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.
Thus, the financial system provides much more utility for the energy it consumes than bitcoin does.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m...
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 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
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?
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.
What, per transaction?