I keep reading Steemit postings and journalistic articles, debating SegWit vs. Bitcoin Unlimited, trying to illuminate various advantages and disadvantages, but they always miss one very important point:
Blockchain transactions are slow. Even with the highest fee you may have to wait for an hour or, if you are particularly unlucky, two hours, due to the unpredictable times between blocks.
For this simple and non-controversial reason we need quick second-layer payment systems that can perform a confirmed payment within seconds. The Lightning Network is one of them, and there are others being worked on.
SegWit is more or less a prerequisite for them, while Bitcoin Unlimited does not solve the slowness problem at all.
I urge particularly the professional journalists not to keep overlooking such a simple fact.
Some more background information:
Zero-confirmation transactions on the bitcoin blockchain have been proposed, but there is no reliable implementation. As far as I can see, they do not solve this problem. They do not work as well as some people had hoped.
There are other reasons to doubt the viability of BU, but they are far more difficult to understand. If you don't know much of economy and game theory, if you have never understood or even heard of the Byzantine generals problem, unfortunately you don't have the faintest chance of understanding why BU's "emergent consensus" idea is highly problematic. But let's forget these difficult things for now and concentrate on the simple and obvious.
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