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Comment by magicjosh | Hacker News Reader

It really does seem like the main purpose Bitcoin is succeeding at is sort of a digital gold. It's not good as cash, privacy, or anything else. Lightning seems like a joke compared to the types of efforts happening on Ethereum.

Appreciate this thorough analysis of problems with cryptocurrency.

Disclosure: crypto owner

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In what way is Lightning a joke compared to what's happening on ethereum? People are using Lightning to get more remittance money to their families, while over in ethereum folks are speculating on jpegs and yield farming ever-more-unsound token schemes.

Is it cheaper than Transferwise?

I can't say this for lightning or bitcoin, but a similar question was asked of nano.[1]

When I checked the numbers, it was 4% cheaper, but the convenience factor wasn't there.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/nuz7f8/nano_a...

Can you expand on "Lightning seems like a joke compared to the types of efforts happening on Ethereum" ? I was just in El Salvador and Lightning was a faster and more convenient experience than credit cards...

Happy to hear more about your experience!

To answer your question, what I've read about Lightning it sounded convoluted. The need to have a watcher keeping a channel open, invoices, just seems overly complex. I have tried receiving sats from online Lightning faucets and that part was impressive.

Ethereum's L1 growth and improvements seem more logical to me.

Is there a good place to go to track the adoption of Lightning?

Lightning was recently added to Cash App, for one big corp fiat onramp/offramp example.

2022 is off to an interesting start!

"Block’s Cash App adopts Lightning Network for free bitcoin payments" https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/18/blocks-cash-app-adopts-lig...

Kind of strange to call Lightning convoluted and then cite Ethereum as a foil. Lightning is much simpler than what Ethereum is trying to do, and evidently so when you compare progress on each so far.

Lack of fungibility makes Bitcoin worse than gold in that area. Gold doesn’t have a “permanent record” like Bitcoin. It’s more like a virtual deed to a plot of land that you can’t rent or use

Gold often has distinguishing markings on it, but in the end, a bar can always be melted down and recast.

> It’s more like a virtual deed to a plot of land that you can’t rent or use

Or, you know… gold

As gold price increases, more mining can be afforded. This helps stabilize its price because of increased supply.

As BTC price increases, more mining is still afforded, but this does not result in an increased supply and stabilized price, only in unmitigated high price and more energy spending.

If you keep calling Bitcoin digital gold they're going to start taxing it like gold. Goodbye long-term capital gains.

One project I'm following is Aztec Protocol. It's an Ethereum L2 (so faster & cheaper transactions, similar to Lightning) but it supports any Ethereum asset (ETH, USDC, WBTC) and is fully private.

The only thing that goes for Ethereum is the fact that it's used for creating worthless numerous other pump and dump crypto currencies on top of its blockchain where Shiba Inu is the latest glorious example. Solves nothing, serves no purpose but increases the demand for Ethereum transactions which ultimately drives the cost of Ethereum. All those poor sods who have invested in Shiba Inu? Plain idiots to put it mildly.

Oh, and NFTs as well. Another worthless crap just to create more Ethereum transactions. Why worthless? Because ... Ethereum is just one of multiple crypto currencies/block chains and tell me again why your particular NFT on top of Ethereum is worth more than the same object on another blockchain? And how many times can the same object be (re)sold on all other blockchains? Do you need to own all of them? Or Ethereum NFT is somehow better?

Aren't NFTs very very useful for money laundering?

No affiliation with Aztec, but it's absurd to lump them in the same bucket as Shiba.

> pump and dump crypto currencies

Aztec has been in development since 2017, and has solved some real problems in cryptography in order to accomplish their goals. Besides, it doesn't have its own token, so there's nothing to pump.

> Solves nothing, serves no purpose

It allows Ethereum users to transact in private.

> but increases the demand for Ethereum transactions which ultimately drives the cost of Ethereum

It does the opposite, since it's a rollup - the transactions happen off-chain.

Neat can you talk more about what makes it fully private? How does it work?

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