
No Bitcoin-based protocol can handle more than 20M users per month - runeks
https://runeksvendsen.github.io/blog/posts/2017-10-08-no-bitcoin-based-protocol-can-handle-more-than-20m-users-per-month.html
======
ploggingdev
OP makes the implicit assumption that all lightning network payment channels
are p2p in which case the 20M users per month upper limit is true. From what I
understand, the plan is to have a network of supernodes which settle on the
blockchain. Users will interact with these nodes instead of true p2p.
Lightning network opponents argue that these supernodes will become mini banks
in some ways and will need to follow KYC norms. While it's possible to do p2p
payment channels without interacting with any third party, the high
transaction fees make it impractical. From the Lightning Network paper [0] :

> If all transactions using Bitcoin were conducted inside a network of
> micropayment channels, to enable 7 billion people to make two channels per
> year with unlimited transactions inside the channel, it would require 133 MB
> blocks (presuming 500 bytes per transaction and 52560 locks per year).

Notice the 2 channels per year. These 2 channels will be opened with a
supernode (operated by eg- Coinbase, Gemini, Blockstream etc). I glanced
through the document but they don't seem to acknowledge the requirement for
these supernodes.

It's hard to cut through all the FUD, trolling, memes and propaganda to get to
the meat of the debate, so I'm not too sure my understanding is accurate, feel
free to correct me.

[0] [https://lightning.network/lightning-network-
paper.pdf](https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf)

~~~
AlexCoventry
> Lightning network opponents argue that these supernodes will become mini
> banks in some ways and will need to follow KYC norms.

This is an interesting theory. Why don't money transmitter laws apply to
standard bitcoin nodes which authenticate more than $10,000 of transactions a
year?

~~~
jlrubin
Laws would probably have to be re-written to categorize them as a money
transmitter, because there is no fiduciary duty for the Lightning Network Node
(they cannot wrongfully claim funds).

These changes shouldn't happen, there are lots of companies who provide
services where it doesn't make sense for them to act like money transmitters.
For instance, BitGo is a 2-of-3 multisig wallet where they hold one key. They
aren't a money transmitter because they can't send funds without your approval
nor can they prevent you from sending funds.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Laws would probably have to be re-written to categorize them as a money
> transmitter, because there is no fiduciary duty for the Lightning Network
> Node_

American law draws two circles. One is for entities with know your customer
(KYC) requirements. The other is for entities with a fiduciary duty to their
clients. The second circle is inside the first. Lots of entities with no
client fiduciary requirements are required to know their customers.

TL; DR If you’re handling others’ money, or helping others transmit money,
directly or indirectly, you have a KYC liability under current law.

 _Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice._

------
rothbardrand
The max block size for segwit transactions is about 3.7mb. The idea that
bitcoin blocks are limited to 1mb is false, and its being propagandized as
such by people who really want to fire core and take over the bitcoin brand.
It has nothing to do with technology (because as I pointed out the max block
size quadrupled in August.)

It's also worth noting that segwit transactions are more efficient and segwit
paves the way for even more efficient transaction formats in the future, so
that 225byte average transaction size will go down over time.

SegWit was just activated in August. The core client that utilizes it is still
in testing (or was recently released) so segwit is still very early in its
adoption stages.

Along with Lightening Network and side chains (a whole other form of
scalability) and other layer 2 solutions, SegWit contains multiple layer one
scalability solutions, not just SegWit itself and the block size increase, but
efficiencies across the board-- and over the past 2 years core has been making
bitcoin more efficient, and scalable, with many releases and many
optimizations... none of which are talked about in the "scaling debate"
because its really a "I want to be king fo bitcoin" debate.

------
augustl
No Bitcoin-based protocol that handles _money_ , at least.

[https://www.civic.com/](https://www.civic.com/) is based on the Bitcoin
protocol. It's a service for putting signed information about a user in a
block chain, so that you don't need to implement your own verification of
adresses, phone numbers, e-mails, etc being real, as long as you trust the
signer of that information in the Civic block chain. This is a read heavy, not
write heavy, block chain - reads of signed information is more common that
writes of the signatures.

It's definitely my favorite block chain based technology that isn't a
currency.

~~~
xdeqx366
What double spend problem is that solving though? Why not a broadcast network?
Why blockchain...

~~~
majewsky
It's just because "blockchain" is the new magic word that gets you funded. You
can do the same with public-key cryptography, but that's boring 70s
technology. Who'd want that!?

~~~
drngdds
Isn't "the same with public-key cryptography" exactly what Keybase is?

~~~
RasputinsBro
I'm not the guy you were talking to, but I still don't know what keybase
actually is. Let me know if you understand it.

~~~
aaomidi
You put your public (and private if you want) pgp key on there. Then you make
public posts on your social media signed with that key. This way, you show
everyone that you own these accounts or websites or whatever.

If any of the proofs changes, it puts it on a timeline. If your account has a
hard reset it notifies all your followers.

Basically its safeish key sharing in the modern world.

~~~
RasputinsBro
> You put your public (and private if you want) pgp key on there. Then you
> make public posts on your social media signed with that key. This way, you
> show everyone that you own these accounts or websites or whatever.

If I don't want to give keybase my private key, which I obviously don't, how
can it sign my tweets?

What is even the use case of signing my tweets? Presumably if I can access my
account, t's me. There's only two alternative scenarios: someone hacks my
account, or twitter is trying to screw me. Is there really a use case for
this? Other than a few very high risk individuals, I don't think there's a
point in signing tweets.

One of us (or both) is missing something here :D

~~~
ameliaquining
You've got it backwards. The point of Keybase is to replace PGP web of trust
with a more human-friendly system based on proof of control of social media
accounts (and/or domain names, and/or various other things).

The idea is that you tweet a message that's signed with your PGP key, then
publicly register the URL of your tweet on the Keybase server. Later, when
somebody requests your public key on Keybase, the Keybase client also requests
that URL from the Keybase server, then scrapes it, verifies the signature, and
tells that user what your Twitter handle is. That way the user knows that the
owner of that private key is the same person who owns your Twitter handle.

Obviously this isn't secure by itself against a compromise of your Twitter
account, but if you do this with multiple social media profiles (and/or domain
names, and/or various other things), then the proof of identity becomes
stronger. And there are some additional security measures based on
timestamping and cross-signing.

Documentation:
[https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/following](https://keybase.io/docs/server_security/following)

~~~
RasputinsBro
In other words, "a website that has people accounts and they can like other
website's accounts".

------
knocte
The author is just assuming an expiry time of the payment channels of one
month, which is not realistic in an hypothetical scenario in which layer2
protocols started to become prevalent in the cryptocurrency space: the more
people trust this new software stacks, the longer the expiry times people will
give to their deposits, because they will not mind locking money which will be
just useful in the Layer2 area, if most of the merchants move to this layer as
well, and because the longer your expiry dates are, the less fees (blockchain
fees) one will have to pay.

~~~
EGreg
So basically, we are back to a federated system :)

~~~
PKop
With a finite currency that is immune to inflation fractional reserve credit
cycles.

~~~
Terr_
... But instead has guaranteed deflation and correspondingly greater
speculation.

~~~
rothbardrand
Bitcoin is inflationary. It is currently inflating at a low rate and that will
decrease every four years.

That's not "deflation".

Further, money holding its value is a good thing. The only people who profit
from inflation are governments with fiat and miners with bitcoin.

The people always suffer. The only reason bitcoin is going up in value despite
inflation is its use case and technological ability is going up faster, and of
course it started at zero.

~~~
Terr_
No, you are confusing "inflation" versus "minting more money". While related,
they are not the same thing.

Whatever school of economics you subscribe to, 99% of the time somebody says
"inflation" or "deflation", they are _not_ referring to the "money supply" of
currency in existence. Instead, they are referring to _a change in proportion_
between that money supply versus how much "economic stuff" people want it for.

Bitcoin will continue to follow its past deflationary pattern as long as the
supply of Bitcoins does not keep up with the underlying growth of everything
else... And it's hard to see a future where "Number of coins mined this year"
grows while "Size of human economy" shrinks.

~~~
rothbardrand
Inflation is literally minting more money. Full stop. The definition you are
giving is a propaganda line to try and rationalize robbing the populace via
inflation. Even Keyenes agrees with me on this. (But thank you for not saying
it's the consumer price index!)

What you're actually describing is the purchasing power effects of minting
more money.

Second paragraph I agree with.

------
emeth
> When a user receives money – which humans usually receive monthly as
> wages/salaries – they need to deposit it into the layer 2 system, in order
> for it to be available within it.

If my employer pays me in bitcoins from their coinbase account to my coinbase
account, that transaction doesn't touch the chain. I can then send bitcoins
from my coinbase account to another coinbase account, again without touching
the chain.

Why wouldn't the employer pay wages in the layer 2 system to begin with?

~~~
runeks
> Why wouldn't the employer pay wages in the layer 2 system to begin with?

(Author here)

Very few employers pay wages denominated in bitcoins. If you're lucky enough
that an employer is willing to pay a part of your wage within a layer
2-system, you're right. For all the people who receive their wages in national
currency (of whichever country they live in), they have to go via the
blockchain, and thus run into this limit.

Also, it seems to me that, if layer 2 protocols want to solve Bitcoin
scalability in order to increase adoption, it doesn't make sense for it to
depend on everyone having adopted Bitcoin already (which, I would argue, would
be the case if most people received their wages as bitcoins).

~~~
rlpb
> Very few employers pay wages denominated in bitcoins.

Very few merchants accept payment denominated in bitcoins, either. And these
two statements are clearly tied together. If, upon bitcoin scaling up in the
economny, more merchants accepted bitcoins, then it follows that more
employers would pay wages denominated in bitcoins.

If the state of affairs remains the same as it is today, then there is no need
for me to buy into layer 2 protocols monthly. My monthly spend in bitcoins
will remain a fraction of my monthly wage. I could afford to buy into layer 2
annually easily enough.

If more of the economy moves into bitcoins, then employers will pay wages in
bitcoins by definition. And at that stage, it will be feasible for them to pay
in layer 2.

Either way, I think this exposes a vital flow in your chain of reasoning.

------
quadcore
An idea would be to not use one blockchain but a tree of blockchains. Say one
blockchain is attributed to London so that if you make a transaction in that
blockchain it should be quite fast. Now you want to send money to bangkok, the
transaction bubbles up and you get the idea.

edit: obviously someone got that idea before; my point was meant to be that it
would be a shame to use a centralised solution like the services of private
companies.

~~~
augustl
Wow, that's super interesting, I've never heard about something like that
proposed before. Same protocol, but layered and sharded, basically.

~~~
Buttes
The Ethereum guys proposed something like this in a super long rambling
document with lots of made up terminology [1]

[https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-
FAQ](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Sharding-FAQ)

------
gruez
tl;dr: the old "bitcoin can only do 7 tps" argument, except with an extra bit
that says even with layer 2 scaling, if each user has to transact once a month
on-chain (because... salaries?) then max users is 20M (which is 7tps
multiplied by 1month). All in all, not very interesting because there's no
reason why salaries can't be paid on l2 as well (securely as well, if LN is
used).

~~~
__s
So thought experiment: the incentive to stay on L2 is anonymity & lower
transaction fees. Therefore as usage goes up transaction fees will raise but
more will be pushed to L2 in order to avoid those fees, & in effect reducing
them

So let's say things have exploded: transaction fees are twice my salary. If I
get stiffed on L2 I'll have to pay more in fees than my salary. So my recourse
will be to sue my employer into paying the transaction fee

Obvious answer to this: L3

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Then L4 :).

------
flotillo
Blockchain protocols typically aren't designed to be scalable because, based
on what they are actually used for, they don't need to be.

Bitcoin was a cryptography research project that became popular outside of the
usual circle of people interested in such things mostly due to these three
somewhat overlapping groups: get-rich-quick types, criminals, and people who
have deluded themselves into believing that Bitcoin will usurp the world's
major currencies.

One those three, only the last group have any interest in massively scaling up
blockchain technologies. Those looking to speculate on Bitcoin markets have no
such concern, and the criminals are just feeding off Bitcoin's popularity for
this rather than having an interest in making it scale; besides, they'd prefer
a more anonymized cryptocoin to be popular rather than something that makes
public the entire transaction history.

The 'true believers' of Bitcoin are outnumbered not only by these other two
groups, but also by the general population who have no use case for Bitcoin at
all.

This is why scalability is such a fringe issue for Bitcoin and other
blockchain protocols - they're all just solutions looking for mass-scale
problems.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
So there are four groups? The usual circle, the get-rick-quick types,
criminals, and people who have deluded themselves into believing that Bitcoin
will usurp the world's major currencies?

Do only the 1st and 4th group hold? The 2nd manipulates the market best they
can, and only the 3rd and maybe some in the 1st are actually using it?

May I ask - What do you think are hallmarks of the usual people or the true
believers of Bitcoin?

------
tfha
This hopefully throws some context on the scaling debate. The giant fight, a
fight from 1MB to 2MB, would allow Bitcoin to scale from 20 million monthly
users, to 40 million monthly users.

It's not a big upgrade. Any exec at Facebook, Snapchat, Uber, etc. would laugh
you out of the room if you suggested that we should have a company-splitting
and devastating debate that sidetracks development for 2 years over scaling
the platform from 20 million to 40 million users. It just doesn't make sense.

Which is one of the big reasons the small blockers resist the 2mb hardfork.
For all the pain that this debate has brought about, there's very little
upside in the grand scheme of things. We scale Bitcoin from an insignificant
number of users to still an insignificant number of users.

If we find a scaling solution, it's going to come from somewhere else.

~~~
stephenbez
FWIW, the block size of Bitcoin Cash is 8MB not 2MB:
[https://www.bitcoincash.org/](https://www.bitcoincash.org/) "As a first step,
the blocksize limit has been made adjustable, with an increased default of
8MB. Research is underway to allow massive future increases."

------
antocv
The only good scaling/high throughput consensus algorithm is Byteball.

The block-chain does not scale, DAG coins suffer form various issues, the only
DAG-coin with semi-trustless distributed "consensus" is Byteball.

The implementation sucks, the algorithm is nice and innovative.

~~~
EthanHeilman
> The only good scaling/high throughput consensus algorithm is Byteball.

SPECTRE [0] is pretty good, not implemented in any cryptocurrency yet.

[0]: [https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre-
protocol-7dbbebb70...](https://medium.com/@avivzohar/the-spectre-
protocol-7dbbebb707b5)

~~~
tatersolid
Interesting paper. You could almost rename SPECTRE as “GitCoin” (trademark me)
as the various tips of the branches are effectively merged.

------
tudorconstantin
Why can't people be paid directly on one of the layer 2 systems?

~~~
Filligree
At that point, aren't you just reinventing fiat money?

~~~
keymone
Layer 2 is not money and so can’t be fiat. Lightning network is just a clever
way to construct bitcoin transactions such that it is possible to send sub-
transactions via different communication channel(not congesting bitcoin
network) but preserving crypto currency guarantees.

~~~
knocte
> Layer 2 is not money

Ehrm, what? So Layer1 is not money for you either? Explain...

PS: I'm not agreeing with that "this is reinventing fiat money" comment.

~~~
keymone
layer 2 is the payment processing network, money being transferred remains
bitcoin.

------
sphix0r
When explaining bitcoin to non technical people I compare bitcoin for the to
gold. Almost all non-tech people I know think bitcoin is the new next
currency, I doubt it. Blockchain is currently hyped as currency, but it could
solve many things related to trust, which is not only currency.

An other new technology to watch is IOTA (
[https://iota.org](https://iota.org) ) not blockchain based, no fees and
scalable.

~~~
Buttes
IOTA is amateur hour. The author implemented their own hashing algo, "curl",
which is used all over the place in IOTA, until recently including signing
transactions. Researchers were able to produce distinct transactions with
colliding signatures [1].

Depending on whether you believe the author, either they did it intentionally
for the implied purpose of attacking competing forks (as they claim), or
unintentionally because they're incompetent. Neither situation sounds good to
me.

IOTA also relies on a closed-source "coordinator" for consensus. They call it
"training wheels". Who knows if their "tangle" will actually work in
production. Crazy to me that people are pumping so much money into it w/o any
due diligence.

[1] [https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-
iot...](https://github.com/mit-dci/tangled-curl/blob/master/vuln-iota.md)

~~~
wpietri
Wow. I'm not a crypto expert, but the one thing I'm sure of is that no
individual should ever create their own crypto algorithms. Of course, we're
talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their Magic The Gathering
code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I shouldn't be too
surprised.

~~~
Klathmon
>Of course, we're talking about a space where somebody can repurpose their
Magic The Gathering code and call themselves a currency exchange, so maybe I
shouldn't be too surprised.

Stop judging things by what they were, unless of course you think the
aerospace industry is a space where 2 brothers can build a plane out of wood
and push it off a cliff...

~~~
wpietri
Oh, I'm definitely judging it by the titanic failure it turned into:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mt._Gox)

~~~
Klathmon
I know very well what you are referring to, however Mt. Gox was one of the
first exchanges, and it in no way is indicative of the industry now.

Bitcoin is very new, created in 2009, didn't see any real usage until
2010/2011, Mt. Gox blew up in early 2014, and now in 2017 most exchanges
follow KYC laws, are built on real trading systems, and can't be compared to
Mt. Gox any more than you can compare a Boeing 777 to the wood gliders that
mankind first flew on.

~~~
wpietri
My point was that the cryptocurrency world is enormously tolerant of clown-
shoes levels of operation, ones where it's hard to tell whether the people are
incompetent or just scammers.

Key differences between Mt Gox and the Wright Brothers are that a) the
financial industry was well established in 2010, and b) the Wright Brothers
were not offering commercial flights to a general audience on their wooden
gliders.

The first means that Mt Gox was run by idiots who ignored all of the
established best practices around running a financial company. (And was given
money by same.) The second means that even if you were right, that Bitcoin was
just too new to do well, then they were grossly negligent in offering services
to the general public and managing hundreds of millions of dollars in assets.

Of course, the incompetence at scale continued long after Mt Gox. E.g.,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_(organization)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_DAO_\(organization\))

You may be right that there are now some adults running well-regulated
businesses. But that doesn't mean the space isn't full of scam artists,
Dunning Kruger goofs, and wide-eyed technoutopian marks. We only have to look
at the latest ICO announcements to see that, at best, enthusiasm has run ahead
of competence.

~~~
Klathmon
Mt. Gox was a massive fuck up, i'm not denying that. They had no business
being in the space.

But at the same time nobody else was taking it seriously. Look back over the
history of banks. Do you really think no "bank" ever lost significant amounts
of money? Do you really think there aren't still scam artists and assholes
trying to steal people's money? Just the other day my mother got called again
by people asking for her social to "fix her credit", does that mean that the
incompetence of the financial industry is still at an all time high?

Cryptocurrencies have a lot in common with traditional finance industries, but
they are different enough that the previous systems don't work. It's very much
the "wild west" right now (which i'll point out there were established
"governments" at the time of the "wild west"). The space is still new, and if
you are risk averse you should stay away from it, but painting the entire
industry as idiots and children makes you look like the idiot.

~~~
wpietri
We still have bank failures pretty regularly. But they're a small fraction of
total volume, and the damage is contained thanks to regulation. Since 1933,
every bank depositor in the US has had insured accounts. And the bank failures
that happen are not of the "oops I losted your dollars" variety. E.g., the
most recent one, the First National Bank of Edinburg, Texas, was just a pretty
normal business failure. Nothing was stolen, the regulator arranged a merger,
and no depositor money was lost.

It's true that Mt Gox might have lost some money even if they had been
following known best practices. You're right that Bitcoin is new, and presents
new risks. But they wouldn't have been driven out of business with hundreds of
millions of dollars of losses. Money given to them by people who were just as
credulous, just as believing that the old rules didn't apply.

Yes, there will always be fools and financial scammers. But the proportion and
the scope in the cryptocurrency world is much, much larger. In the short reign
of the *coins, there have already been enough disasters that somebody has
managed to fill a book with them: [https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-
Blockchain-Contracts-e...](https://www.amazon.com/Attack-50-Foot-Blockchain-
Contracts-ebook/dp/B073CPP581)

And I'll note that I'm not saying the entire space is "idiots and children".
Just that the tolerance for incompetence and scam artistry is much, much
higher. Which, given that you defend it as being the "wild west", you
apparently agree with.

------
phasnox
You are wrong. But interesting!

Take a look a the following scenario where Bob works for Company A and has a
monthly salary of 1.5btc:

\- CompanyA opens a 100btc channel with Amazon

\- Bob has an 2btc channel opened with Amazon

\------------------------------

Now lets say, that at a start, channels look like this:

\- Company A 100btc -> Amazon 0btc

\- Bob 2btc -> Amazon 0btc

\------------------------------

As the month goes through, Bob starts spending his money on Amazon and other
stores that have channels opened with them. Company A also spends their money
paying suppliers and other expenses. After 2 weeks, channels look like this:

\- Company A 40btc -> Amazon 60btc

\- Bob 0.75btc -> Amazon 1.25btc

\------------------------------

Its the end of the month, many Clients have payed their bills, and Bob has
almost consumed all his salary.

\- Company A 95btc -> Amazon 5btc

\- Bob 0.5btc -> Amazon 1.5btc

\------------------------------

Now its time for company A to pay salaries. And we go back to step 1. Rinse
and repeat.

But I think you are right on one thing. Eventually the 1mb block limit has to
be raised.

~~~
wolfgang42
I think you have changed Bob's scenario halfway through--he has a monthly
salary of 1.5btc, yet somehow has 2btc to spend?

~~~
phasnox
He has a side project. He sells pancakes.

------
ethn
All true except that a transaction can have around 400 inputs per standard
size transaction. You were assuming a single input. This means Bitcoin-based
protocols can handle 8B users per month, which is more payments than the ACH
handles per month.

~~~
runeks
> All true except that a transaction can have around 400 inputs per standard
> size transaction.

(Author here)

I'm not sure what you mean by this. A transaction can have lots of inputs,
yes, but they take up space -- in fact they are the largest part of the
transaction, since they contain signature (~72 bytes), public key (~33 bytes),
as well as redeemed txid+input index (32+4 bytes).

The 224-byte transaction used as an example has a single input and two outputs
(one destination address; one change address). A standard (pay-to-pubkey-hash)
transaction with two inputs and two outputs is ~373 bytes. A 400-input
(2-output) transaction would be roughly 60KB.

~~~
ethn
Standard size transaction is up to 100KB.

------
stcredzero
Why not have several thousand block chains? Just having 2^13 blockchains would
be enough for 100 billion users. New blockchains could be rolled out as
needed. Perhaps a blockchain could mitotically divide as needed?

~~~
whiskers08xmt
There are some projects working on solutions like this, but the problem
becomes how you move funds between these blockchains.

~~~
lowglow
I'm interesting in someone exploring atomic swaps.

~~~
lowglow
interested _

------
xasos
The community is well-aware of this problem already, right? Title seems a bit
click-baity, but it's definitely an active area of research. Bitcoin is still
less than a decade old :)

------
feelin_googley
The world now has a compelling reason to make the internet operate again as
peer-to-peer in addition to client-server?

(I am presuming there is a reason bitcoin was originally designed as peer-to-
peer and not client-server i.e. it was not an arbitrary decision.)

The silver lining of the bitcoin movement, if there is one, could be that it
provides internet users with reasons to want the network to reliably operate
peer-to-peer. Not to mention reasons to want to understand and use asymmetric
cryptography.

~~~
ZenoArrow
It's nothing to do with peer-to-peer vs client-server. The main issue is
keeping the blockchain up to date. Client-server can actually be more
efficient than peer-to-peer in disseminating blockchain updates, but it's
still not enough.

Bear in mind that, in order for all users to keep a full copy of the
blockchain, every time a transaction is carried out every single copy of the
blockchain needs to be updated. Beyond a certain level that simply isn't
scalable, as it has a big impact on performance. The only pragmatic way to
scale the network beyond that point is to only have some nodes having a full
copy of the blockchain, at which point you've got more of a client-server
model.

------
eralpb
Interesting to see this get so many upvotes & discussion. Blockchain is an
agreed protocol not a god-given thing, any time we need more we can just
increase the block-size.

This blog post would make sense if it talked about why incrementing block-size
is not feasible, which is feasible. Storage gets cheaper every year and block-
size has no effect on compute power.

------
lowglow
We'd be down for someone to come out and chat about this at our next crypto
builders meet-up at Noisebridge in SF on the 11th.[0]

Scaling is a huge point of interest when considering building on top of BTC or
ETH.

[0]
[https://www.meetup.com/sfhackdays/events/243614539/](https://www.meetup.com/sfhackdays/events/243614539/)

------
mcintyre1994
Why do all of everybody's step 1 transactions have to be within a single
block? Do the proposed 'layer 2' ideas only work inside one block? It's not
obvious why you can't pay into 'layer 2' from arbitrarily many Blockchain
blocks, but I'm not really familiar with any of the proposals.

------
fiatjaf
What about Ripple and Stellar? How many users these can handle?

~~~
pat2man
Bitcoin can do about 7 transactions per second and Ripple tests have shown it
can handle about 70,000. In the real world Ripple has never hit anything near
that so we don't know for sure.

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rpedela
If networks and/or computers were faster, would that increase the max
throughput? Or is the max throughput fundamental to the blockchain algorithm?

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m3kw9
I’ve never heard of such metric, being useful measure of utilization without
indicating duration or with another metric.

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Seriously. What about off chain transactions and their already extant impact
on the velocity? From the oft-cited coinbase customer email to coinbase
customer email "bitcoin" transaction to handing the private key over to
somebody, behind a hologram or not, these types of transactions don't appear
on the blockchain but they certainly do effect the economy.

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Kelab
Even dash/litecoin?

Maybe dpos will win e.g steemit kevin ross just joined

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curyous
This article gets it completely wrong. Bitcoin can handle much more than 20M
users without layer 2 services. Layer 2 services are a solution looking for a
problem that doesn't exist.

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KasianFranks
Time to buy.

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__s
ITT: pumpers

