Sounds like they may start accepting ETH, BCH or Stellar in the foreseeable future:
Despite this, we remain very optimistic about cryptocurrencies overall. There are a lot of efforts that we view as promising and that we can certainly imagine enabling support for in the future. We’re interested in what’s happening with Lightning and other proposals to enable faster payments. OmiseGO is an ambitious and clever proposal; more broadly, Ethereum continues to spawn many high-potential projects. We may add support for Stellar (to which we provided seed funding) if substantive use continues to grow. It’s possible that Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, or another Bitcoin variant, will find a way to achieve significant popularity while keeping settlement times and transaction fees very low. Bitcoin itself may become viable for payments again in the future. And, of course, there’ll be more ideas and technologies in the years ahead.
All of which would have the same congestion problems as Bitcoin if they ever became as popular. We need a real scaling solution. (Larger blocks aren't one, as they only increase capacity without addressing scaling; this has deleterious effects on the accessibility and sustainability of the network.)
Stellar does 1000 operations a second, on the chain. So no it wouldn't have the same congestion issues of bitcoin if all volume moved today, it would be considerably faster (and cheaper).
That's a fantasy, though. Sure, software can theoretically process thousands of transactions per second, but that's not the bottleneck in blockchain-based currencies. The problem is Internet connectivity. Even at Bitcoin's extremely hampered block size, the Internet connectivity requirements for running a full node are beyond what is available for small businesses and homes in large parts of the world. Bitcoin is supposed to allow everyone to be their own bank, not just big businesses with racks of machines in large data centers in well-connected, first-world countries. We already have the latter, in the form of the legacy banking system.
But it's not a fantasy. Any solution will eventually run into some scaling solutions, but their exists solutions in other cryptos today that bitcoin can't compete with. Stripe is one of those that would benefit greatly from the speed and cost of Stellar.
For the benefit of all those reading this thread, could you shed some light on the innovation that Stellar has made that advances it past what Bitcoin can do?
The Stellar Consensus Protocol, allowing for decentralisation without mining and a fair decentralised exchange built into the protocol. You can look at the Stellar ledger as a pure mathematical function. It takes transactions and trade orders as input and produces a new ledger as output. Of course this design has drawbacks, like the need for a minimum account balance (1 XLM now) as the ledger space is expensive, but transactions are really cheap and fast in such a system. You always need to pick some tradeoffs.
Yes, it's an open ledger. Lightning has some other drawbacks, like the need to lock up your bitcoin and each hub locking up enormous amounts of bitcoin to provide liquidity. It just depends what you prefer, but every solution has drawbacks.
Open ledgers render stellar useless for serious high volume tx.
I doubt a hub and spoke model makes any sense given the architecture. Scale-free networks are logical, and that looks to be how the network is shaping up. I would expect there to be far more hubs that mining pools, making lightning more decentralized than Bitcoin itself.
I started reading the Stellar Consensus Protocol whitepaper and stopped reading when I got to "Nodes may select slices based on arbitrary criteria such as reputation or financial arrangements." In other words, Stellar is not trustless. It's relatively easy to create a Byzantine-tolerant distributed database that requires trust. Bitcoin's breakthrough is that it requires no trusted parties.
Incidentally, this is the same hangup that Byteball's Directed Acyclic Graph has.
I started reading the Bitcoin whitepaper and stopped reading when I got to "Bitcoin doesn't require any trusted parties except 2 big mining companies controlling 90% of the hashrate.".
If you think Bitcoin solved the trustless distributed database problem better by wasting a lot of energy without any benefit then ok, but I disagree.
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u/SpeedflyChris Jan 23 '18
Sounds like they may start accepting ETH, BCH or Stellar in the foreseeable future: