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Comment by ericb | Hacker News Reader

Bitcoin isn't a currency that can fix this. Bitcoin is either censorable (lightning network) or unaffordable when used heavily with slow confirmations and ridiculous fees.

The lightning network is a joke--a frankenstein "Engineering UI" layed over a system to route around bad development decisions re:block size.

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What sort of censorship are you referring to? If taproot-schnorr is deployed and adopted, cooperative channel operations will look exactly like normal single-sig transactions. As for routing censorship, if one node fails to route for me, I can open a channel with a different node and route around them.

You can be deplatformed from major node hubs, especially considering the design makes the hubs money transmitters from a US legal standpoint. You can get your channel closed out and be forced to pay the transaction fee, which may be higher than the value in your channel.

None of these are things people want to spend money worrying about.

Lightning is not censorable as participants in a payment channel route cannot know the sender nor receiver of a payment. It's similar to tor relays.

Lightning is also a pile of vaporware. It is even more Rube Goldberg than bitcoin. It’s only purpose in the bitcoin ecosystem is so shysters selling the dream can claim “no really, bitcoin can scale!!!! Lightning is just around the corner!!!”.

(Of course they don’t mention the irony to bitcoin scaling is not to use it)

How is it a pile of vaporware? It works today - I've used it multiple times in the past week.

1 sat/byte transactions will still clear the mempool, eventually. I don't think you need payments for porn to settle immediately. There are workarounds a business could use like speculatively accepting payment before a confirmation using heuristics e.g. the customer's past history. It's not an ideal situation, but the market decided this is the coin to use.

You could argue the market decided it was the store of value to use, like gold, not the coin to use. Or it is still being pumped by bitfinex/tether, tough to tell.

one of the best real life examples of being resistant to financial deplatforming is Wikileaks and they used Bitcoin

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