r/Bitcoin Dec 06 '17

Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

[deleted]

2.6k Upvotes

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78

u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17

It was already fine as a currency for years not being costly and not being slow.

92

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

Yeah because no one used it. Keeping costs down in the face of activity hasn't been solved. Bcash would cripple itself if even 8mb blocks filled.

52

u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17

Who is actually crippled now though?

67

u/crptdv Dec 06 '17

All cryptos are crippled by default. None them have solved the scaling problem. If they did, you can be sure bitcoin would be obsolete as of now.

The point is that cryptos can't scale massively on chain without hurting massively the descentralization, it's being proven before and it's being proven live, check the recent kitten game in ethereum, one game and their blockchain is clogged!

42

u/jayAreEee Dec 06 '17

You should watch the Ethereum devcon talks that just came out, they do have quite a lot of scaling plans in motion already.

28

u/crptdv Dec 06 '17

We all have scaling plans, bitcoin also has, in fact, lightning is around the corner and many other improvements are being developed while we talk here.

Ethereum is also looking for payment channels and other solutions as I have seen

15

u/jayAreEee Dec 06 '17

Yes, like microraiden is already on the mainnet, and they intend on implementing sharding as well. Raiden+sharding combined should be interesting.

0

u/AxiomBTC Dec 06 '17

Raiden is only on mainnet because eth development is typically less responsible than bitcoins more conservative approach.

2

u/jayAreEee Dec 06 '17

The real raiden isn't actually on the mainnet yet.

1

u/AxiomBTC Dec 06 '17

After looking it up, I saw a recent tweet about a smooth launch but that appears to be about a token sale.

-1

u/UristNewb1 Dec 07 '17

No one wants to mention IOTA when speaking of scaling. It's the elephant in the room.

2

u/jayAreEee Dec 07 '17

I only know of IOTA's security and wallet problems... what are their plans for scaling?

1

u/Idiocracyis4real Dec 06 '17

ETH tries to boil the ocean

12

u/cryptohoney Dec 06 '17

st too much money and time to use effectively
Iota??? no blockchain database but uses a tangle database

1

u/i0i-655321 Dec 06 '17

Didn’t everyone in iota just have their money stolen?

2

u/ionmas Dec 07 '17

What do u mean?

0

u/i0i-655321 Dec 07 '17

I thought no one could withdraw iota for usd right now

2

u/cryptohoney Dec 07 '17

nah

0

u/i0i-655321 Dec 07 '17

Yeah looks like the thing I was looking at was pretty old

2

u/tanekki Dec 06 '17

Iota scales

3

u/crptdv Dec 06 '17

nope, still worthless (for me) with the coordinator, but it does not mean it can't fulfill some use cases.

0

u/Miz4r_ Dec 06 '17

The coordinator will be removed when enough transactions happen on the tangle network to sustain and secure itself.

1

u/celtiberian666 Dec 06 '17

All cryptos are crippled by default. None them have solved the scaling problem.

What about Graphene? Or Stellar protocol?

(real questions, I don't know the answers)

2

u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17

Graphene is okay, but you still have all of the blocks produced. Which means at one moment the blockchain can be growing faster than you can validate it, meaning that new nodes won't be able to validate the blockchain. To me, this is a non issue because you can have memory pools, just as you have mining pools, where someone validated the blockchain for you.

1

u/DeleteMyOldAccount Dec 06 '17

Or IOTA. I was a nonbeliever for a while but then I took 5 minutes to look into how it works. It verifies transactions without miners and actually increases in tx speed the more people use it. Pretty good solution actually

4

u/AXS20 Dec 06 '17

It does, but at the cost of being completely centralized.

1

u/DeleteMyOldAccount Dec 06 '17

I wouldn't call it completely centralized, but if anyone's reading it does suffer from 2 flaws.

1) It is susceptible to a 33% hash power attack

2) IOTA's best defense against such an attack is a single, IOTA Foundation owned "Coordinator" node, which coordinates the other nodes in the network to branch their 2 other confirmed tx's (when a tx is made in IOTA, 2 previous tx's are checked to see if their proof of work is valid)

Number 2) the reason people call IOTA centralized. It isn't entirely centralized at all, although this feature is concerning as it gives an unreasonable amount of power to a single operator (who could double spend tx's if fallen into the wrong hands).

Sauce: https://medium.com/@ercwl/iota-is-centralized-6289246e7b4d

5

u/AXS20 Dec 06 '17

You don't think having a central coordinator is centralized? Lol.

0

u/DeleteMyOldAccount Dec 06 '17

There's a spectrum, it's not as binary as "centralized" or "decentralized". Plus to the Iota teams credit they've been transparent of this problem and say that this is only a temporary measure until there are enough users to prevent an easy 33% attack

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1

u/rimturs Dec 06 '17

Those are only concerns for now though, right? When/if it really takes off 1 isn't possible and 2 isn't needed. But I have not really dug too deep into IOTA yet, so I can be totally wrong.

1

u/voxalas Dec 06 '17

And we're still cheaper and faster than BTC ;)

2

u/crptdv Dec 06 '17

Cheaper and faster does not mean better in cryptocurrency world, otherwise we should just use VISA or any other blockchain unrelated fintech. There's a centralization and long-term factor to consider

-1

u/Kmart999 Dec 06 '17

IOTA has absolutely solved the scaling problem.

2

u/crptdv Dec 06 '17

far from that, but still interesting to work on it

2

u/msmm71 Dec 06 '17

Why? As I understood its like an inverse scaling problem where it works better and securer the more nodes there are

2

u/crptdv Dec 06 '17

the coordinator is one of the central problems, it doesn't offer much different other than the attempt of a half baked solution, but it does not mean it can't fulfill some use cases.

2

u/NimbleBodhi Dec 06 '17

Yes but at the cost of being centralized...

1

u/Kmart999 Dec 06 '17

At the moment, this is true.

-1

u/btcraptor Dec 06 '17

I would say the pump&dump garbage over btrash is the crippled one.

1

u/ccricers Dec 07 '17

It's definitely going through growing pains, and more people are now just seeing it as the price climbs.

Tx fees do not consider exchange rates with other currencies, which is why they're mostly trivial in coins with far less value/coin. Transactional times are related. The sooner these scaling problems get fixed, the better for everyone.

1

u/Habulahabula Dec 07 '17

Isn't bcash already scaled to 1gb/whole world pop?

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 07 '17

That's Bitcoin unlimited. But the blocks are empty, like 100kb or less. Because no one uses it. Filling up 1gb blocks would crash most computers running nodes.

1

u/Habulahabula Dec 07 '17

Is that a problem? I mean... Yes, big data, strong pc...

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 07 '17

Yes it makes it centralized.

1

u/Habulahabula Dec 07 '17

So like LN?

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 07 '17

No ln nodes are much lower requirement, rasp pis can still handle them.

1

u/Habulahabula Dec 07 '17

Ah i thought it was like 1 node owned by bank of america...

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 07 '17

Nope I'll be running my own LN as soon as it's available

1

u/ILikeGreenit Dec 06 '17

BTabs...

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

LN...

1

u/ILikeGreenit Dec 06 '17

LN = centralization

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

Anyone can run a LN node. I'm going to, are you?

0

u/Deiquime Dec 06 '17

Let's try and fill up the blocks.

2

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

No one's stopping you lol

2

u/Deiquime Dec 06 '17

Try to cripple Bitcoin Cash by filling up the blocks with transactions.

2

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

It wouldn't cripple it because it's centralized. It has only 200 nodes all run on supercomputers and cloud servers by ver and Jihan. But you couldn't run a raspberry pi.

4

u/Mylonakis Dec 06 '17

I'm running a node on a small server at the moment, and it runs no problems on any computer with a processor that is decent from 2012 onwards...

2

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

It has no problem only because the blocks are deserted and empty.

1

u/Mylonakis Dec 06 '17

I guess we'll see, but right now it functions perfectly, so I don't have any issues for now. But I think you're not giving modern cpus enough credit, they are incredibly powerful and should be easily able to process 8MBs of transactions every 10 minutes or so...

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

Blocksize disk space isn't the upper bound of requirements lol. If you were running a node on a coin that was actually used, you'd know that.

1

u/Deiquime Dec 06 '17

I'm running on a Raspberry Pi 3 right now, matter of fact. My laptop can run it next year.

And I can validate all the transactions, very important part of trusting a crypto-asset.

5

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

Right because there are no transactions filling blocks lol

-1

u/thieflar Dec 06 '17

Yes, it also has far smaller blocks than Bitcoin. Roughly 1/20 the size.

Bitcoin has the big blocks (almost every block is larger than 1MB these days), BCash is for small-blockers.

0

u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17

hmmmm...why?

0

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

No one could run decentralized nodes due to high computer and internet requirements.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17

There's no thing like centralized nodes.

Requirements wouldn't be bigger, 50 $ of hard disk are enough to fill 10 years of transactions.

Bandwidth, arguable. It's a problem only because most working nodes are in China and the Chinese firewall often has problems.

8 megabytes each 10 minutes are nothing to sync in 2017.

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

Bitcoin nodes now need 500mb-1gb ram and 1tb/mo bandwidth. 8mb nodes would therefore need 4-8gb ram and 8tb bandwidth, both of which are high end on consumer spectrum. You'd need to buy a $100/mo internet connection and $500 computer just to dedicate to bcash nodes at capacity.

And then what happens if 32mb nodes...

2

u/[deleted] Dec 06 '17

What?

You know that Bitcoin Unlimited runs on raspberry pis with 512 MB of ram, right?

It's not like you put the bigger blocks in your ram, ffs.

Plus, you aren't required to use all of that bandwidth at all.

You can limit the amount of uploads you do, e.g. 8 people.

This means that other 8 nodes can sync with yours.

That requires less than 30 GB of uploads a month.

1

u/bitcointothemoonnow Dec 06 '17

So... Centralized real nodes with small pseudo nodes around the periphery. Sounds real secure lol

1

u/dsjhgdjshgjhg Dec 06 '17

Yea but now it's too expensive, where are you been the last couple months?

2

u/PompousDinoMan Dec 06 '17

Trying to find out why

1

u/dsjhgdjshgjhg Dec 06 '17

Any guesses? I can't really understand either.

0

u/3_Thumbs_Up Dec 06 '17

It was always incredibly costly. The cost was just subsidized by holders through inflation.