Peter Waterland
Aug 8, 2017 · 1 min read

We are now in an interesting time period for bitcoin. The recent hard fork presents the market with two possibilities going forwards — one stewarded by the company you work for and offering expensive on chain transactions and promising cheaper off chain alternatives. The other is just bitcoin with a larger blocksize where miners take all the fees as opposed to Blockstream gobbling them up.

Everyone knows bitcoin doesn’t scale up to VISA levels. But the truth you fail to offer is that it doesn’t have to — not for a long time. It can continue to grow as it always did on chain whilst the solutions you are working on such as Lightning (big fan of this btw) become available.

I would suggest that trying to market bitcoin with the tagline, ‘Bitcoin fees are only going to rise from now on. Plan on it.’ is probably counter productive given this latest price rally was predicated upon bitcoin finally overcoming it’s scaling woes.

The market always finds a way.

When the 1MB cap hit the alt market soared and potential bitcoin usurpers surfaced for the first time in the last 8 years. Now there is a vanilla version of bitcoin which isn’t subject to the artificial constraints imposed upon by a single software constant and it isn’t going anywhere.

What happens when Blockstream bitcoin becomes too expensive and unusable for everyday usage as happened a few months back? How will lightning work with multi-day confirmation times?

    Peter Waterland

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