You can talk about bitcoin in any bitcoin specific spaces on the internet. You ever noticed that? You can talk about Austrian economics, you can talk about price, you can talk about influencers, you can talk about hardware wallets, but if you try to ever go into technical details about bitcoin to discuss their strengths and weaknesses you get called a shitcoin shill big blocker trying to ruin it’s decentralization and probably also get banned. This is in every bitcoin specific space, the subreddit, stacker.news, bitcointalk, everywhere. You can’t actually discuss bitcoin with bitcoin people.
And this is a problem. It means that no technical innovation whatsoever can happen on bitcoin. It means that they’re like a herd of buffalo headed for a cliff at full speed.
That wouldn’t be a problem if bitcoin was perfect. But it isn’t. There’s a huge, huge problem in bitcoin that I wrote a post about here https://njump.me/nevent1qqs8pzrkesjnfcws3whvjya0l9n68dx8q7sg69lhyc7dyusahe4x3rgpp4mhxue69uhkummn9ekx7mqzyrwjq464d7y2vn9v6p6aqpl3heyql9yuj87k6rzdtya6endj4277yqcyqqqqqqgsjee5u that I began to understand when I saw multiple people complaining that they have DCA UTXOs that are too small to spend right now because of fees. I understand the mechanics of bitcoin pretty well, so I thought through it and came to those conclusions and of course, the believer that I am, wanted to have a conversation about it because it is a very big deal, either I’m wrong and need to be corrected by someone or it means that bitcoin is going to fail.
They’re going head first into a crisis and you can’t even have a conversation about it. And I just hope they don’t take us all down with them. I am no longer bullish on bitcoin long term, only in the mid term like one, maybe two more halvings, and if those of us that really believe in this peer to peer electronic cash thing actually want to see it succeed we need to position ourselves to not go down with the ship, to be the fixed version of bitcoin when it happens.
Monero already has a head start on that, but the problem I referenced also applies to Monero if and when it becomes widely adopted. It really is scary to realize that these networks have a design constraint that prevents them from ever being widely used, unless it is fixed the entire thing is going to suddenly go up in flames and the freedom money revolution will be over. Again, if I’m wrong about that I welcome discussion because I really, really don’t want to be right about it.
If this is about high fees: Dynamic block size ensures manageable fees under sustained high usage and fees should actually go down the more transactions there are.
If this is about technical discussions: The 4chan threads are unironically a good indicator for this. Currently the vibe is “moonboys gtfo” and it’s the same for all other community channels.
The dynamic block size is a wonderful mechanism. But there is still the problem of storage of all historic transactions in perpetuity.
Suppose we wake up one day to find that monero is widely used all over the world, we will have perpetual sustained high usage. An equilibrium will surely be found, but the chain will grow at an astronomical rate and then you run into the issue that bitcoiners like to talk about a lot, centralization of nodes. Couple that with the fact that to sync a wallet in monero you have to play through every block since your first transaction and you could wind up with a problem such that nobody can actually sync their balance in any reasonable timeframe. You’d have to sweep your wallet every few transactions or keep a copy of all your transactions to avoid this.
What 4chan threads?
Storage is already cheap and has been getting cheaper at a faster rate than the blockchain grows since Moneros inception. With some napkin math I once came to the conclusion that Monero can easily handle 1 million tx per day and even 10 million per day is still doable with current SSD prices. The real problem in these scenarios would be bandwidth but barring some fiat-mega-black-swan I don’t see such a large increase in the foreseeable future anyways.
With the improvements to lightwallets jberman is working on, syncing shouldn’t be an issue at all.
The /xmr/ threads.
You nailed it. Unless we hit a wall with storage capacity, it will be fine. Keeps getting more expansive and cheaper. Speed and reliability may be issues when trying to weigh affordability, but capacity is not.
There was a time when 256kb was considered “a lot”, then 256mb, then 256gb and soon 256tb. Obviously you can see the pattern, moving forward or in reverse. So again, unless we hit a brick wall soon, I think this is an inconsequential concern in the larger scheme of things.