Sorry, I am not sure Bitcoin can be a niche currency. It needs to be big enough to survive.
If most people prefer to use other crypto instead then Bitcoin may fall into a death spiral:
...lower the demand for bitcoins -> lower the price of bitcoin AND lower amount of bitcoin transactions -> less profitable the mining -> less secure the network -> lower the demand for bitcoins....
Thanks for the article. But I don't see where it says that Bitcoin can't scale 20x without decentralization problems.
I see that "the block size should not exceed 4MB for X=90%; and 38MB for X=50%", but I don't think that 50% reduction of number of nodes would be a serious decentralization problem (we've seen a similar reduction already due to the implementation of SPV clients).
Mining centralization could be a bigger problem, but with headers-first mining the block size wouldn't contribute to it.
Also the authors of the article assume the use of Bitcoin’s current peer-to-peer overlay network, that can be drastically optimized.
I've chosen 20x because Gavin had conducted 20Mb tests more than a year ago, before many optimizations took place.
There is nothing bad in the low fees. Low fees is the marketing strategy to boost the usage of Bitcoin and create the large enough ecosystem. Miners are being subsidised by bitcoin holders for a reason.
Larger the blocks while preserving a reasonable degree of decentralization -> lower the fees per transaction -> more people use Bitcoin -> more valuable the bitcoin ecosystem is -> higher the price of bitcoin -> mining is more profitable -> stable and secure infrastructure for the new global economy.
True, but we are not there yet. Bitcoin can probably scale 20x times without a problem. That would be 20 times lower transaction fees and 20 times more people using it.
First, I want to apologize. We have received a lot of negative feedback suddenly and I can assure you that we take it seriously.
I temporary disabled ALL the email notifications (even though I don't think they were a real problem) and added a warning that we are not affiliated with project owners. When my teammate is online he will probably also some of the other issues.
Perhaps some people just misunderstand the project and hate it.
Also I think that it is normal that developers try to understand the motivation of users and ask questions in order to find a better solution, please don't take it as offence or reluctance to change.
We are going to resolve every issue or close the project.
Thank you very much! I am quite surprised because I remember fixing this issue in the same day patch became available and I run update recently. Upgrading the distro, hopefully it fixes the problem.
We don't impersonate anybody. We just provide additional way to reward project's contributors and perhaps attract more of them. We'll make it more explicit with https://github.com/tip4commit/tip4commit/issues/136
> I assumed "the project" meant that the tip goes back into a general pool still dedicated to the particular project the tip was originally designated for.
When I said "returned to the project's balance" - I meant "returned to the funded project's balance" so that other contributors to that project could receive them.
Sorry if sounds ambiguous, English is not my native language.
Thanks for your question. Currently it will just stay as unclaimed balance. But probably it is a good idea to return it back to the project eventually.
PS: Thanks for your hint regarding valid email addresses. If your email address is a@ai or something similar - you won't receive tips, sorry.
You are right. But it is not a salary, it is just a tip. If developer spent time to make even a tiny useful commit - that is good. Probably with time it will become harder to find tiny commits. And donations will probably keep accumulating thus creating higher incentive for more complex commits.
If most people prefer to use other crypto instead then Bitcoin may fall into a death spiral:
...lower the demand for bitcoins -> lower the price of bitcoin AND lower amount of bitcoin transactions -> less profitable the mining -> less secure the network -> lower the demand for bitcoins....