Never Changing Bitcoin Will Eventually Destroy You

In the long term, and speaking more about Bitcoin rather than the GLBSE specifically, if the largest proportion of the bitcoin economy is made up of black market goods and services, it's going to eventually result in govenments around the world shutting down all the exchanges. Because running a node yields no financial benefits, the incentive to run one disproportionately decreases the more costly it is. In Bitcoin, each node has to store and validate each transaction. Bitcoin, the base layer, is a globally-replicated public ledger - every transaction is broadcast to every participant in the network. At that point, the system chooses the longest chain of blocks as the rightful one, and it becomes part of the shared ledger across the network. However, at this point, we encounter an interesting philosophical roadblock: what exactly is the difference between a preference, infrastructure and a memory? The default LND node is said to be able to do 33 payments per second with a decent machine (8 vCPUs, 32 GB memory) according to the benchmark.

Each subsequent payment modifies the channel’s state, cryptographically revoking the old one and checkpointing the new one in memory and on disk of both nodes, but critically, not to the base chain. With 16,266 nodes in the network (as of November 2022), assuming each payment has to go through three channels (four nodes), the network should be able to achieve around 134,194 payments per second. Critically, one need not be directly connected to another party in order to pay them - channels can be used by other nodes in the network in order to increase their reachability. Back in the day, there was a major civil war between the online community in what Bitcoin should do to increase its transaction throughput capacity. The benchmark numbers we will use for this analysis have per-node throughput capacity, not per-channel. Users begin to outbid each other via the adjustable transaction fee in order to have their transaction be included by the miners, who are incentivized to choose the highest-paying transactions. That would be an improvement over the current case where each user’s CPFP fee bump is considered independently and multiple related fee bumps may not have an aggregate effect on whether an ancestor transaction is mined.

But here's the thing: Every currency in human history has been totally private, so we have no other similar disaster scenario to even compare this to. Thus, perhaps Bitcoin may have even more intrinsic value, relative to its market value, than gold does; an even if it does not, Bitcoin has a trump card that even gold does not - its absolutely limited supply of 21 million units. Examples include cash, precious metals (like gold or silver), a document that confirms ownership of something (like a business or a resource), a right to deliver or receive cash, and many others. Integration: The plan was to send the money to Colombia, where Santacruz-Londono would use it to fund his numerous legitimate business there. There is major, infuriating controversy in this story and is in large part what shaped Bitcoin to remain what it is today - a grassroots, bottom-up movement where the average people (plebs), in aggregate with one another, dictate the rules of the network.

Forty. Seven. People. these details were the same people he had just moments earlier emphatically accused of being "hoarders". Additionally, it doesn’t account for the fact that a user would have other uses for their bandwidth - few selfless people would dedicate 50% of their internet bandwidth for a Bitcoin node. Various degrees of support for anchor outputs have already been merged into several LN implementations. This allows constructing the transaction template without the coordinator learning which inputs funded which outputs. This allows one to batch billions of payments into two on-chain transactions - one for opening the channel and one for closing it. To put it into numbers, if Bitcoin is to ever scale to Visa’s purported peak capacity levels (24,000 transactions per second) a node would need 48 megabits per second (Mbps) second just to receive the transactions over the network. As the block size grows, the cost to run a node in the network increases. If demand grows to outpace the amount of transactions a block can have, the block becomes full and transactions get left unconfirmed in the mempool.