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The Rise of Whatever

(eev.ee)
631 points cratermoon | 2 comments | 04 Jul 25 04:48 UTC | HN request time: 0.417s | source
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OvbiousError ◴[04 Jul 25 08:17 UTC] No.44462360[source]▶
> Bitcoin failed as a currency because the people who got most invested in it do not care about currency

As far as I understand, bitcoin is fundamentally unusable as a currency. Transactions are expensive and limited to ?7k? every few seconds. It's also inherently deflationary, you want inflationary currency, you want people spending, not hoarding.

replies(1): >>44462580 #
fsh ◴[04 Jul 25 08:52 UTC] No.44462580[source]▶
It's much worse, the maximum on-chain transaction rate is something like 7 per second. Also the time intervals between blocks have a huge spread, so it can take more than an hour for a transaction to be confirmed if you are unlucky. This is obviously impractical, so people came up with schemes such as Lightning to avoid touching the blockchain as much as possible. Of course this makes it much more difficult to judge whether the system can be cheated in some way...
replies(1): >>44463552 #
m0wer ◴[04 Jul 25 11:27 UTC] No.44463552[source]▶
Blockchains don't scale. But that's a feature, not a bug.

Great protocols are built in layers.

You have decentralized instant settlement for an average of 0.005% even for micropayments with the Lightning Network (another protocol built on top of Bitcoin). That's orders of magnitude away from the settlement time and resilience of the current payment networks.

replies(1): >>44521144 #
1. immibis ◴[10 Jul 25 13:55 UTC] No.44521144[source]▶
This might be the first time I've heard the argument "it's great that my project is shit because a lot of great things are layers on top of shit"
replies(1): >>44529030 #
2. m0wer ◴[11 Jul 25 06:41 UTC] No.44529030[source]▶
You missed the point. The IP protocol doesn't scale! Ethernet MTU is just 1500 bytes how are we ever going to transfer a movie over the Internet!

Ethernet does not need to carry the whole movie in one packet. If it does the job of delivering the MTU to the host on the other side of the cable, it's good. Websockets can be figured out somewhere else. The IP stack is not shit because each layer does just one thing, it's good because of that.

But hey, time will tell.