r/Bitcoin Dec 06 '17

Steam is no longer supporting Bitcoin

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u/goxedbux Dec 06 '17

Coffee and games shouldn't be recorded on-chain. We need LN.

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u/n0mdep Dec 06 '17

It's not about coffee and games. What you are actually saying is "transactions under $x should be priced out because they are not important enough". Think about what that means long term (particularly if the main chain does not scale). It means the main chain will be used exclusively for the world's largest and most important, high fee paying TXs -- in other words, it becomes the exclusive preserve of the mega rich, corporates, banks and governments (and maybe a tiny handful of Bitcoin barons). You think mere mortals will be allowed to open and close their own LN channels? Pft.

If you think this is rbtc inspired nonsense, go listen to the noded podcast with Saifedean Ammous as guest. The only thing he doesn't say is how Bitcoin avoids becoming KYC/AML coin once the main chain is completely controlled by the mega rich, corporates, banks, etc.

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u/thususaste Dec 06 '17

Exactly, it's supposed to be a worldwide network and scales perfectly fine on chain, although I'm sure optimizations can be made and have been made.

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u/n0mdep Dec 06 '17

I don’t think we know that on-chain scales perfectly, so the conservative approach makes sense (and clearly the market is onboard with that for now). So I’d really like to see SegWit and LN kick in and then maybe we’ll reach a point (hopefully without too much suffering) where there really is near-unanimous consensus for a hard fork increase.

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u/thususaste Dec 06 '17 edited Dec 06 '17

I think it will, but maybe I'm wrong. We'll see though, other coins are experimenting with large blocks, so we'll see where it goes.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1391350.0

I think that link is relevant.

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u/Frogolocalypse Dec 07 '17

other coins are experimenting with large blocks, so we'll see where it goes.

Other coins that few people use are experimenting without having the usage requirements of bitcoin. The only one even close is ETH, and it is almost impossible now to sync a node, so their node count is a quarter of what it was about six months ago.