This is how markets work. The “market clearing” price represents equilibrium in supply and demand. But supply and demand can fluctuate, causing prices to fluctuate.
In markets supply and demand can fluctuate, sometimes in markets there are constraints on supply for a variety of potential reasons. In these circumstances you can still have a floating price and it still doesn't make sense for supply to be above demand, the price simply increases to ensure the market clears. That is not to say I advocate a 1MB limit, I am simply saying some markets have supply constraints
You say “All I was doing was arguing against the point, which was that a successful lighting would reduce demand. I simply do not understand that point and it seems illogical to me.”
LN is a complicated idea, my point was much more simple and general without getting into your examples. It is a very basic point, if LN fails and people do not use it, it should be irrelevant and therefore will not impact the network or reduce demand. That is all. Do you understand that?
Let’s say Leroy runs a lightening payment channel to process btc payments for several popular and busy online stores. If I want to buy widgets from George’s store – who is also a member of Leroy’s payment channel - using btc, the demand for blockspace is the same irrespective of lightening since both George and I eventually want the payment settled on chain.
You also had to put a transaction on the blockchain to open the lighting channel in the first place. The advantages of lighting are near instant settlement and almost unlimited transaction capacity within the constraints of an existing payment channel. Before you even begin to think about LN, I suggest you gradually build up knowledge, first start by trying to understand an uni directional payment channel between two people.
this seems to introduce an additional layer of trust into commerce.
No, the point of LN is one does not need to trust the payment hubs. Since the hub cannot take anyones money.
s there any literature I can read on this projected effect along with the “[c]ombined the impact” of seg wit and schnorr, aggregated signatures, etc. resulting in “a massive c10x capacity improvement?” It sounds really good, but also really complicated.
The Bitcoin development team does not specialize on public relations and communications. They focus on technical issues. If you like good communication, marketing and easy to understand systems there are other alternative areas to get involved in, other than Bitcoin. When Bitcoin was released people had to use their imagination or engage in research to see the path forward, it was not nicely explained in one simple piece of literature, you had to dig around.
There is plenty of literature on many of these topics, for example on aggregated signatures:
There have been a lot of discussions on Schnorr signatures and aggregated signatures, they are also mentioned in the scaling roadmap and even the HK agreement.
I think aggregated signatures should be able to increase capacity by around 30%. The impact of Schnorr signatures could be massive, depending on the transaction mix used. I hope this helps.
I know you may not be totally satisfied by this , and for what its worth, I apologies. Bitcoin has not worked in an environment with these much demands for information before. The communication has been dramatically improving recently, with a new Core website and weekly IRC meeting logs. At the same time there have been regular and large scaling conferences, in Montreal, Hong Kong and next up Milan. A huge amount of scaling and capacity enhancements ideas were discussed and huge progress was made on many ideas, including agreements to move forward and implement ideas, which is happening right now in a very fast way.
Please try to carefully evaluate all the information and do not believe all the criticisms of the Core development team, they are working extremely hard on successfully delivery both scaling and capacity enhancements. The massive 10x capacity enhancement is coming.
Wouldn’t there still be a patchwork of clients that don’t generate savings in every instance?
Remember the people that create the most savings are incentivised to upgrade the most, creating more space for others. With a hardfork everyone also needs to upgrade anyway.
Seems like the c10x capacity improvement may only be realized IFF certain stars permanently align?
Nope, if everything aligns I think one can get a 168x capacity improvement.
RE: RBF – No religious sentiment here. I just think commerce tends to operate on a first in time, first in right approach. This allows for predictability in markets. RBF – in a world where blockspace is limited – allows people to cut in line in the que hindering that predictability. For example, imagine buying an airline ticket last week to fly today and being bumped from the plane while standing at the gate because someone paid more yesterday for seat on today’s plane. Getting bumped from that plane might screw up both your plans (this is the delay I was referring to) and budget. You’d probably need insurance or credit to protect your interests in the event you get bumped from the plane. Similarly, RBF seems to allow delay when earlier broadcasted transactions waiting to be included in a block get bumped when enough later-in-time broadcasted transactions pay a higher transaction fee than the earlier tx. Am I wrong? If not, what’s the response to concerns about predictability here?
You are totally wrong in your understanding of Opt In RBF. The Opt In RBF policy is totally benign and has no negative consequences. It is unfortunate and odd that so much fear and confusion has been created over such and benign feature.
RBF does not allow you to jump the "bumped" ahead of anyone else. RBF is about replacing your own transaction only and was a feature Satoshi put in the early version of the software (Source:
https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L434).
Adrianx said:
the designer/s of Bitcoin understood the issue and if you believe they're wrong go make a better design.
With an economically relevant blocksize limit, I think the design is fantastic. Satoshi put in the 1MB limit.
