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Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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Lightning adds a layer of complexity and additional failure points. It also centralizes power in the bitcoin network even further.
It doesn't actually change anything about the fact that Bitcoin isn't a currency: Despite the fact that it's claimed to be theoretically able to handle millions of transactions per second, it only handles a few million per month or about half of all Bitcoin transactions after having been around for six years (and most transactions aren't payments for goods or services). The vast majority of online commerce does not accept bitcoin nor any other cryptocurrency, which isn't surprising, given that their values fluctuate wildly. Currencies need, acceptance and stability, neither of which applies to anything crypto.
Complexity, sure, though honestly I find the UX simpler than on-chain payments due to instant confirmation times. It doesn't centralize power at all. Lightning nodes are just as easy to run as Bitcoin nodes, you don't need high-powered servers to run them. They are dependent on main chain for security, which is highly decentralized as it is. If anything, it increases decentralization as miners are no longer the only ones who can earn BTC for supporting the network. Miners must buy expensive ASICs, but you can run a lightning node off a 10 year old laptop and that isn't something that will change anytime soon. Bitcoin started with one of the most equitably distributed resources in the world: energy. And now it's adding the second most equitably distributed resource in the world: bandwidth and storage.
Hard things to get hard numbers on due to the opacity of lightning payments. The theoretical maximum is not based on some made up fantasy, it's based on decent back-of-the-napkin math on how it can scale. The base chain's scalability issues were due to limited blockspace, lightning does not have that problem, there are no real scaling limits on it as a result except "the storage and bandwidth of whatever portion of the internet participates in it" which is massive.
Determining value relative to other currencies is a single API call, that is not complicated. The reason they don't accept it is due to lack of usability for many online merchants in their integrated platform and the belief that many users would prefer not to pay in crypto. Which is weird considering 1 in 5 Americans own crypto, which is a number that continues to grow. I think a lot of them dropped support due to high on chain fees, but lightning has solved that to the point that accepting lightning it 10-1000x cheaper than credit cards for a merchant. That's a savings they can pass on partially to customers as well, which means customers can be incentivized to use Bitcoin. We are just now seeing the effects of that. At the same time, many online merchants do accept and even prefer cryptocurrency. Same with many online contractors. PayPal is a royal pain to use, and so are most other platforms for online international payments. There are some items I would refuse to sell online with PayPal due to rampant buyer fraud and chargebacks. Same reason why when you go on Facebook marketplace everybody refuses to take venmo for so many items.
How many merchants is enough until people are satisfied Bitcoin is actually useful? Idk. As far as I can tell, from Bitcoin detractors, basically all of them. Transaction volume grows, on average, over time, and that trend has not been broken yet. Fees also grow on main chain, which indicates increased demand for chain space since supply has not changed there.