Cash provides essential fallback when digital payments break down, Payment Choice Alliance points out
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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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With Bitcoin lightning the confirmation time is under a second and you pay pennies in fees as you don’t make the transaction on the main chain. Even main chain is like $1.50 for a 10 minute confirmation time which for many transactions like an international wire is still a great deal.
The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables at off-peak hours since miners have to chase the cheapest electricity. Remittance services and other funds transfer companies also use energy and human capital to move value around, it’s not free. A single on-chain tx can open a lightning channel which can contain and secure trillions of transactions off-chain. Processing these transactions takes the energy equivalent of sending an e-mail. Users are “taxed for the use of their own dollars” in regular currency as well. Who pays that tax and the amount of that tax varies by context.
In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It absolutely scales. And there is plenty of more room to grow.
Its value also comes from its use as a transactional network and from it’s political neutrality geopolitically speaking. And from the known supply which nobody can manipulate. It’s not purely scarcity.
And yet mining is still distributed globally. Any person, company, or country with spare energy resources can buy an ASIC and mine. Mining pools have become more centralized, but a lot of work has been done on that in recent years and that trend is reversing as a result.
Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.
Yeah, that’s bullshit. First of all, 1% of energy use for a network that serves a few million transactions per day is really bad. A single 1kW node in Visa’s datacenter churns through that in an hour.
Second, it’s not renewables. It’s everything they can get for cheap. And that’s often enough coal, gas, oil. Also, they’re driving up power demand as a whole, which means fossil energy is actually needed longer.
Bitcoin lightning is Bitcoin. It’s a smart contract on the Bitcoin main chain. You move Bitcoin “into” lightning by sending it to that smart contract, you move it “out of” lightning by having that smart contract close. It inherits the security of Bitcoin main chain while getting the transaction speed of off-chain.
Agree to disagree about the rest. Energy use like carbon footprint is about “where you draw the box”. Off-peak demand is the cheapest power available, and it tends to be renewable. That trend continues to escalate.