Bought some silver again today and it felt good! Okay, it is bitSilver and I bought it with Bitshares {BTS} at the Decentralized Exchange {DEX} in the Bitshares2-light App. The awesome part of it being the high exchange speed and the ease of use. It really is a bliss to use. The downside being that right after I bought the bitSilver, the price dropped. Yet, I'm keeping the silver for now. There are safer ways to store the value in like OPEN.USDT {USD Tether}, or bitUSD and bitEURO, but I granted myself some SmartCash {SC} to play with. Always wanted to have some silver, not gold, so now, in a sense I have.

And because I'm getting rid off my Dash, I needed to do some exchange to Tether. (Going to trade with that a bit.) While the Steem, Bitshares and bitSilver trades went in a jiffy all the other ones went like, eurm, slow. And allthough the name Slothcoin would suggest slowness, it is actually faster. Anyway, after a while that trade got confirmed. It just needed little patience. This just reminded me that the Bitcoin network is slow and not really build to suit mass consumption usage. Just like one would not take three bars of gold to buy our house. (Yes, it is a bargain.) Bitcoin, is, like I wrote before, ideal for large value transactions. Like I would want to wait days before my silver bars would be brought to my doorstep, I would wait an hour before a 132.000 Euro would be paid in BTC.

There are more people who agree on the idea that Bitcoin is like the digital equivalent of gold. The way it is constructed seems unfit for fast, cheap and small transactions. We have SmartCash {SC} Steem and Bitshares for that. Why would it need to be like a credit-card payment business and the only one being able to handle hundred of thousands of transactions per second? To get the facts straight: Bitcoin will never be able to do that. Promoting an unbound blocksize as a solution for this makes no sense. The way Bitcoin works it could do 3.5 transactions per second. (Bitshares can do 3300 per second and very likely so can Steem!) Do you want to do the math for Bitcoin?

It will create extremely huge blocks and challenges to solve

For 3.5 transactions per second {TPS} Bitcoin has got (close to) 1 MegaByte {MB} blocks. Double the blocksize and presto: 7 transtions per second. At some point 56 TPS would need blocks of 16 MB. Yet, we are a long distance away from what Bitshares managed on the testnet lately. And as the Steem blockchain technollogy is closely related to Bitshares it would outrun Bitcoin with ease already, mulitple times. Steem could be able to perform a 100.000 transactions per second in the near future, just like Bitshares.

Yet, even it Bitcoin went to 64 MB blocks that would just give them 224 transactions per second, at the most. Just do that times ten and you have blocks of 640 MB to get 2240 transactions in. These huge blocks need to be moved around the Bitcoin peer to peer {p2p} network, every 10 minutes. With 144 blocks added a day the Bitcoin blockchain would grow at 90 GigaByte {GB} a day. That could fill about a 32 TerraByte harddrive a year. Remember all the miners would need a kind of hardware setup to be able to handle this kind of data. These blocks of 640 MB a time would need capable miners to calculate the right hash, at the right difficulty...

Now I really do wonder if the 'unbound' Bitcoin developement branche has take this into account. For me the Bitcoin Core developement branche seems much more realistic when it comes to numbers and figures. That branche is working on true innovation that can last a long time, also supported by the Litecoin {LTC} developement branche. (A reason for me to also buy some LTC.) The hardware needed for the extreme size blocks could move Bitcoin into a more centralized controled market fast. And that could start to smell like a monopoly. Where the biggest mining pool controler will set the price. Now, would you want to have your assets locked inside of that...? And then, free market, where are you?

Steem and Bitshares are better for fast and cheap

Maybe you remember the mantra for Bitshares and Steem?

3-2-1-BLOCK!

With Steem this will costs you ZERO! Just moved some Steem up and about, just like that. Bought some silver, at the Bitshares DEX: BAM, just like that. At a very low cost, of not even a cents worth. That is what I openede this post with. Just to remind you, in contrast, how far ahead SmartCash solutions like Steem and Bitshares are. It is not only in the apparant value that they hold at any given time. It is in the speed, the amount of transactions and the stability of the network that secures it all.

It is also strange to want one system to control it all, that is a free market curse. Just like there are more credit-card networks, there are more SmartCash systems available. Let Bitcoin be good at transferring large quantities of value. There are plenty of others that can do vast amounts of fast transactions to serve that part of the free market. Bitshares and Steem already have proven that. There are many solutions to any challenge possible. And I think it is best to keep that option as open and free as possible.

To finalize it

This is written from my point of view. Trading in the realm of Smart Cash {SC} has its risks. So, as always only put in what you are willing and able to lose. Just to remind you, any speculation of yours might be as good or bad as mine. In which I use a crystal ball, tea leaves and if I'm lucky, three pigs, a bucket and some truffels.

The blockchain technology that is used by Steem and Bitshares is absolutely superior to any current system available. Especially when it comes to large amounts of transactions that get processed at high speed within a strong network. (But you might also state that I'm a 'bit' biased...)

Yet, the best thing for Bitcoin to stick to right now is, what I think it does best of all, to move high amounts of value around securely. That should not even be cheap, or extremely fast, or causing extreme amounts of data to just be able to move tiny amounts of value, there is no logic in that.

So my bet is on Bitcoin Core and SegWit...

Have a good one!

License: cc0/public domain. Image by @oaldamster,
background 'bitcoin' photo by Benjamin Nelan at Pixabay