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Bitcoin kept Wikileaks going for years after Visa, Matercard, and Paypal cut off service for no reason.

arcticbull 5y ago
Crypto in general has an edge case use as a payment mechanism of last resort in certain very limited circumstances - however Bitcoin isn't the one anyone should be using because it's public and transparent making anything you write up there prosecution futures. Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees.
- ashwagary 5y ago
  >Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees. Not correct, transactions on bitcoin's lightning network take 1-2 seconds to complete and cost a fraction of a penny.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Not quite. Because you still need to open a channel and probably eventually close a channel on the L1. Doing so for everyone on earth would cost 75 years, the entire block reward and about a half a trillion dollars. Double if you plan to close. So yeah it's fast so long as nobody's using it, but if they ever (god help us) start, you'll be putting in your payment requests like a Soviet phone line. Then, you have to deal with the quadratic routing complexity which would likely make it completely untenable past a certain number of users. This is why even the Chivo and Strike wallets don't actually use LN - they have a couple of their own nodes, that they don't allow external peering with, and only in certain circumstances. Mostly they just use MySQL. Either way, it's not relevant because everyone uses centralized exchanges.
    - ashwagary 5y ago
      >Because you still need to open a channel and probably eventually close a channel on the L1. Doing so for everyone on earth would cost 75 years, the entire block reward and about a half a trillion dollars. Double if you plan to close. This is a fake concern. People dont have to open a channel to use lightning. There are many solutions that dont require dedicated channels like custodial wallets. Also if lightning is used as a Bitcoin hot wallet, it would be silly to close channels constantly. You can just keep refilling your balance on the open channel using an exchange. Routing complexity actually decreases as the value of Bitcoin increases because all of the already openned channels increase in total possible dollar throughput at the same time. >This is why even the Chivo and Strike wallets don't actually use LN - they have a couple of their own nodes, that they don't allow external peering with, and only in certain circumstances. Mostly they just use MySQL. Strike uses LN, I'm not sure why you think it doesn't. They have some of the largest routing nodes on lightning. My understanding is they dont allow channels to be opened that are smaller than a certain size (500m sats if I remember correctly), this is a freedom that every node operator has, no one is forced to accept tiny incoming channels. Strike can even reject all anonymous incoming channels and you still couldn't say it adds no routing value to LN without more node config information and the number/size of private channels it has open.

Crypto in general has an edge case use as a payment mechanism of last resort in certain very limited circumstances - however Bitcoin isn't the one anyone should be using because it's public and transparent making anything you write up there prosecution futures. Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees.

ashwagary 5y ago
>Not to mention the insane volatility, long transaction times, climate impact and high fees. Not correct, transactions on bitcoin's lightning network take 1-2 seconds to complete and cost a fraction of a penny.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  Not quite. Because you still need to open a channel and probably eventually close a channel on the L1. Doing so for everyone on earth would cost 75 years, the entire block reward and about a half a trillion dollars. Double if you plan to close. So yeah it's fast so long as nobody's using it, but if they ever (god help us) start, you'll be putting in your payment requests like a Soviet phone line. Then, you have to deal with the quadratic routing complexity which would likely make it completely untenable past a certain number of users. This is why even the Chivo and Strike wallets don't actually use LN - they have a couple of their own nodes, that they don't allow external peering with, and only in certain circumstances. Mostly they just use MySQL. Either way, it's not relevant because everyone uses centralized exchanges.
  - ashwagary 5y ago
    >Because you still need to open a channel and probably eventually close a channel on the L1. Doing so for everyone on earth would cost 75 years, the entire block reward and about a half a trillion dollars. Double if you plan to close. This is a fake concern. People dont have to open a channel to use lightning. There are many solutions that dont require dedicated channels like custodial wallets. Also if lightning is used as a Bitcoin hot wallet, it would be silly to close channels constantly. You can just keep refilling your balance on the open channel using an exchange. Routing complexity actually decreases as the value of Bitcoin increases because all of the already openned channels increase in total possible dollar throughput at the same time. >This is why even the Chivo and Strike wallets don't actually use LN - they have a couple of their own nodes, that they don't allow external peering with, and only in certain circumstances. Mostly they just use MySQL. Strike uses LN, I'm not sure why you think it doesn't. They have some of the largest routing nodes on lightning. My understanding is they dont allow channels to be opened that are smaller than a certain size (500m sats if I remember correctly), this is a freedom that every node operator has, no one is forced to accept tiny incoming channels. Strike can even reject all anonymous incoming channels and you still couldn't say it adds no routing value to LN without more node config information and the number/size of private channels it has open.