On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 5:09 PM, juan <juan.g71@gmail.com> wrote:

...

"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution."

keywords, peer to peer, no financial middlemen.

Now it gets interesting. Blockstream has a solution to increase bitcoin's capacity, which I don't think can be described as "purely peer-to-peer" and involving no middlemen at all. As a matter of fact, blockstream solution is to create middlemen that will process the vast majority of transaction...because they can't scale bitcoin (technical failure) or they don't want (political failure).

nobody bothered to correct me, so I'll have to do it myself. When I first watched this "Lightning Network Talk"...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zVzw912wPo

...I got the impression that the layer on top of bitcoin would be run by big business and would be composed of relatively few 'big' nodes. However it turns out that, at least in theory, the LN is peer to peer and anybody can route payments for other peers. So maybe there's some hope for bitcoin...

Among various larger proposals, sure, maybe. Yet going back before than, and even in point at end below regarding any adoption forthcoming..... Bitcoin ecosystem has lots of variables that automatically slide around to compensate for various conditions. And with some code, size of chain itself can be broken up later across distributed history stores for address lookup later, even possibly "old" address holders can migrate to new on notice (but that forces ethics and contract issues thus isnt cool. New coins can launch with that.) Phones can't handle full chain anyway. Single biggest problem is hard physical limit of txrate. For which user computers have zero problem for at least 5 more years by doing nothing but fiddling that single blocksize #define according to some simple automatic network defined formula. Which gives time to do further development and consensus, including exchanges, since bitcoin must not be only useful / ranking coin. It's hard to peg / track / input an external monetary fee value like $0.01/tx, but inchain analysis of tx values to set it might be possible. Or hardfix it in code releases at whatever upon whatever heights. Or just remove it and punt to relays, miners, users. Real problem is everyone turning small technical problem into their own oppurtunities to fiefdom exploit, and none having balls to do it due to their own risk proposition. It's fun to watch :) Till then, so long as users can pay fee in/out of spends/positions, addresses aren't invalidated, hodling still seems economically valid, and routes exist... that's life. In multiple cryptos we trust. (Which tends a liberating thought regarding silly BTC blocksize debates... isn't that the point?)