Oddbean

“Death to fiat via global p2p economy. This requires high TPS on a chain that can't be gamed by industrial miners or social consensus via PoS.” There is no way, zero, nadda, absolutely in no way shape or form is it possible to have global retail payments on chain AND have a secure decentralized independent network. ZERO. This is fundamental to how it works. You are demanding that we have a broadcast network for every transaction on earth. It’s flatly absurd from a technical point of view. It is an impossibility, you might as well scream at the clouds, you’ll probably have more luck honestly. If you cannot understand the most basic network and technical limitations and WHY it works, then you cannot possibly understand why decisions are made to retain decentralization and actually scale something in the realm of real life. I would tell you to maybe read Layered Money just to get a big picture, but judging by your responses and that you can’t even **acknowlegde** the difference and just keep parroting the same crap as if it’s some revelation you’ve had that NOBODY else could’ve thought of, “OMG we could just add more tps!!, then this is definitely going nowhere. Read the book if you even bothered to read that part of my response before constructing the same thing you’ve regurgitated 4 times already. I’ll still say I hope you have a nice day, but I’m muting you this time sense this isn’t even a real discussion anyway.

You have the patience of a saint. The 7 TPS is a red herring. Bitcoin scales through layers. Each layer is a trade-off. If it was not a trade-off it would be the base layer. The layered system is still vastly superior to the status quo. I do however think that after 99% of the coins have been fairly emitted, there is a case to increase capacity TPS in line with the hardware of the day, and balancing it with keeping the node network decentralized.

I think the case could be made at that point, but I think the issue will be moot by then anyway. It’ll be like IPv6, everyone will say it’s needed, but we’ll never need it, and there will still be new and better ways to accomplish the same thing, and then we’ll probably have another paradigm shift in cryptography or who knows what with layers on top (like Nostr and pear are likely to remake the web), and then we will be so excited and busy with that, that a hard fork for higher tps just won’t be worth all the trouble. Thats at least how I picture it in my mind. We usually suck at predicting the future and people come up with bonkers stuff that seemed impossible in a shockingly short amount of time.

Largely agree. I think colored coins are going to grow in utility and popularity, because they create free markets on bitcoin base layer. We see in the real world that free markets are major use case. It's something that could be as big as bitcoin itself, just if you look at the dematerialization of what exists in the financial world. So an expanded middle section of the mempool would facilitate this, increase security budget, decrease fees for L2 and onboarding, and keep the network sufficiently decentralized. I agree alot will change in the next, say 4 years, simply because AI will mature and affect so many things. AI will also incrase demand for block space. Important to remember that one of the main reasons for decentralized node network is to ensure that the coins were emitted as a level playing field. After that is 99% accomplished, so much more is possible.

It's totally possible. Sharding + Merged Mining + a consensus mechanism thats a huge improvement on nakamoto consensus which (let's be honest) is a proof of concept. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04305