<story><title>Lightning Network: “Bitcoin Doesn’t Scale” [pdf]</title><url>http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>celticninja</author><text>Im not sure that Netflix is the preferred option. You say&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;(Netflix et al) are far more popular and commercially successful for watching online video&lt;p&gt;File sharing versions are not aimed at being commercially successful so i think that is an irrelevant comparison.&lt;p&gt;Also you I expect are from the USA, netflix&amp;#x2F;hulu etc arenot available everywhere so they are certainly not more popular than the alternatives in countries where they are not avaiable.&lt;p&gt;Popcorn Time was a free, decentralized Netflix alternative and it was hugely popular, only that the developers pulled the plug on it did it not become the defacto method of watching movies for free online.&lt;p&gt;Anyway not sure how these compare to bitcoin but I dont think your analogy holds up even when not compared to bitcoin.</text></item><item><author>bhouston</author><text>Interesting parallel to the growth and development of decentralized P2P networks around 1999&amp;#x2F;2000.&lt;p&gt;First there was Gnutella (as Napster had a centralized directory) - but it didn&amp;#x27;t scale, although it proved popular.&lt;p&gt;Then they added support to Gnutella for spoke&amp;#x2F;hub models, which had superpeers that reduced the load on most individuals.  But in the end Gnutella never really took off.&lt;p&gt;What replaced Gnutella was bittorrent, which actually only did transfer via P2P but the searching and discovery was centralized again PirateBay and Trackers.&lt;p&gt;But for all bittorrent&amp;#x27;s success, Netflix (and others), which are centralized and highly controlled alternatives, are far more popular and commercially successful for watching online video -- it is just less work to use Netflix, even though it doesn&amp;#x27;t have the benefits of being free and open.&lt;p&gt;So for all the attraction of P2P decentralization, often centralized, commercial focused easy solutions win out.  There are costs to be paid by being decentralized and often general people who are not ideological do not want to pay these costs.&lt;p&gt;But I am mostly an outsider with regards to Bitcoin so who knows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>dublinben</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s worth mentioning that PopcornTime[0] is still available at a new domain, and has been forked by at least one group of developers.&lt;p&gt;[0]&lt;a href=&quot;http://popcorntime.io/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;popcorntime.io&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Lightning Network: “Bitcoin Doesn’t Scale” [pdf]</title><url>http://lightning.network/lightning-network.pdf</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>celticninja</author><text>Im not sure that Netflix is the preferred option. You say&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;(Netflix et al) are far more popular and commercially successful for watching online video&lt;p&gt;File sharing versions are not aimed at being commercially successful so i think that is an irrelevant comparison.&lt;p&gt;Also you I expect are from the USA, netflix&amp;#x2F;hulu etc arenot available everywhere so they are certainly not more popular than the alternatives in countries where they are not avaiable.&lt;p&gt;Popcorn Time was a free, decentralized Netflix alternative and it was hugely popular, only that the developers pulled the plug on it did it not become the defacto method of watching movies for free online.&lt;p&gt;Anyway not sure how these compare to bitcoin but I dont think your analogy holds up even when not compared to bitcoin.</text></item><item><author>bhouston</author><text>Interesting parallel to the growth and development of decentralized P2P networks around 1999&amp;#x2F;2000.&lt;p&gt;First there was Gnutella (as Napster had a centralized directory) - but it didn&amp;#x27;t scale, although it proved popular.&lt;p&gt;Then they added support to Gnutella for spoke&amp;#x2F;hub models, which had superpeers that reduced the load on most individuals.  But in the end Gnutella never really took off.&lt;p&gt;What replaced Gnutella was bittorrent, which actually only did transfer via P2P but the searching and discovery was centralized again PirateBay and Trackers.&lt;p&gt;But for all bittorrent&amp;#x27;s success, Netflix (and others), which are centralized and highly controlled alternatives, are far more popular and commercially successful for watching online video -- it is just less work to use Netflix, even though it doesn&amp;#x27;t have the benefits of being free and open.&lt;p&gt;So for all the attraction of P2P decentralization, often centralized, commercial focused easy solutions win out.  There are costs to be paid by being decentralized and often general people who are not ideological do not want to pay these costs.&lt;p&gt;But I am mostly an outsider with regards to Bitcoin so who knows.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>timdaub</author><text>Good point.&lt;p&gt;I think the market will always decide which media consumption method it wants to use depending on how frictionless the experience is.&lt;p&gt;In the case of Bittorrent, as a mainstream consumer you&amp;#x27;d have to know what program to download, where to find a torrent file yada, yada yada, while on Netflix you can just enter your credit card information and watch as many movies as you like.&lt;p&gt;I think recently, Facebook also realized this, which is why they are currently aiming towards bringing a great search engine to their customers.&lt;p&gt;Once that is in place sufficiently, homepages for small businesses will become obsolete, as people rather search for a company&amp;#x2F;product on Facebook than on the internet as it is a much easier to do.&lt;p&gt;This same principle again will probably apply to Bitcoin and digital payments in general.
Right now, Apple is doing a great job reducing friction in payments, at least for mainstream consumers.</text></comment>