Because Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized peer-to-peer cash solution, which is impossible with Bitcoin with the scalability issues it has currently.
Spiritually Bitcoin’s original idea still lives on Bitcoin Cash. But it doesn’t have the popularity nor the name brand to be able to make the huge impact that Bitcoin could have made if it was usable by end users when it gained popularity.
Bitcoin cash was an attempt at centralized control by Jihan Wu. Just because the block size is bigger doesn’t mean it’s better for decentralization. In fact, the increased costs of maintaining a node just makes it harder for people in (typically poorer) oppressive countries to self verify
They are still increasing the TPS, lightning network isn’t perfect, but it can scale beyond visa until more upgrades are implemented
The lighting network is bound to fail because it suffers from the same problem Bitcoin is solving, i.e. it only works in centralized hubs. Think about how a new user would come to Bitcoin if the LN was in full effect, they would need to spend hundreds to open a channel to a centralized hub, the more centralized the better so it can connect to more places, so they can ensure they have the funds and the connectivity to use the network, because channels can’t be increased, if he ever needs more funds than what he has he will need to close the channel and open a new one, and because channels might be used by third parties when routing through the network if he spends double that amount to create two channels to two centralized hubs he risks having their funds go from one channel to the other and having to go the long route for his own transactions.
Also the idea that running a node is more expensive because of larger blocks is mostly nonsense, for starters the only nodes that matter are mining nodes, even if your validating node finds an issue it has no power to do anything about it. Secondly there is such a thing as pruning old blocks to reclaim space. Third the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don’t need to validate transactions because mining nodes have incentive to stay honest, and the regulators are other mining nodes who stand to gain from others dishonesty by mining the same block they did, and again, mining nodes require lots of hardware, some extra HDD for old data is cheap in comparison. Fourth, why don’t you feel the need to validate the LN? Why just validate the on-chain stuff but trust the LN? Surely you’ll want your validator Node to process all of the LN transactions to ensure they’re valid, no? Or do you trust that the LN works? And if you do why not trust that the technology the LN is built on top of also works?. Not to mention that even in poor countries the cost of a hard drive that can hold years of data is lower than a couple of transactions on the main Bitcoin network during peak times, and a lot cheaper than opening one channel on the LN that’s worth using, for example earlier this year the average transaction fee peaked at $123 https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee so of someone wanted to make a transaction that day on the Bitcoin network they would need to spend $123 extra, that is enough to get a used 8TB HDD which should hold all of the BCH Blockchain just with the cost of a single transaction.
Long story short:
LN has design flaws and doesn’t work
Even if LN worked, on-chain transactions are better, less limited and more secure
Even if those design flaws could be addressed, the main chain will still become unusable due to high cost of entry unless blocks get increased
If blocks never get increased, popularity will be the death of Bitcoin like it happened in 2017, if someone needs to throw away hundreds of dollars just to get into the network, they’ll never do it. And because RBF people that don’t pay whatever the current tx fee is can get scammed.
Validator nodes serve no purpose
Even if they did running a validator Node on BCH is cheaper than using BTC
Even if validator nodes made some difference then the LN would also need one and then the amount of transactions there would increase the need of a node to higher than what would be needed for BCH (since besides regular transactions you would also need to validate on and off channel transactions).
I’ll look into LN more, I’m familiar with the centralization concerns (but still think they’re able to be mitigate until more upgrades), but am not familiar with the costs you’re bringing up. Fee estimators notoriously round up, I’ve never spent more than a dollar but that’s anecdotal
BCH is still an attempt at centralization from bitmain, a company which literally installed kill switches in their miners without telling anyone, and ran botting attacks in /r/Bitcoin and /r/BTC during that fiasco - the hard fork they created is absolutely more centralized than Bitcoin
There will be a time to do something as risky as hard fork for a block size upgrade, but to do it for the sake of just one upgrade that serious doesn’t make sense to me. If a hard fork must happen there might as well include other bips that necessitate a hard fork like drivechain.
Soft fork upgrades which enable more efficient algorithms like schnorr / SegWit in the meantime have scaled tps without having to waste block space. Bch is cheap because there’s no demand or usage.
First of all, this discussion doesn’t matter, Bitcoin will never regain the popularity it could have had if it had increased the block size back in 2017 when it became unusable, I remember buying stuff with Bitcoin, I remember mining and using that money to buy games on steam, paying for my electricity bill, etc, those days are gone and won’t come back. After all of the backlash Valve got from the unusability of Bitcoin, they’ll never reenable that, Bitcoin fucked all of crypto adoption back then and I don’t think the market will ever forget (if they would they would have migrated to another coin already).
$1 which is what you say you pay is too much. Imagine if every time you used your card $1 extra was charged, you would never use that as a currency. The problem is that you’re not thinking on Bitcoin as a currency, and I don’t blame you, that hasn’t been the vision for Bitcoin in a long while, but originally that was the goal.
You keep saying that BCH is an attempt at centralization, would you care to explain how that would work? Imagine if back when BCH hard fork happened all of the miners had sided with it (they had the option and choose not to), how would that be more centralized? You do know you can mine BCH with any miner, right? Just like BTC you don’t need to use Bitcoin-core, the protocol is open source and there are plenty of implementations.
As for the botting attacks I was there when they supposedly happened, I was banned from /r/Bitcoin for saying the same thing I’m telling you now, we weren’t bots, that was the excuse the mods there used to ban everyone who disagreed with keeping blocks small. I’m not going to put my hand in the fire for him, I don’t know the guy and for all I care he can go fuck himself, but not everyone who was accused of being a bot was one, lots of us were just people saying “don’t you see how not increasing the block is harming Bitcoin? Don’t you see the hardware price has decreased dramatically since the 1MB block size was introduced? Don’t you see companies are jumping ship and we are losing all of the momentum?” It sounds like bots because lots of people were pointing out the same stuff, but the thing is that we were pointing out things like we were seeing them in the real world. That’s when /r/BTC started gaining popularity, because being banned from /r/Bitcoin was almost a rite of passage, and curiously on /r/BTC no one was banned for showing either side of the opinion, people might get downvoted but that’s just the system working, banning people is censorship and it’s a clear cut way of showing you’ve ran out of arguments and are just looking to create a bubble where everyone agrees with you.
Nope, the time is gone. Hard forks are not risky at all, Bitcoin has had several in the past, no one made a fuzz about them back then. Soft forks are just as dangerous, and BTC has had several. The difference between a soft and a hard fork is that the hard fork is backwards compatible, whereas the soft fork is forward compatible, both of them the miners are forced to migrate or they will be throwing away money.
You are correct, there is no demand or usage for either of the Bitcoin’s anymore z there was back then, there isn’t now. BCH is scaled much, much higher than BTC, so if adoption had migrated they would have been prepared. And the important thing is that no one was saying we don’t need side chains, it was more of “we need the main chain to be usable NOW, we can scale indefinitely later, but we need to fix this NOW or Bitcoin adoption will be irreparably gone”, unfortunately it was too little too late, and companies had already jumped ship and weren’t going to risk it back.
Because Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized peer-to-peer cash solution
I still think it is one, we use it to pay for services online right? We don’t share bitcoins like money with friends or family because of it’s complexity but who know what the future contains?
Yes and no. Historically Bitcoin had no limits on transactions, but someone realized a while back that because transactions were really cheap rich people could flood the network with transactions and that would prevent legitimate people from using the network. Therefore a limit on the size of a block was imposed, which in turn meant that Bitcoin could only process 7 transactions per second in average.
At the time that was great, if someone tried to attack the network they would quickly run out of space in the block and people wanting to do transactions had only to pay a little bit more to ensure their transactions got approved, which in turn made this attack more expensive and eventually useless.
However in 2017 Bitcoin gained popularity, and this caused an issue, actual users were hitting that barrier of 7 transactions per second among themselves, and so users began competing with each other for space on the chain. And when that happens your coffee or VPS payment is going to get a much lower fee than what someone trading hundreds or thousands of dollars can afford. So essentially Bitcoin became only usable for large trading (you needed to pay $50 for a transaction at the time).
Since that became prohibitive for most users, people stopped using it, and because of long confirmation times for people who still tried to use it stores stopped accepting it (some people don’t know this, but Steam and Microsoft used to accept Bitcoin payments).
You might think the solution is simple, just increase the limit like the guy who imposed it originally said it should be done, but that created a shit storm of people claiming that that would bring all hell on earth, and the proper solution was to build a secondary chain on top of Bitcoin so you only needed to pay the high prices once (this is what the other reply to my comment is mentioning). The problem is that for miners small blocks with higher transactions fees are waaaay more profitable, so they sided up with the fuck the user mentality (and some even say that they paid people to promote that solution).
So long story short Bitcoin is not currently usable for day-to-day purchases. Transaction prices fluctuate a lot, currently it’s “cheap” at $1.5 per transaction, but it regularly goes to 10/20 and even got to over 100 this year. So it’s no longer a currency, since no one would pay those prices to use it as currency. Bitcoin is now more of an investment than cash, it’s closer to gold in that you could use it as cash but it’s inconvenient and you’ll end up losing money.
Monero seems to be the closest successor to the idea, actually. It is accepted in a lot of places, and I got actual use out of it when I couldn’t use my card.
Because Bitcoin was supposed to be a decentralized peer-to-peer cash solution, which is impossible with Bitcoin with the scalability issues it has currently.
Spiritually Bitcoin’s original idea still lives on Bitcoin Cash. But it doesn’t have the popularity nor the name brand to be able to make the huge impact that Bitcoin could have made if it was usable by end users when it gained popularity.
Bitcoin cash was an attempt at centralized control by Jihan Wu. Just because the block size is bigger doesn’t mean it’s better for decentralization. In fact, the increased costs of maintaining a node just makes it harder for people in (typically poorer) oppressive countries to self verify
They are still increasing the TPS, lightning network isn’t perfect, but it can scale beyond visa until more upgrades are implemented
The lighting network is bound to fail because it suffers from the same problem Bitcoin is solving, i.e. it only works in centralized hubs. Think about how a new user would come to Bitcoin if the LN was in full effect, they would need to spend hundreds to open a channel to a centralized hub, the more centralized the better so it can connect to more places, so they can ensure they have the funds and the connectivity to use the network, because channels can’t be increased, if he ever needs more funds than what he has he will need to close the channel and open a new one, and because channels might be used by third parties when routing through the network if he spends double that amount to create two channels to two centralized hubs he risks having their funds go from one channel to the other and having to go the long route for his own transactions.
Also the idea that running a node is more expensive because of larger blocks is mostly nonsense, for starters the only nodes that matter are mining nodes, even if your validating node finds an issue it has no power to do anything about it. Secondly there is such a thing as pruning old blocks to reclaim space. Third the whole point of Bitcoin is that you don’t need to validate transactions because mining nodes have incentive to stay honest, and the regulators are other mining nodes who stand to gain from others dishonesty by mining the same block they did, and again, mining nodes require lots of hardware, some extra HDD for old data is cheap in comparison. Fourth, why don’t you feel the need to validate the LN? Why just validate the on-chain stuff but trust the LN? Surely you’ll want your validator Node to process all of the LN transactions to ensure they’re valid, no? Or do you trust that the LN works? And if you do why not trust that the technology the LN is built on top of also works?. Not to mention that even in poor countries the cost of a hard drive that can hold years of data is lower than a couple of transactions on the main Bitcoin network during peak times, and a lot cheaper than opening one channel on the LN that’s worth using, for example earlier this year the average transaction fee peaked at $123 https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee so of someone wanted to make a transaction that day on the Bitcoin network they would need to spend $123 extra, that is enough to get a used 8TB HDD which should hold all of the BCH Blockchain just with the cost of a single transaction.
Long story short:
I’ll look into LN more, I’m familiar with the centralization concerns (but still think they’re able to be mitigate until more upgrades), but am not familiar with the costs you’re bringing up. Fee estimators notoriously round up, I’ve never spent more than a dollar but that’s anecdotal
BCH is still an attempt at centralization from bitmain, a company which literally installed kill switches in their miners without telling anyone, and ran botting attacks in /r/Bitcoin and /r/BTC during that fiasco - the hard fork they created is absolutely more centralized than Bitcoin
There will be a time to do something as risky as hard fork for a block size upgrade, but to do it for the sake of just one upgrade that serious doesn’t make sense to me. If a hard fork must happen there might as well include other bips that necessitate a hard fork like drivechain.
Soft fork upgrades which enable more efficient algorithms like schnorr / SegWit in the meantime have scaled tps without having to waste block space. Bch is cheap because there’s no demand or usage.
First of all, this discussion doesn’t matter, Bitcoin will never regain the popularity it could have had if it had increased the block size back in 2017 when it became unusable, I remember buying stuff with Bitcoin, I remember mining and using that money to buy games on steam, paying for my electricity bill, etc, those days are gone and won’t come back. After all of the backlash Valve got from the unusability of Bitcoin, they’ll never reenable that, Bitcoin fucked all of crypto adoption back then and I don’t think the market will ever forget (if they would they would have migrated to another coin already).
$1 which is what you say you pay is too much. Imagine if every time you used your card $1 extra was charged, you would never use that as a currency. The problem is that you’re not thinking on Bitcoin as a currency, and I don’t blame you, that hasn’t been the vision for Bitcoin in a long while, but originally that was the goal.
You keep saying that BCH is an attempt at centralization, would you care to explain how that would work? Imagine if back when BCH hard fork happened all of the miners had sided with it (they had the option and choose not to), how would that be more centralized? You do know you can mine BCH with any miner, right? Just like BTC you don’t need to use Bitcoin-core, the protocol is open source and there are plenty of implementations.
As for the botting attacks I was there when they supposedly happened, I was banned from /r/Bitcoin for saying the same thing I’m telling you now, we weren’t bots, that was the excuse the mods there used to ban everyone who disagreed with keeping blocks small. I’m not going to put my hand in the fire for him, I don’t know the guy and for all I care he can go fuck himself, but not everyone who was accused of being a bot was one, lots of us were just people saying “don’t you see how not increasing the block is harming Bitcoin? Don’t you see the hardware price has decreased dramatically since the 1MB block size was introduced? Don’t you see companies are jumping ship and we are losing all of the momentum?” It sounds like bots because lots of people were pointing out the same stuff, but the thing is that we were pointing out things like we were seeing them in the real world. That’s when /r/BTC started gaining popularity, because being banned from /r/Bitcoin was almost a rite of passage, and curiously on /r/BTC no one was banned for showing either side of the opinion, people might get downvoted but that’s just the system working, banning people is censorship and it’s a clear cut way of showing you’ve ran out of arguments and are just looking to create a bubble where everyone agrees with you.
Nope, the time is gone. Hard forks are not risky at all, Bitcoin has had several in the past, no one made a fuzz about them back then. Soft forks are just as dangerous, and BTC has had several. The difference between a soft and a hard fork is that the hard fork is backwards compatible, whereas the soft fork is forward compatible, both of them the miners are forced to migrate or they will be throwing away money.
You are correct, there is no demand or usage for either of the Bitcoin’s anymore z there was back then, there isn’t now. BCH is scaled much, much higher than BTC, so if adoption had migrated they would have been prepared. And the important thing is that no one was saying we don’t need side chains, it was more of “we need the main chain to be usable NOW, we can scale indefinitely later, but we need to fix this NOW or Bitcoin adoption will be irreparably gone”, unfortunately it was too little too late, and companies had already jumped ship and weren’t going to risk it back.
I still think it is one, we use it to pay for services online right? We don’t share bitcoins like money with friends or family because of it’s complexity but who know what the future contains?
Yes and no. Historically Bitcoin had no limits on transactions, but someone realized a while back that because transactions were really cheap rich people could flood the network with transactions and that would prevent legitimate people from using the network. Therefore a limit on the size of a block was imposed, which in turn meant that Bitcoin could only process 7 transactions per second in average.
At the time that was great, if someone tried to attack the network they would quickly run out of space in the block and people wanting to do transactions had only to pay a little bit more to ensure their transactions got approved, which in turn made this attack more expensive and eventually useless.
However in 2017 Bitcoin gained popularity, and this caused an issue, actual users were hitting that barrier of 7 transactions per second among themselves, and so users began competing with each other for space on the chain. And when that happens your coffee or VPS payment is going to get a much lower fee than what someone trading hundreds or thousands of dollars can afford. So essentially Bitcoin became only usable for large trading (you needed to pay $50 for a transaction at the time).
Since that became prohibitive for most users, people stopped using it, and because of long confirmation times for people who still tried to use it stores stopped accepting it (some people don’t know this, but Steam and Microsoft used to accept Bitcoin payments).
You might think the solution is simple, just increase the limit like the guy who imposed it originally said it should be done, but that created a shit storm of people claiming that that would bring all hell on earth, and the proper solution was to build a secondary chain on top of Bitcoin so you only needed to pay the high prices once (this is what the other reply to my comment is mentioning). The problem is that for miners small blocks with higher transactions fees are waaaay more profitable, so they sided up with the fuck the user mentality (and some even say that they paid people to promote that solution).
So long story short Bitcoin is not currently usable for day-to-day purchases. Transaction prices fluctuate a lot, currently it’s “cheap” at $1.5 per transaction, but it regularly goes to 10/20 and even got to over 100 this year. So it’s no longer a currency, since no one would pay those prices to use it as currency. Bitcoin is now more of an investment than cash, it’s closer to gold in that you could use it as cash but it’s inconvenient and you’ll end up losing money.
Monero seems to be the closest successor to the idea, actually. It is accepted in a lot of places, and I got actual use out of it when I couldn’t use my card.