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I can use as much energy as i can afford to buy on an open market, just like any other market participant. > Visa can process the same amount of transactions o

I can use as much energy as i can afford to buy on an open market, just like any other market participant. > Visa can process the same amount of transactions on a few watts comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network. > Bitcoin is a speculative bubble Bitcoin is speculative investment for sure, doesn't make you right about everything else. > illegal goods exchange token very much legal.

simiones 5y ago
> comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network. Bitcoin uses energy to secure transaction processing. Every node in the network must prove that it has spent at least this much money/effort on electricity (the exact computational requirements to prove this are constantly adjusted upwards if the algorithm/hardware is becoming too efficient). This works as the signature of a block, which the miner applies to a block that it has verified contains only correct transactions. Now, the Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks, and each transaction has a size of its own - so being able to process N blocks per second (limited by the necessary work imposed by the burden of PoW) is directly proportional to a number of transactions per second that the Bitcoin network can confirm. Visa does the same by updating its ledger, roughly - no need to for the extreme cost of PoW, since you just trust the ledger. Lightning is a separate technology, with different guarantees. It has definitely not been tested on Visa's scale, so any claims about its scalability should be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees of transaction validity. In fact, if a Lightning node goes offline, its trivial to double spend bitcoin on the Lightning network - with the only risk that you may lose all the bitcoin you added to the channel if the node later comes back online and verifies this before you can cancel. It's also trivial to do denial of service attacks on a Lightning node, as you can always advertise channels then drop them, reverting all transactions at little cost to you. > very much legal. There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC. Note that some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire - such as donations to wikileaks.
- keymone 5y ago
  > Visa does the same Visa doesn't do "the same", specifically, Bitcoin does what Visa is doing but in a decentralized, trustless and permissionless manner. That's where the cost of security comes from and why there is no waste of energy. > Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees lightning allows to make tradeoff between liquidity and transaction cost/reachability, but settlement is still done on bitcoin, so bitcoin's security guarantees apply. and yes, it's possible to DoS and possible to lose money if the node isn't operated correctly, it's emerging technology on the extreme bleeding edge of largest financial revolution in hundreds of years. give it time. > There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC. irrelevant. > some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire also irrelevant, but i'll point out that purchasing illegal good/service with bitcoin doesn't make bitcoin illegal same as purchasing it with usd wouldn't make usd illegal. bizarre that i even need to spell this out.

simiones 5y ago

> comedic is your misunderstanding of what Bitcoin uses energy for. hint: it's not at all related to transactions per watt, in fact, Bitcoin is already capable of processing orders of magnitude more transactions than Visa through Lightning network. Bitcoin uses energy to secure transaction processing. Every node in the network must prove that it has spent at least this much money/effort on electricity (the exact computational requirements to prove this are constantly adjusted upwards if the algorithm/hardware is becoming too efficient). This works as the signature of a block, which the miner applies to a block that it has verified contains only correct transactions. Now, the Bitcoin network limits the size of blocks, and each transaction has a size of its own - so being able to process N blocks per second (limited by the necessary work imposed by the burden of PoW) is directly proportional to a number of transactions per second that the Bitcoin network can confirm. Visa does the same by updating its ledger, roughly - no need to for the extreme cost of PoW, since you just trust the ledger. Lightning is a separate technology, with different guarantees. It has definitely not been tested on Visa's scale, so any claims about its scalability should be taken with a grain of salt. More importantly, Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees of transaction validity. In fact, if a Lightning node goes offline, its trivial to double spend bitcoin on the Lightning network - with the only risk that you may lose all the bitcoin you added to the channel if the node later comes back online and verifies this before you can cancel. It's also trivial to do denial of service attacks on a Lightning node, as you can always advertise channels then drop them, reverting all transactions at little cost to you. > very much legal. There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC. Note that some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire - such as donations to wikileaks.

keymone 5y ago
> Visa does the same Visa doesn't do "the same", specifically, Bitcoin does what Visa is doing but in a decentralized, trustless and permissionless manner. That's where the cost of security comes from and why there is no waste of energy. > Lightning offers precisely 0 of Bitcoin's guarantees lightning allows to make tradeoff between liquidity and transaction cost/reachability, but settlement is still done on bitcoin, so bitcoin's security guarantees apply. and yes, it's possible to DoS and possible to lose money if the node isn't operated correctly, it's emerging technology on the extreme bleeding edge of largest financial revolution in hundreds of years. give it time. > There is no good/service that is (1) legal to acquire in country X but (2) can't be acquired more cheaply and easily with regular money than with BTC. irrelevant. > some goods/services that are illegal to acquire in country X may be perfectly moral to acquire also irrelevant, but i'll point out that purchasing illegal good/service with bitcoin doesn't make bitcoin illegal same as purchasing it with usd wouldn't make usd illegal. bizarre that i even need to spell this out.