Hector Martin

Yes there's downsides to just increasing blocksize which is why it's not been done and other options are being looked at. In the meantime it *is* an electronic cash. With challenges, but it's there. Not a failure (yet). Or stupid.

Cash doesn't have a $30 transaction fee. Right *now*, all Bitcoin is is the world's most expensive checking account modality, and a vehicle for speculators.

You're declaring it a failure whilst it's in trouble and before it's failed (with fixes in pipeline). You're declaring it stupid for not having magical properties no-one knows how to achieve. Current problems are temporary. But you can still use it.

Incidentally, can you reference that O(n3) scaling thing, I've not heard that one before and it doesn't seem obvious to me.

There are N people in the network. As N grows, each individual person also has more potential people to transact with - transactions would be O(N²). Since each person has a copy of all transaction history, the network requires O(N³) storage overall.

Ah, so N isn't the size of the block or the storage needed because the block is bigger. It's the scaling factor of transaction counts as networks in general get bigger. So every network scales by O(n3)?

No, the problem here is requiring everyone to have the entire transaction history stored locally. I'm oversimplifying of course, but I'm saying overall throughput scales with O(n²) (and thus individual bandwidth with O(n).

Yeah this checks out for me, I want to use bitcoin more, but I need more people available to trade bitcoin with. If we double the number of people on the network we more than double transaction potential (handshaking problem).