Don't we need to increase block weight/size?

[taera249]

While I don't have a solid stance on raising the block size, I see a lot of roadblocks in the way of doing it.

    Raising the block size makes running a full node less accessible.
    Raising the block size requires a hard fork of the entire Bitcoin network, which imo would be extremely difficult.
    A lot of people are against it (/r/Bitcoin) just because other people have told them to be against it and haven't formed their own opinions, but are swept up in the tribalism


I also believe the lightning network will be successful. People may point at segwit and say "well segwit was supposed to help fees too, and we have low segwit adoption months after the soft fork". These people are correct, but they miss (imo) a huge point. Say a transaction fee on our congested network is $20. With segwit, that fee becomes ~$14 (roughly). With the lightning network, that fee becomes <$0.01. It's a massive, massive difference.

Say you have two choices: sell all your Bitcoins, because you believe Bitcoin is dead and can't properly scale. Alright, that takes 1 last transaction to move your coins to an exchange and sell them. OR, you could make one last transaction to open a lightning channel. Now, your Bitcoins are all available on the lightning network, where you can make instant, near-zero fee transactions.

I don't believe people will stop using the main network when people start shifting towards using the lightning network. But the more services that support the lightning network, the less payments will be made on chain, which frees up more room for people to make on chain transactions, transactions like opening more lightning network channels.

The battle that needs fought now (again, imo) is adoption of the lightning network. It's a drastic change from the benefits provided by segwit, which was more about fixing transaction malleability. If we could only fight one more battle, and it had to be raise the block size or get people to move over to the lightning network, the latter is going to work for a lot longer than the former. Because it's important which battles we choose here, because people will quickly get tired of needing to make changes to use Bitcoin.