Even better: never leave The lightning network and you’ll never really have these issues
1,298 karma · joined February 3, 2020
I'd suggest looking for news stories or posts from El Salvador. You can find both positive and negative ones, of course.
The low transaction rates and high transaction fees argument isn't really valid anymore. A lot of the transactions have moved to L2 (Lightning Network) and thus current transaction fees on Bitcoin are regularly reaching $0.05. Using LN you also bypass any bottlenecks associated with number of transactions per second and confirmation time.
One country's criminal is another's activist. You're making it sound so simple.
> Where does this end in societies governed by the rule of law? Who can decide to opt-out or in?
I think individuals themselves should decide what is and isn't OK to spend money on. In such a world you rely on law enforcement doing actual work instead of using vague KYC, AML and Terrorism laws that are extremely obtuse.
Real criminals just use a middle man while regular citizens have to endure this insane regulatory environment without any benefit.
KYC/AML is just a waste of time, energy and manpower.
> That can also be achieved by mandating banks to offer accounts (as some countries have). So I put that down to a political failure.
What if you don't have a functioning banking sector? Or even a functioning government? You're just supposed to accept that you're not going to be able to participate in a global society?
> The ability for people in extreme situations to store value in something other than their governments currency. Think Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, etc.
Sure, but most (if not all) of those things can be taken from you. Bitcoin can not. Of course, there's always the $5 wrench attack but relative to other assets, Bitcoin is superior in this regard. Even if it's just slightly better than other assets it's a win.
> Could be used like that, but so can normal money and incentives
Yes, but Bitcoin mining is a natural free market incentive to this problem, incentives and money is not.
PS. I am in the EU. What kind of argument is that, anyway?
With regards to practical wins I can see a number that are even playing out today:
- The ability to skirt sanctions making it possible to donate to organisations that are deemed "illegal"
- Banking for those that are deemed unprofitable by banks. El Salvador has a large portion of unbanked citizens. Making it possible for them to interact with the wider world economy seems like a good thing to me?
- The ability for people in extreme situations to store value in something other than their governments currency. Think Lebanon, Argentina, Venezuela, Turkey, etc.
- Promotes the build-out of new energy production; especially renewables since they are the cheapest form of electricity. This is a topic that deserves a thread in itself so probably not worth going into here.
You should care because the world doesn't exist solely in the privileged western hemisphere.
Why would offering an API mean that the service is decentralised? It doesn't - it just lets you get some data in or out. You are still beholden to a single party that can cut you off at a moments notice.
> I'll also note that - in my opinion - Blockchains aren't really decentralised. There's no way you can do an "Off-Chain" transaction. Everything has to be recorded on a single ledger.
Not true at all. Bitcoin has a Layer 2 solution where transactions are done off-chain in a non-custodial manner. Those don't need to be recorded on the ledger, only the settlement is (if you decide you do not wish to participate any longer).
Second: Yes. No one is denying that Bitcoin is volatile. If you pick any arbitrary period of time you can come up with whatever statistic you want. This is not sound argument IMO.
I guess you could call it stable. A stable decline!
Do you mean to say that you are fine and dandy with your purchasing power eroding over time?
All governments eventually start tinkering with the money supply. It's all well and good that you trust your government to do the right thing, sadly that's not the case for a large portion of the worlds population. Have you seen Turkey lately? Lebanon?
> The number of transactions is a measurement of efficiency.
The number of transactions would be the same, regardless of energy spent on mining. Be it 1 joule or a million.
> Only between 2 parties, after opening a channel between them, which requires: A transaction. And neither party can use any of the funds transmitted via the payment-channel in the wider network until the channel gets closed, which requires: Another transaction.
This isn't correct. The Lighning Network isn't just a channel between two parties. It's a network of channels between participants that allows you to transfer to any part of said network. You can open a channel to someone and never close it. Why would you? There are channels that are multiple years old at this point.
> The banking system imposes no such limitations: A transfer can be initiated at any time to any IBAN in the world, with no prior agreement, the energy cost is miniscule, and the moment the transfer is completed, the funds are available to the other party for transactions to whatever other IBAN they want.
This is really looking at the current banking system with rose-coloured spectacles wouldn't you say? What about the billions of people that do not have access to banking? You don't think there's any value in those people being able to use something like Bitcoin to interact with the wider international markets?
The number of transactions has nothing to do with the energy spent on mining. Besides, the LN can already handle millions, if not billions, of transactions per second. You’re parrot
I’d suggest reading this article by Nic Carter to get the other sides POV: https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-mining-americas-most-misund...
Here's what I used: https://github.com/vinceliuice/WhiteSur-gtk-theme
Other blockchains make decentralization tradeoffs to process more transactions on-chain per second. For example, Ethereum requires better hardware: larger storage, better CPU and more memory. Solana makes even larger tradeoffs: expensive server hardware costing up to $25000, making it pretty much a central service controlled by the few.
The key innovation of Bitcoin is the decentralization; almost anyone can participate and no one can control it. Sacrificing this for negligble is not worth it. Especially since there are smarter ways to scale the system. Even if you could improve throughput by 100x by making the system slightly less decentralized you would still not reach VISA levels of TPS.
The correct way to scale these systems is using off-chain solutions like the Lightning Network. This way you can process millions of transactions per second.
Look at the Solana fiasco a while back where the network went down and required a coordinated restart.
Another centralising power in these "smart" blockchains are the stable coin issuers. In the event of a hard fork^2 Tether and USDC essentially have the power to decide single-handedly decide which chain ends up being the correct one. Why? Because they can't support two chains, the value of the tokens would be split in half. So, for example. Let's say Tether decides that Eth 2.0 is not something they would like to support, they would simply say "We will not redeem any coins on Eth 2.0" and that would be it. The value of the DeFi on that chain would evaporate instantly and no one would use it. The fact that almost no-one talks about this is pretty scary.
^1 Only Bitcoin is actually sufficiently decentralised to withstand large take-over attempts and politics, IMO.
^2 Ethereum hard forks every 6 months by design, by the way
If you're interested in checking it out the URL is here, it's free and will be streamed on YouTube: https://sveltesummit.com
There are also two watch parties that will be hosted in New York (Rich will attend!) and in Mainz, Germany.
Links: - https://lu.ma/sveltenyc - https://lu.ma/sveltesummit-2021-mainz
For the day-to-day stuff it's obviously not as widespread as credit cards and I can't use it for much. For those situations I top up a debit card (Lastbit) using lightning.
In addition to that I spend a fair bit of money on Bitrefill. Obviously also a stop-gap until wider adoption gets here.
For someone living in a country where it's easy to send money locally and where cash isn't very common I don't think the benefits are apparent yet, for me personally. In my business I do receive a number of payments from abroad that always take at least a day to arrive and some funds are lost due to bad exchange rates. Lightning would help a lot here.
Any custodial ones I have tested have worked well, though.
In addition to that, there's always the Lightning Network as well wherein you can transact for fractions of pennies.