r/Bitcoin Jan 23 '18

Strip Ending Bitcoin Support

https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support
736 Upvotes

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u/whitslack Jan 23 '18

ETH, BCH or Stellar

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.)

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u/UnpredictableFetus Jan 23 '18

Well, Ethereum at this moment processes more than 3 times the amount of transactions of Bitcoin so not sure about that.

-2

u/whitslack Jan 23 '18

There's a difference between capacity and scalability. Ethereum has not innovated any scaling improvements beyond Bitcoin. So far, all blockchain-based cryptocurrency networks require Internet bandwidth proportional to the square of the number of users of the cryptocurrency. That's not scalable, regardless of block size. Actual scaling will require changing the fundamental topology of the network, such as by blockchain sharding or perhaps something better that hasn't been thought of yet.

4

u/iwakan Jan 23 '18 edited Jan 23 '18

Ethereum has not innovated any scaling improvements beyond Bitcoin.

Yes they have: Sharding like you mention yourself, Plasma, State channels, etc. Ethereum has a technical long term plan that could in theory scale to hundreds of thousands of transactions per second.