1/ Blockchain is a very sluggish thing. Many confirmations (= time) are needed to ensure transaction finality. It is inefficient because everybody sees all transactions. And we need to store all transactions for eternity (unless Mimblewimble is used.)
2/ But if properly implemented blockchains are of extremely high security. And the location of sender & receiver is irrelevant. This is _the_ killer app for which everything else is built upon.
3/ From this hard secure foundation we can build faster & cheaper payments (like the lightning network) that still carries almost the same security thanks to smart contracts.
4/ Despite lightning network, we probably need higher onchain capacity (if more people are using #bitcoin.) The question is how we can do this without making it too costly to run a full node. And there’s active research going on as we speak.
5/ One giant leap would be to be able to throw most of the data out for old transactions. That way syncing a new node from scratch would take a couple of hours regardless of how many blocks have been added.
6/ That tech is known as Mimblewimble and there are multiple ways of implementing it. We don’t which one is most suitable for #bitcoin just yet. Another cool tech that would help is Schnorr signatures. That would drastically make the transactions smaller. And more private!
7/ Things progress albeit slowly. And patience is painful. But what we do know, and this is the cool part, is that whatever banks do, they cannot do it better. Blockchain is really useless, unless you build an immutable, decentralized, permissionless & borderless network.#bitcoin
