Lightning Network co-author Tadge Dryja gives a talk about his invention, its benefits and shortcomings, and other scaling solutions for Bitcoin.
- Bitcoin usecases: 1) store of value (NGU y’all, which “actually makes a lot of sense”; 2) gambling…? (thanks ordinals), 3) payments (micro and otherwise)
- Greshams law: bad money drives out good money. Even when you can use BTC, sometimes you don’t want to!
- Other proposed L2s: Rollups, statechain
- BIP 39 “maybe the best product-market fit” for Bitcoin? But it’s “unanimously discouraged for implementation” so “that ship has sailed,” Dryja said.
- Enter Runes: inscriptions, runes, etc are paying the majority of fees right now
- What do runes mean for scaling? Well, you don’t *really* need scaling right now because there isn’t consistent, unbearable pressure on the fee market
- Two reasons for a block size limit: technical and economic
- Technical: if blocks are too big, you make initial block download difficult at best and nearly impossible at worst
- Economic: if blocks are too big, miners don’t earn as much from fees
- This scaling conversations is not new — it’s as old as Bitcoin — but it gets more germane with each passing year
- There have been a lot of bad ideas for scaling bitcoin (like Gavin Andresen’s idea to increase the block size to 20 MB), but if we let those stymy discussion, then those bad ideas were effectively successful social attacks
- Bitcoin is worth scaling. If you don’t touch it, it’s still great! But it’s worth the effort as long as it doesn’t break bitcoin, and there is perhaps greater risk in *not* changing it
- Dryja says that he’s not writing a BIP or proposing a fork, but he does want to talk about scaling and technical solutions again.
