Bitcoin at its most fundamental state, is an open and permissionless public good.
Many people now and into the future will rely on "on-chain" transactions for a vast array of reasons. We are not here to question those reasons. It may be for a private sale of expensive art or it may be for a company like factom who uses the blockchain for their entire platform to operate.
It is naieve to expect everything to run on the lightning network bar a few highly congested settlement transactions per person.
LN is fantastic and absolutely has its place in bitcoins future. But to limit bitcoins utility as a global public good by limiting its blocksize, forcing people onto a layer 2 payment network will in itself strangle bitcoins utility as a base layer for trust and innovation.
Bitcoin is only as good as its utility, and its utility is in its open permissionless frictionless access to a public ledger. That can never cease to exist because the second it does is the second bitcoin looses its utility as a global public good.
We need both. Bitcoin should always grow to allow as many on-chain transactions as the global population require from this public good. And we also need LN style payment channels for convenience.
Allow the block size to grow with demand. Implement LN when its ready.
No one should be dictating how big or how small a block should be.. It should be a floating function based on demand for the utility that this global public good provides.Miners will naturally set their block size at a size that is convenient for them (getting the most amount of transaction fees by including the most transactions) whilst limiting themselves to their bandwidth and storage capabilities.IF bandwidth naturally limits blocksizes globally over the long term in the future, yet […]
