The original Bitcoin would have set up a completely independent financial system with a peer-to-peer, near instant and near free (think 00.00001 fees on any transaction) payments that gave people complete and decentralized control over their finances. Then, as a hedge against certain forms of early attack, a temporary block size limit was put into place, with the full understanding of everyone from Satoshi on down that it was to be removed immediately once the system could handle the worrisome attack.
What happened next was interests from outside pounced on the system's primary vulnerability: the social control of the codebase. Through ousting of original Bitcoin insiders like Gavin Andresen and the installation of clearly incompetent or controlled figures through Blockstream, the temporary limit was, through tons of infighting, censorship, and disinfo campaigns coordinated through social media (twitter, reddit) and official internet channels (bitcointalk forums), ensconced as a permanent feature. This was sold at the time through clearly bunk argumentation that it's not worth going into right now.
The salient result of this block size limit is that block space is now artificially limited. Artificially restricted. This causes the average fee to skyrocket, and even worse, bakes in the potential for enormous explosions in fee price as happened in Dec 2017 -- any time the network becomes too heavily used, its fee and the wait time increase exponentially.
Now, other than clearly destroying what was to be a peer-to-peer cash system, why is this important?
Well, again the outside-invested companies like Blockstream develop "second layer" solutions that allow people to use their tokens in transactions that will then only much later, and through Blockstream and friends, be settled on the BTC chain itself. But of course these second layer networks are privately and centrally controlled. They share none of the properties of the base Bitcoin layer that made it revolutionary, free, and valuable. Once this setup is accepted, BTC has become completely co-opted and under the control of status quo financial interests, since they will control the hubs and the centers of power over the network.
During all of those people quite aware of the bullshit created spaces for uncensored talk, like /r/btc (rather than the sewer that is /r/bitcoin), and originalist Bitcoiners forked away and formed Bitcoin Cash. It is now the only reasonable fork of Bitcoin worth calling Bitcoin. BTC is not Bitcoin any longer, though through the disinfo and capture of exchanges and the like they kept the brand and ticker name. But it's a shambling corpse with the face of Bitcoin sewn on....
I'm aware of the scaling problem, and both methods has it's pros and cons, that's the problem. Scaling must be done in a decentralized way, but currently all available scaling methods seems to lead to centralization in one way or another.
BCH and BSV would require bigger local disks to work, we might get there in a few years seeing how SSDs are getting bigger and cheaper every year, but we're not there yet. BCH processing the same amount of transactions as VISA would make the chain at least 1GB bigger every 10min, while you get fast and cheap transactions, very few people could possibly afford all the storage required, hence there would be too few nodes.
BTC has it's major issues too, I checked the transaction price a few days ago, $100 for one transaction, that's not sustainable either. While Lightning does work as a decentralized second layer solution too few people are aware of it, and fewer knows how to actually use it. Just like BCH and BSV this problem will likely be solved in a few years too.
There's really not much to do other than hodl and trade alts, while waiting.
You don't understand what I'm saying.
The original Bitcoin would have set up a completely independent financial system with a peer-to-peer, near instant and near free (think 00.00001 fees on any transaction) payments that gave people complete and decentralized control over their finances. Then, as a hedge against certain forms of early attack, a temporary block size limit was put into place, with the full understanding of everyone from Satoshi on down that it was to be removed immediately once the system could handle the worrisome attack.
What happened next was interests from outside pounced on the system's primary vulnerability: the social control of the codebase. Through ousting of original Bitcoin insiders like Gavin Andresen and the installation of clearly incompetent or controlled figures through Blockstream, the temporary limit was, through tons of infighting, censorship, and disinfo campaigns coordinated through social media (twitter, reddit) and official internet channels (bitcointalk forums), ensconced as a permanent feature. This was sold at the time through clearly bunk argumentation that it's not worth going into right now.
The salient result of this block size limit is that block space is now artificially limited. Artificially restricted. This causes the average fee to skyrocket, and even worse, bakes in the potential for enormous explosions in fee price as happened in Dec 2017 -- any time the network becomes too heavily used, its fee and the wait time increase exponentially.
Now, other than clearly destroying what was to be a peer-to-peer cash system, why is this important?
Well, again the outside-invested companies like Blockstream develop "second layer" solutions that allow people to use their tokens in transactions that will then only much later, and through Blockstream and friends, be settled on the BTC chain itself. But of course these second layer networks are privately and centrally controlled. They share none of the properties of the base Bitcoin layer that made it revolutionary, free, and valuable. Once this setup is accepted, BTC has become completely co-opted and under the control of status quo financial interests, since they will control the hubs and the centers of power over the network.
During all of those people quite aware of the bullshit created spaces for uncensored talk, like /r/btc (rather than the sewer that is /r/bitcoin), and originalist Bitcoiners forked away and formed Bitcoin Cash. It is now the only reasonable fork of Bitcoin worth calling Bitcoin. BTC is not Bitcoin any longer, though through the disinfo and capture of exchanges and the like they kept the brand and ticker name. But it's a shambling corpse with the face of Bitcoin sewn on....
I'm aware of the scaling problem, and both methods has it's pros and cons, that's the problem. Scaling must be done in a decentralized way, but currently all available scaling methods seems to lead to centralization in one way or another.
BCH and BSV would require bigger local disks to work, we might get there in a few years seeing how SSDs are getting bigger and cheaper every year, but we're not there yet. BCH processing the same amount of transactions as VISA would make the chain at least 1GB bigger every 10min, while you get fast and cheap transactions, very few people could possibly afford all the storage required, hence there would be too few nodes.
BTC has it's major issues too, I checked the transaction price a few days ago, $100 for one transaction, that's not sustainable either. While Lightning does work as a decentralized second layer solution too few people are aware of it, and fewer knows how to actually use it. Just like BCH and BSV this problem will likely be solved in a few years too.
There's really not much to do other than hodl and trade alts, while waiting.
There are no reasonable cons to scaling up exactly as Satoshi and the entire community outlined and foresaw.
There is no reason for every single person to have the entirety of the history of the chain on their HDD.