Bitcoin Responsiveness and Ease of Use

Bitcoin (BTC) price may fluctuate right now, but the most popular cryptocurrency continues to attract steady interest from around the world. Most recently, US payment giant NCR and digital asset management firm NYDIG have teamed up to have around 24 million customers from 650 US banks buy and sell BTC while El Salvador prepares legal crypto tender in September.

All of this can be encouraging until rolled out, but since Bitcoin is still relatively unproven as a means of payment on a large scale, it begs a mystery: How responsive and usable is Bitcoin?

According to many Bitcoin experts, upgrades – like SegWit – have expanded the platform’s capacity in recent years, while the maturity of the Lightning Network (LN) as a second-layer solution theoretically allows Bitcoin to process an indefinite number of transactions per Monday. Even so, many observers agree that the main problem related to the introduction of Bitcoin right now is not capacity and throughput, but ease of use.

Bitcoin Responsiveness and Ease of Use: Bitcoin scales itself

According to developer Luke Dashjr, Bitcoin’s capabilities are not limited to transactions: “After the activation of SegWit in 2017, Bitcoin did not have a maximum limit for transactions per second.”

Other commentators agree that Bitcoin’s capabilities have expanded significantly after SegWit. According to blockstream researcher Christian Decker, the capacity of Bitcoin increases as the transaction size decreases.

“Some time ago I made a direct comparison between pre-SegWit and post-SegWit. In this overall calculation for optimal conditions (smallest possible transactions), SegWit has almost doubled the capacity of the network (from 5,200) [giao dịch] / 12,100 block [giao dịch] / block) by optimizing information storage, ”he said.

Decker added that this scenario is a bit optimistic as it is forecast based on the smallest possible transaction size. However, the upcoming upgrades – Schnorr and Taproot signatures – make it even more practical.

“With Taproot and Schnorr, however, we can get closer to this optimistic scenario by further compressing popular scripts and reducing the size of multisig transactions to resemble single transactions. Sig,” he said.

Decker points out that estimating the maximum number of transactions per second is not very informative because it can vary widely depending on the nature of the transactions. Christopher Bendiksen, Head of Research at CoinShares, shares this view and adds that Bitcoin can already serve many useful purposes.

“The theoretical limit is not really interesting in my opinion and more or less an academic exercise that relies heavily on assumptions about user behavior that are often completely unrealistic. Bitcoin handles a similar amount of daily transactions as competing systems like FedWire and Mempool [nơi tất cả các giao dịch hợp lệ chờ được xác nhận] Frequent deletions indicate sufficient liquidity of the transactions, ”he told Cryptonews.com.

Bitcoin’s Responsiveness and Ease of Use: Potentially Infinite Transactions Per Second from Lightning Network

In other words, Bitcoin has significant levels of adoption and use. However, most agree that if it is to become something like an international or nationwide payment system that is regularly used by thousands or thousands of people, Layer 2 solutions will need help.

“It is of course important that the transaction capacity in the chain is further optimized, but it is multilayered solutions that enable the introduction of Bitcoin on a global commercial level, as we have just observed in El Salvador,” said Bendiksen.

El Salvador is turning to Lightning Network to make Bitcoin payments widely available in the Latin American country, with LN being able to conduct a potentially infinite number of transactions per second.

“There is no transaction capacity in the Lightning network – it is unlimited and infinitely exceeds the possibilities of centralized Layer 2 alternatives such as Visa and MasterCard,” says Bendiksen.

Others agreed, although some noted that there were still some technical challenges to overcome in order for LN to reach large dimensions.

“The Lightning Network itself has no limit on transaction capacity. One possible limitation is the requirement to open a payment channel and then manage channel balances – but we’ve seen emerging solutions like batch channel management, channel mills, etc., ”said Josef Tětek, Satoshi Labs, maker of Trezor, wallet, brand, Ambassador.

Critics argue that the Lightning Network might tend to centralize payment channels. However, most argue that this is the only viable way for Bitcoin to significantly expand its capabilities, with Christian Decker explaining how to do it.

“The way Lightning is scaling up is by moving transactions off-chain, but rooting those off-chain contracts and ultimately doing them down the chain. This means that the block space limit is no longer a limit on transfers, but is now a limit on the number of these off-chain contracts created and settled, ”he said.

Bitcoin Responsiveness and Ease of Use: Ease of Use

Thanks to the Lightning Network, El Salvador has been able to continue its plans to legalize bitcoin bids, although it remains to be seen how successful the adoption of crypto will be.

For many experts and commentators, however, the question does not really arise as to whether Bitcoin and / or the Lightning Network are technically capable of handling a large number of transactions. Instead, it’s ease of use, with the experience and expertise still being deemed necessary to use Bitcoin with ease.

“This may be a very personal opinion, but I think usability is our main topic right now. The lack of readily available tools to remove the underlying complexity means that we are limiting the reach of Bitcoin to tech-savvy people and enthusiasts who are willing to invest their time to learn and free time to do it “Says Decker.

Luke Dashjr agrees and emphasizes the importance of users running their own nodes.

“Bitcoin only works if most of the usage is checked with the recipients’ full nodes themselves. Right now, the biggest barrier to adoption is ease of use, especially the willingness of users to do whatever it takes to verify their own transactions. “

“The worst-case scenario is that most Bitcoin newbies choose centralized custodian solutions (like exchanges and their wallets) because they are easy to use. Infrastructure developers have a responsibility to develop tools that are easy to understand so that people are not afraid to use them, ”said Josef Tětek.

Christopher Bendiksen also claims that scalability and capacity are really not an issue for Bitcoin and that the cryptocurrency has to judge other fish in terms of acceptance.

He concludes: “The main obstacle to the widespread use of Bitcoin as money right now could be its volatility, familiarity with the technology and, in some regions, if usage remains high, low and users will need to get into their local fiat currencies. and get out. ” – Liquidity. “

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