Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by optymizer | Hacker News Reader

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It has survived by changing the narrative and getting people to buy the stories.

It was going to replace money, but then it didn't because the network slowed down to the point where it was unusable. Nobody was going to wait 30 min for a transaction to complete.

So then the message was flipped and Bitcoin was now 'an asset', not a currency, further supported by IRS's decision to tax it like an asset, so it was advertised as a store of value, "like gold".

It didn't deliver on the currency promise, even with all the lightening and proof-of-stake talks.

It is actively hurting the entire planet at this scale by generating useless heat.

And last, but not least, KYC lets governments track all your bitcoin purchases forever to an extent impossible to do with cash, including deanonymizing transactions retroactively decades later.

A digital currency will not give us more freedom, it will only take more of it away, which is why I personally no longer support Bitcoin, and I don't think others should either.

This global warming rhetoric against bitcoin is nonsense right? The current financial system doesn't run off as many or more computers in datacenters around the globe? I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.

The global financial system can handle considerably more than three (3) transactions per second.

There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network. There are other problems in terms of adoption and infrastructure etc, but the actual potential for humankind to have a single currency global low-barrier payment system is there. But this is more like the early days of the internet. The internet seemed pointless to most people even as late as the 90's.

A future global system could have settlement on the blockchain. Like the current system does at far less regular intervals than the processing power of non-settled transactions.

> There's not really a problematic upper bound for global transaction volume on transactions per second with the lightning network

There unfortunately is, to open a channel you have to make a Bitcoin transaction, and you can't use lightning without opening a channel. Bitcoin processes a max of ~220M transactions per year so to onboard the world onto lightning with only one channel each would take a few decades.

A real layer 2 could solve it, or having some trustless way to use BTC on other chains

It's possible I'm too optimistic on this point. I feel I have a good grasp of how bitcoin works, but when it gets to layer 2 it gets fuzzier. The initial discussions sounded really promising, as they seemed to mirror HTTP on top of TCP/IP. And we all know how much of a slow burning revolution that turned out to be.

But http seems simpler than what I've read about lightning more recently.

Total wild speculation follows:

As for the channels problem, it feels to me like you have something like ISPs or AOL being the thing that's needed to kickstart it. And perhaps the ISPs or AOL in this world are the employers and lightning banks. So yes you need bitcoin to open it, but with an employer you have the potential to have an entity with bitcoin resources and with a reason to send bitcoin to an individual.

Perhaps HD wallets with lightning kickstarter funds apportioned to new employees. This feels similar to the needing a bank account or national insurance number in the UK (social security number? in the US) to start getting paid, or similar to needing an internet connection. Yes you could choose to get paid in bitcoin and have the fees come out of your wage, and this would be similar to getting paid in physical cash today. Or you could get over the slight roadbump to get you onto the lightning network.

What would a real layer 2 look like in your opinion?

A real layer 2 would look more like something built on Ethereum (can see all its L2s at https://l2beat.com).

Essentially it's a separate network that every few minutes takes every transaction and compresses it into a data blob that it saves on Ethereum along with a proof that the computation was done correctly. The Ethereum L1 nodes then only need to verify the proof instead of re-executing all transactions that happened on the L2.

With this design users can go straight from an exchange like Coinbase onto the L2 and never need to use Ethereum, and fees are 10x cheaper because of the data compression. Fees will soon be 100x cheaper as Ethereum is adding extra space just for these L2 data blobs that is much cheaper than normal Ethereum data space.

Unfortunately it can't be done on Bitcoin right now because Bitcoin nodes don't have Turing complete scripting and so can't verify the proof that an L2 posts to Bitcoin.

You know credit card transactions can take days to actually settle right?

YouTube is one of those things that consumes more energy than bitcoin.

That is bad, but it doesn't seem part of the public narrative that YouTube is bad because of global warming. Also the general narrative posits that electric cars are good. They also use a lot of energy. There's nothing inherent about EVs versus bitcoin that suggests one uses clean energy versus another. They both use a lot of electricity.

But so does the banking sector. And entertainment, farming, travel and a lot of the other things 8 billion people choose to do or depend on.

Any usage of fossil fuels should rightfully be a target and held to the same standards.

There is another narrative that we need continual growth and that inflation aids this. And deflationary currencies are bad because they don't help growth. This seems so ingrained in modern politics and economics that I slightly hesitate to question it in public.

Well maybe unbounded growth and exponential usage of resources is the actual problem.

I hope we reach the social limit on unbounded growth before it destroys everything we have. It's literally in physical terms unsustainable. My only hope here is that nuclear fusion gives us a respite for a hundred years or so. But we'd still have the same problem at a different scale if we used that to grow to a trillion people.

I can see that a deflationary global currency could be part of the solution to the problem. And I can see why suggesting deflation is good can be seen as a threatening thing to those that have resources.

So I feel in that light, the bitcoin = global warming narrative is really convenient, even if a little ironic.

While Bitcoin is designed to reward high energy consumption the opposite is true for the fiancial system, since lower energy costs would make the different processing entities earn higher margins.

Thus, the financial system provides much more utility for the energy it consumes than bitcoin does.

Bitcoin rewards energy efficiency by design, which is why the vast majority of bitcoin mining uses excess fully renewable energy.

Yeah, like running old coal powered plants to power mining facilities[1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...

>I don't have objective numbers but I'd lay money credit card processing alone dwarfs bitcoin by a pretty good margin.

What, per transaction?

> Nobody was going to wait 30 min for a transaction to complete

Depends on the transaction. To buy coffee? Of course not, but there are transactions that can take hours or days to clear.

Yeah, 30 min for a BTC tx which is basically guaranteed to go through is amazing compared to the shitfest that is SWIFT.

If people only knew that a card transaction is the equivalent of a 0 confirmation transaction between two “trust me bro” parties and that said card transaction takes days and a lot of institutional resources to clear…

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