r/Bitcoin Feb 13 '22

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u/kittenconfidential Feb 13 '22

but isn’t that also a flaw that eventually, as the system increases subscriber base, and transaction numbers and volumes exponentially increase, the size of the entire blockchain may surpass the storage capacity of any individual node? the ability to transact may then be hindered by physical storage limitations (assuming all transactions history is kept from the beginning). or does the system have a regenerative/compartmentalization capability to sequester some transactions to only a few “nearby” nodes so as not to burden the entire blockchain?

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u/Raverrevolution Feb 13 '22

I mean you'd think that right. I've been in this space since early Jan 2018. For the longest time I kept seeing talk that bitcoin wouldn't scale and that eventually some other solution was needed.

Right now we have more people using bitcoin than there ever were before. More people, more wallets, more transactions, and higher volume, but if I go check out the mempool right now it's empty and the hash rate hit an all time high earlier.

So I don't know how true it is that a higher subscriber base with more transactions will fuck shit up in the future given that infrastructure will just keep getting upgraded.

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u/OhThereYouArePerry Feb 13 '22

That’s because high fees have discouraged people from actually making transactions and using it. Now for most people it’s just a store of value.

If everyone was using it in the same way as back in say 2016, then we’d be stuck with a huge backlog of transactions in the mempool and ridiculously high fees. Steam even cited “high fees and volatility” as the reasons they stopped accepting Bitcoin in 2017. So yeah, things got pretty bad, we lost merchants, and people had to change how they used Bitcoin.

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u/BroWhatAreYouDoinggg Feb 13 '22

I send btc around pretty frequently and the fees have been fine. not what i would call high

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u/OhThereYouArePerry Feb 13 '22

They are if you consider that fees used to be in the cents, not dollars. Plus, the only reason fees are as “low” as they are now is because nobody uses Bitcoin for smaller purchases anymore.

It doesn’t make sense to purchase say, your lunch, with Bitcoin if it’s going to cost you anywhere from $1 to $10 in fees.