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I work on Bitcoin and Bitcoin-related software.

#1 is false.

Bitcoin has an artificial transaction cap because it's conservative. It's been raised before and will be raised in the future.

#2 is false, though a different concern is present.

Bitcoin doesn't require a user store the entire chain, older transactions can be pruned. It does need to be sent over the network and processed which _is_ a concern.

Ultimately it shouldn't be the case that every single transaction has to pass through every node but only settlements. Solutions for this are being worked on.

#3 is false.

Transaction fees pay for mining.

I got bored at that point, though it does seem to get more reasonable, because BofE staffers' likely know more about economics than technology. Their comments on the distribution possibly have some merit (but then, I think the 'traditional' wealth distribution is probably far worse than we think it is; it's difficult to know because it's more opaque).




#1 is not false. They say:

> their capacity is largely fixed... Bitcoin has an estimated maximum of 7 transactions per second vs 24,000 for visa

Yes, Bitcoin could raise their artificial transaction cap. But they haven't recently, despite fees and delays getting quite large. So clearly there are significant difficulties in increasing the throughput meaningfully, and it is unclear how high it can go. To a user used to pre-existing transaction mechanisms, that's a "largely fixed" capacity.


Yet people upvote articles like this. Goes to show how supposedly people of "reason/logic" are as much influenced by "monsters" (ref to Goya's The sleep of...) as anybody else. :/


> Bitcoin has an artificial transaction cap because it's conservative. It's been raised before and will be raised in the future.

I thought one of the founding principles is that new money will not be created?

Unrelated to your comment, but re: #3 and #5 ...why shouldn't Bitcoin's value be the cost to mine it?


I'm confused by your first comment; the transactional throughput of Bitcoin is completely unrelated to money creation.

On the latter - I think it's more up to you to show that it would be. The value of most things is unlinked from their cost of production. A really obvious example would be a five pound note.

That said, yes, in the stable state, miners should only expend 1BTC-epsilon of 'effort' to produce 1BTC. So if a block contains 1BTC of transaction fees, you'd expect them to spend a maximum of 1BTC (currently ~$6000 USD) to produce a block.

In reality it's a bit more complicated than that because the value fluctuates far more quickly than mining operations can or will scale up or down.

So really, it's the opposite - 1BTC isn't worth the amount of effort miners put in, the amount of effort miners put in should be approximately 1BTC worth. Sort of.


Imagine that I am trying to convince you to buy some cookies I baked. Are you going to care about the effort I put into making the cookies when I ask you to pay me for them?


How are the `transaction cap` and `new money will not be created` related? A block can contain more transactions, but the block reward stays the same.

Also, new bitcoin is created all the time (since that's what mining is).




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