?
It would lead to more centralization than would otherwise occur.
Plus, once regular users are priced off the main chain by way of excessive tx fees, why would they run a node in the first place?
This is a presumption. Why sacrifice decentralization for a cooked up hypothetical? Fees are extremely low right now.
Shouldn't the cost of transacting on the chain be less than the cost of running a node?
The cost of hardware only needs to be less or equal to how much you value some consensus rules enduring and verifying that they apply to your coins.
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During the last fee spike I paid fees that amounted to more than the cost of a full node, this is not hypothetical. If Lightning is successful and Bitcoin scales to use as a global unit of account and means of exchange, the Lightning settlements alone will be more than the base layer can handle. As it stands currently Bitcoin is not able to cope with global use as money. What is the solution to this problem, if not additional on-chain capacity?
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I'm not an expert here, but the solution I'm most familiar with are Channel Factories.
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Do you think a time will come when regular users are forced to store their value in second layer contracts and the base layer is reserved only for channel factory settlement and large commercial players. ie. banks, governments?
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I don't know, but it makes sense that on-chain txs would be relatively high in economic value.
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