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Comment by dustintrex | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunate wording in the title. The price of Bitcoin "crashed" as in plummeted, and the Chivo wallet system they're trying to use in El Salvador "crashed" as in went offline. The Bitcoin network, of course, chugged merrily along, at its usual 4 or so txns/second.

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Wait, is BTC really only doing 4 transactions a second? I knew it was bad, but I didn't realize this bad. Bitcoin is like a 1960s mainframe computer in an old bank headquarters that runs everything but is an archaic relic.

Yes. There was a big argument several years back about increasing transaction counts and the "more transactions please" advocates lost. BTC, by design, targets roughly this number of transactions per second regardless of how much energy is spent to mine.

Isn't this the reason for the Lightning network layer?

It is. There are some people who believe that lightning causes a "worst of both worlds" situation where you are reliant on intermediate processors for everything and the network still emits gobs of CO2.

This is wrong. Lightning Network transactions are 100% non-custodial.

4 transactions a second!? I heard it was bad but that is absolutely pathetic, my local strip mall likely averages out to more then 4 transactions a second.

Is it still 4 txns/second even with the Lightning network?

4 transactions per second is for the main chain, not side-chains.

Nobody uses side-chains, so I don't think their capacity is the interesting number.

> Nobody uses side-chains...

I use LN every day. Also, have you heard the El Salvador news?

This is just active, malicious disinformation - why are you doing this?

LN blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude - you can do hundreds of millions of transactions per second, today.

> chugged merrily along, at its usual 4 or so txns/second.

who needs failure when this is what success looks like?

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