Bitcoin May Have Solved Its Scaling Problem
Not a great article.  Perhaps best to downvote until a better one comes along.<p>Things to consider, which most people can agree on :<p>- SegWit2X [ segwit feature, followed by 2MB block size ] is seen as a compromise worth taking to move things forward past the current impasse, by a range of people who dislike SegWit and think an actual blocksize increase is urgently needed<p>- There is an immediate scaling problem : The mean and median blocksize is converging on the max blocksize of 1MB, and transactions waiting to get into the block blow out on a daily basis to 20MB.  This backlog of waiting transactions causes users to pay high fees to get their transaction to the front of the queue, and causes delays in processing&#x2F;confirmation times.<p>- there is a less urgent longer term scaling problem due to the linear architecture of the blockchain itself<p>My personal viewpoint :<p>- if you are only processing 3 transactions per second, there is substantial room for performance increases<p>- SegWit may help slightly in alleviating transaction pressure, and a 2MB block size will help a bit more.  Given the voracity of the debate, SegWit2X is a practical compromise we should adopt to move forward.  The USD&#x2F;BTC market seems to agree with this.<p>- We do need a schedule for block increases over the next couple years so all parties have certainty, and so it doesn&#x27;t create renewed havoc every few months.<p>- blocksize is just the first of several engineering optimizations that could see transaction throughput on the same linear architecture increase over 1000x.  eg. We have a 150GB full blockchain - it would be half the size on disk if compressed.<p>- Even if LN or side chains are the way to scale, and only 0.1% of transactions are &#x27;settled&#x27; on the main chain, we will still need a more efficient main blockchain, because the growth of transaction volumes will likely be exponential for the next decade.<p>- some people think the blocksize is a fundamental part of the genius breakthrough in technology that is the blockchain, and so cannot be tinkered with.  This is wrong.  Proof-of-work, monetary supply, miner reward, chained hash of the blocks, longest block wins, distributed redundancy are fundamental ideas at the core of bitcoin .. but blocksize is merely a technical issue, an artificial limit that was there to make implementation simpler, and always assumed that it would need to be increased well before it became an issue.