Comment by nprz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nprz | Hacker News Reader

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There is utility in the bitcoin network that is not found in existing financial systems (censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, borderless, and pseudonymous). And If you are thinking about the energy consumption of btc on a per transaction basis you are misunderstanding that the btc network should be thought of as a settlement layer, rather than a payment layer.

> Bitcoin is therefore best understood as a high-integrity utility-scale settlement network, similar to Fedwire [...] No surprise that like other real-time gross settlement systems, Bitcoin is a suitable base upon which other payments networks can be built. These are numerous, but they include off-chain transactions at exchanges, near-chain solutions like Lightning, sidechains with new trust models like Liquid and Rootstock, and smart contract platforms like Blockstack that rely on Bitcoin’s security.[0]

The myopic focus placed on the bitcoin networks energy consumption has always seemed absurd to me. Considering all the plastic junk manufactured in China, shipped on giant container ships all across the globe, emitting vast amounts of carbon, only to be thrown away a year later. To me, this alternative monetary systems provides far more utility to humanity than some plastic funko pop figurine. But the latter slips under the radar and the former attracts huge amounts of criticism. It's almost as if there is some concerted effort tarnish the public opinion of bitcoin.

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/frustrating-maddening-all-consuming...

"myopic focus placed on the bitcoin networks energy consumption"

It is not myopic to look at, and call out, the elephant in the bedroom

> the btc network should be thought of as a settlement layer, rather than a payment layer

This ruins all of the stuff you mention. Or at least restricts these nice features to the rich. People don't have access to these features if they are only used indirectly through the major institutions they work with.

All of those features remain intact, even with the eventual creation of a payment layer. There is nothing to prevent someone from transacting directly on the blockchain.

Except the high fees due to limited throughput and the absolutely gargantuan CO2 emissions, which are the topic of this thread.

You can't say it is a settlement layer in one breath and then immediately turn around and say that no really everybody truly has access.

Yes, that’s how the btc network works, that’s what censorship-resistant means. You would primarily transact on a payment layer, which true, may not have all the features of the base layer. But you also have the ability to opt-in and transact directly on the blockchain and get all those nice features listed above, however the transaction fee would be higher and the speed of the transaction slower.

For some definition of "higher" and "slower", yes. The scale of BTC is such that if we distributed transactions evenly across the 7b people on the planet, you get one transaction per five years.

The current mining payout is 6.5BTC per block, or roughly $350,000. We are fitting around 1,500 transactions in a block, meaning each transaction costs $300. The price will only rise as more miners join and there is more demand for space in a block. The international poverty line is such that a single transaction would cost somebody at that line half their year's wages.

All that good stuff won't be available to the masses. Just the rich and powerful. Hooray.

> you get one transaction per five years

Isn't it per 89 years? So basically every person gets one transaction in their lifetime. (If we are generous and allow for 5 transactions per second, then everyone can make 2 transactions in their lifetime. Yay!) That is rather remarkable.

(1500 transactions/block * 6 block/h * 24 h/d * 365 d/y / 7e9 person = 1/89 transactions per person per year)

I grabbed some page that claimed 7 transactions per second and also did the math wrong. Not sure how that happened.

This is the big reason why I don't buy the lightning network. It won't be possible for people to have a wallet that connects to some lightning hub, since opening and closing a connection requires an on-chain transaction. So it will be impossible for anybody other than the richest few to even possess a useful wallet. Everybody else will have bits in a database they don't control.

> There is utility in the bitcoin network that is not found in existing financial systems (censorship-resistant, seizure-resistant, borderless, and pseudonymous)

That utility exists in most of the crypto offerings. Bitcoin is horribly inefficient as a payment layer although that's exactly what people want. If it's not good for what people use it for, something better will replace it. It's not about who's first, but who's last.

>> Considering all the plastic junk manufactured in China, shipped on giant container ships all

ah there it is, the straw man. The "plastic junk" makes a lot of poor people's lives a bit better, but fuck those people right?

Golly. All those things (just like payments) are available much cheaper other ways.

I am not a cryptographer, but the cryptographers I know and trust all agree on that.

Say you wanted to pseudonymously send funds to a family member with a frozen bank account in say, Gaza, by the end of the day. What tech would you use to accomplish this?

Please don’t use Gaza as a justification to this broken piece of technology. That’s borderline dishonest.

It's 100% honest. Palestinians have been using bitcoin for exactly the reason I mentioned above. [0]

[0] https://www.coindesk.com/crypto-gaza-west-bank-bitcoin-pales...

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