Do pro-bitcoin people still talk about goals of bitcoin being a currency that people use daily?
I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.
replies(12):
I don't follow it closely, but that idea seems to have faded and now it's just an asset to buy and hold while it magically goes up forever.
We argued against the complexity of SegWit and Lightning Network.
I think greed and politics won rather than engineering or economics good sense - people didnt want cheaper transactions, it now costs around $15 USD per BTC transaction.
Despite the proliferation of alt-coins using essentially the same code-base, with shorter block-times and larger buffers.. and more programmability - ultimately proof-of-stake might be a better implementation of the block minting process, than proof-of-work.
The people who argued for increasing the block size were making a tradeoff between decentralization and "low" transaction fees. Increasing the block size makes the chain grow faster which causes several problems: the time to sync new blocks goes up, initial chain download time goes way up, and block verification takes more CPU.
The parameters were initially set so that anyone could run a full node for as many years as possible which is the most important part of the ecosystem by far. If you make it harder for the average person to run a node it doesn't matter how cheap the transactions are if ultimately a small group of people are capable of running it. You could argue that doubling or quadrupling the block size doesn't hurt decentralization, and maybe you're right, but that also doesn't move the needle much for transaction throughput either at least not enough to make a difference for adoption.
Bitcoin can and should be scaled in layers. The detractors are just impatient.
[1]: https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/10/23/futures4.html
Checking now :
https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
This says, afaict, the average BTC transaction cost today is $1:40 USD
The 5yr chart shows it spiking at $128 in April 2024.
If BTC transactions reliably cost 15c per transaction, it might make for a viable electronic money... but that is clearly not the case, so I think my point stands.