8 ms·

The technological case against Bitcoin and blockchain

57 points by colesantiago 5y ago

colesantiago 5y ago
This is a different perspective on the blockchain / web3 hype arguing correctly that there is no usecase for these crypto tokens no matter how you slice it.
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  Failing to argue, because literally millions of times more people that this one guy actually have a use case?
- djohnston 5y ago
  If you live in Turkey, Venezuela, El Salvador there are pretty obvious and well established usecases. Now Russia is joining the party. I have friends in different countries, it is far easier (and cheaper) to send AVAX than to deal with int'l fiat transfers. So add one more person with actual verified usecases.
  - landemva 5y ago
    I met the author of a bitcoin book who told me he sends both btc and usdc to friends in Egypt. The bitcoin guy sends stablecoin!
    - lowkey 5y ago
      I don’t see the irony. Both have their use-case. Bitcoin is scarce, hard money that has a historical tendency to go up in value significantly over time. Stablecoins have practical value as they hold their value over the short term while also having the Bitcoin-like ability to be transmitted across the world at 3am on a Sunday. Just as you wouldn’t hold all your assets in a single equity, there is room in the world for both Bitcoinand stablecoins. I would argue they are actually complimentary. Does that make me a hypocrite?
      - lowkey 5y ago
        To be clear I am not a fan of USDT which has a somewhat shady history and questionable reserves as an asset backed stablecoin with a blacklist of addresses that can be arbitrarily seized just like USD. I am very interested in UST on Terra, an algorithmic stablecoin whose value is controlled by an automated on-chain process of burning or minting a volatile pair asset called Luna. Like Bitcoin it can be transmitted to anyone anywhere at any time. It is also a very fast blockchain where payments can be sent in a few seconds. Like Bitcoin, UST is censorship-resistant, so useful for political activists in less free countries. It also offers very compelling interest rates on savings that approach 20% APY as well as FDIC-like insurance options for ~2.5% that protect against unforseen failures of the USD peg or smart contract hacks. The more I learn about UST the more I see it as a more attractive alternative to the USD for power-to-peer cash, payments or short-term savings. Just as I continue to see Bitcoin as a more attractive store of value today and potential global reserve currency in the future. Terra UST stablecoins are a fantastic technology that solve important problems and they pair incredibly well with Bitcoin to form the base layer of a new monetary system designed to separate money from state. https://www.terra.money/ https://www.terra.money/
    - djohnston 5y ago
      The fact they're sending a stable coin over Ethereum lends more credit to blockchain. They've pegged a fiat asset and it's way easier to use, granted on Ethereum gas prices are prohibitively high but that will change soon enough and there are other EVM chains with much cheaper gas and the same end experience.
      - landemva 5y ago
        Yes, solid use case of sending near-fiat to be spent on daily life items. So far ethereum continues to have the focus and attention to adapt and grow. Schelling point effects.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    Hyperinflation obsessed people need to study economic history closer. Deflation is a much worse problem with no good mechanisms to address. Real GDP growth under a deflationary bitcoin dominated economy would be very difficult to achieve.
    - djohnston 5y ago
      "Hold onto your Lira! Otherwise things might get bad!"
    - landemva 5y ago
      Deflation is natural due to increasing uses of new technology which make products and services cheaper and better. Deflation, purchasing power increase, is good for savers. Those gorged on debt like to "fight deflation" because inflation makes their debts cheaper to pay. The "deflation is bad" cheering squad is talking their book of over-levered speculation.
      - imtringued 5y ago
        People considered deflation bad enough to fight two world wars. After all, deflation makes a lot of people redundant since the wealthy don't want to share. For example, Germany wants to produce every product on the planet and everyone to world in Germany. The idea of letting the Greek work in Greece is an abhorrent idea to most Germans. Germans want to save as an end itself. They sell products and services to Greece without ever buying anything from Greece. This is bound to collapse at some point because the Greece debt that is fueling Germany's ecpnomy is unsustainable. Oh wait it did... and the same story is happening with italy, spain, protugal and even more african countries. All those countries ought to not exist because Germany is running the show right? Who is Germany going tp sell its products once they are gone? Oh right. Nobody. This very same relationship between countries also happens within countries. There are some individuals that are slightly more profitable to hire so they get the whole 40 work week even if they only want to work 25 hours for example. Those 15 hours cannot be worked by a poorer person that actually needs the money. You are now in a paradoxical situation where there is simultaneously too much money and yet not enough to employ everyone. It clearly is an allocative failure. But since the liquidationists see the failure in the existence of properly run businesses, not the fact that they hire and distribute the money to people that don't need it they will simply shut the entire business down. After all, to get rid of the slightly more productive person that is earning more than he intends to spend, you first have to get rid of all the dozens of slightly less productive people first. During a depression, employers will fire those people whose supply and demand actually matches pretty well and ironically they tend to fire those whose supply exceeds their personal demands very late even though that is the origin of any depression. So the liquidationists end up with a very simple conclusion, shut down the business even though it is needed again in a few years, shut it down even though the cost of reopening exceeds the cost of keeping it open. Liquidationism has no proven track record, it has always ended in failure
jrc2022 5y ago
succinct description of the issues with all things crypto. I'm still optimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies/smart contracts, just not necessarily the current iterations.
- deebosong 5y ago
  Not to argue, but may I inquire what that might look like for you? Reason I ask is, I assume there will be some remnant leftover if/ when all the hype/ bubble aspects of the current iteration of all this cryptocurrency insanity implodes, that will actually become useful, but be so pragmatic and dull that laymen (such as myself) won't even realize I'm using the useful, stable, safe, secure, cheap, and practical tech that is appropriate to where it'll end up. I say this without any ground-level experience with the tech, with no skin in the game, and just based off of seeing how things tend to play out.
  - chaxor 5y ago
    I actually like tokens that are kept completely separate, but are tracking something like storage or compute used/spent. This way you can trade encrypted web storage of an app you want to deploy (large dataset for ML training for example) for some computing or storage you lent to others. This way you can get around the insane prices that AWS charges.
randomhodler84 5y ago
What a long an pointless article to say “I don’t get it”. Nothing is as explicitly wrong, it just misses the point. Author seems to love authority and defer to such.
- tchock23 5y ago
  Care to offer a similarly detailed rebuttal that excludes an ad hominem?
  - randomhodler84 5y ago
    It’s a typical UK authoritarian attitude. The article mentions sdiehl and that guy basically worships state boot on the money supply: Can’t see the point of money that that queen doesn’t endorse. It’s all for criminals don’t you know… Anyone citing him is -100pt for credibility. Yeah, I don’t trust the State with my money. The author has failed to address the issues of: * Wartime savings and safe transfer of funds (escape!!) * bank haircuts and bailouts * money printer goes brrr * state confiscation of bank funds by emergency order (Canada) * state confiscation of bank funds by economic failure (Cyprus haircut) * social credit systems linked to the monetary system (cbdc) * connectivity to the global banking system (Russia/china) * local failing fiat currencies in the world (lots of places, Lebanon and Turkey come to mind) And each of those is a nuanced and deep discussion about the nature and philosophy of money.
    - somewhereoutth 5y ago
      Money, as opposed to goods for barter, only exists because of the State. Bitcoin is essentially a decentralised ledger for recording transactions. That those transactions have any meaning, financial or otherwise, is entirely and solely determined by those who use the ledger. Should those who use the ledger one day decide the numbers are in fact meaningless, then Bitcoin becomes worthless.
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        Yes, exactly. And that is what is so powerful an idea, that we could detach the idea of money backed by the state from a shared internet peer to peer network, like the file sharing networks a decade ago. In that p2p content networks were able to dominate the global internet flows until big CDN aka Netflix stepped in. CBDCs are like this for the 2020s. CBDC is Netflix. Bitcoin is BitTorrent. Plan accordingly.
danuker 5y ago
About the network partition: it only takes one state update between partitions to break the attack. The most Bitcoin network reorganizations seen by Blockchain.com in one day was 7: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-orphaned-blocks https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-orphaned-blocks
- tromp 5y ago
  Bitcoin doesn't partition easily, thanks to a dedicated satellite network [1]. [1] https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
  - CyberDildonics 5y ago
    How does this matter at all, since everyone is already connected to the internet?
    - danuker 5y ago
      The collection of arguments that make up OP's article includes the consequences of a network partition - replacement of one of the parallel histories when the partitions rejoin. Yes, the consequences are bad, but the risk is very low. Though not negligible, when facing powerful enemies like ISPs or nation states, you need to be aware of it.
      - CyberDildonics 5y ago
        This person was talking about satellites that have nothing to do with mining. Someone who has their internet go down isn't creating an alternate history that splits them off. They stop getting updates, then start getting updates again. These satellites are also nonsense because they are just renting time on them to broadcast. If there is no actual internet connection, you can't make transactions in the first place.
chaxor 5y ago
"blockchain has failed and needs to be retired" ... Isn't git a Blockchain? I don't think git has failed.
- jazzyjackson 5y ago
  in crypto parlance blockchain is short for "blockchain+consensus mechanism" eg proof of work, a blockchain isn't useful as currency if it's trivial to rebase history
howinteresting 5y ago
The idea that proof of stake cannot be regarded as a consensus mechanism is nonsense. The weak subjectivity model (where if you're just coming online or have been offline for a while, you need to get a recent block hash from elsewhere) is completely fine in practice. Trying to make a big deal out of it is the domain of either BTC maxis or reflexively anti-crypto people. There is such a thing as a security model that is too strong and can be weakened without practical consequences, and (strong) subjectivity is a good example of that.
- 3np 5y ago
  While this is not an issue for Bitcoin (which runs and syncs fine on a raspberry pi with an SSD), in principle it could be resource-intensive enough to sync that if you fall behind you will never be able to catch up trustlessly even with very performant hardware. Ethereum (referring here to the PoW chain, which isn't going anywhere anytime soon regardless of how the PoS transition goes) is getting dangerously close to this point. Syncing a full history archive node (which you will need if you want to have proper independence) from scratch took us close to half a year, with a recent high/mid-range 4c8t desktop CPU, 64GB RAM, ~500Mbps network, and NVMe SSD. Took us around 1-2 months on a dedicated Xeon server with striped Samsung enterprise NVMe drives in a colo with effort spent on tightening software, kernel, and filesystem parameters. IO and context switching seemed to be the bottlenecks. That was ~2 years ago. Storage requirements for this is now >4TB. This is still doable, but expensive. Other chains, like BSC, are even worse than this which results in the de-facto centralisation that anti-big-blockers were so insistent about during the segwit saga. After the experiences above I have a little bit more sympathy for that stance.
  - jlokier 5y ago
    > Ethereum [..] is getting dangerously close to this point. Not any more. Ethereum (PoW) sync time and storage size have improved a lot since you measured them. (I've worked on algorithms to improve both these areas so I know them well.) Since we're talking about scaling issues, rather than what's readily available in the well known implementations, I'll describe the best implementations that I know about. Sync time: Syncing a full history archive node has been done in less than 1 day. It's reduced a lot from the multi-month syncs before, even though the chain is larger now. Syncing just the state for recent history is commonly done in under 6 hours. Both can be reduced further. Storage size: The entire full history archive state fits in about 400 GiB. With all blocks but just recent history (i.e. a typical node) it's about 200 GiB, and when reduced to 1 year of blocks (EIP-4444) the total storage required for an Ethereum node fits into about 100 GiB. Storage I/O: I don't have hard figures for this, but both the sync algorithms and storage compression techniques reduce IOPS load significantly. Storage of full history in particular has been hugely improved over the 9-10 TiB required by Geth or OpenEthereum shown at https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive You can fit a full history archive node on a Raspberry Pi and small consumer SSD now if you want.
jerry1979 5y ago
The author brings up scaling, slow upgrades, and energy use as the failure vectors for Bitcoin. The scaling section links to a Frances Coppola blog from 2018 which sites the "lightning network not mathematically possible" blog post from 2017. Article does not mention progress made over the last 4 years in lightning, nor does it mention other scaling options such as federated chaumian e-cash systems. I see the slow upgrades in bitcoin as a feature. I see the energy problem as something that we need to solve with pollution legislation. I skipped over the parts about NFTs and Ethereum, and only checked out the parts related to bitcoin.
- whiskyant 5y ago
  If the lightning network isn’t possible, why is it up and running with thousands of people using it?
  - muzika 5y ago
    Exactly
  - jakupovic 5y ago
nguyenlehoang 5y ago
If I have to choose between bitcoin and the banking system I will definitely pick the first one. Why ? The reason is obvious the banking system is there for hundred years and it's doesn't change that much, this kind of system attract people with evil personality. On the other hand, there is a system that constantly changed and fix it problems with people in generally have better persona. Which one would you pick ?
- jeremycarter 5y ago
  Lol wot
  - kayamon 5y ago
    Yes? Why would you use a closed source system backed by nothing and full of exploits when there's a more modern open source system?

57 points by colesantiago 5y ago

This is a different perspective on the blockchain / web3 hype arguing correctly that there is no usecase for these crypto tokens no matter how you slice it.

randomhodler84 5y ago
Failing to argue, because literally millions of times more people that this one guy actually have a use case?
djohnston 5y ago
If you live in Turkey, Venezuela, El Salvador there are pretty obvious and well established usecases. Now Russia is joining the party. I have friends in different countries, it is far easier (and cheaper) to send AVAX than to deal with int'l fiat transfers. So add one more person with actual verified usecases.
- landemva 5y ago
  I met the author of a bitcoin book who told me he sends both btc and usdc to friends in Egypt. The bitcoin guy sends stablecoin!
  - lowkey 5y ago
    I don’t see the irony. Both have their use-case. Bitcoin is scarce, hard money that has a historical tendency to go up in value significantly over time. Stablecoins have practical value as they hold their value over the short term while also having the Bitcoin-like ability to be transmitted across the world at 3am on a Sunday. Just as you wouldn’t hold all your assets in a single equity, there is room in the world for both Bitcoinand stablecoins. I would argue they are actually complimentary. Does that make me a hypocrite?
    - lowkey 5y ago
      To be clear I am not a fan of USDT which has a somewhat shady history and questionable reserves as an asset backed stablecoin with a blacklist of addresses that can be arbitrarily seized just like USD. I am very interested in UST on Terra, an algorithmic stablecoin whose value is controlled by an automated on-chain process of burning or minting a volatile pair asset called Luna. Like Bitcoin it can be transmitted to anyone anywhere at any time. It is also a very fast blockchain where payments can be sent in a few seconds. Like Bitcoin, UST is censorship-resistant, so useful for political activists in less free countries. It also offers very compelling interest rates on savings that approach 20% APY as well as FDIC-like insurance options for ~2.5% that protect against unforseen failures of the USD peg or smart contract hacks. The more I learn about UST the more I see it as a more attractive alternative to the USD for power-to-peer cash, payments or short-term savings. Just as I continue to see Bitcoin as a more attractive store of value today and potential global reserve currency in the future. Terra UST stablecoins are a fantastic technology that solve important problems and they pair incredibly well with Bitcoin to form the base layer of a new monetary system designed to separate money from state. https://www.terra.money/ https://www.terra.money/
  - djohnston 5y ago
    The fact they're sending a stable coin over Ethereum lends more credit to blockchain. They've pegged a fiat asset and it's way easier to use, granted on Ethereum gas prices are prohibitively high but that will change soon enough and there are other EVM chains with much cheaper gas and the same end experience.
    - landemva 5y ago
      Yes, solid use case of sending near-fiat to be spent on daily life items. So far ethereum continues to have the focus and attention to adapt and grow. Schelling point effects.
- qeternity 5y ago
  Hyperinflation obsessed people need to study economic history closer. Deflation is a much worse problem with no good mechanisms to address. Real GDP growth under a deflationary bitcoin dominated economy would be very difficult to achieve.
  - djohnston 5y ago
    "Hold onto your Lira! Otherwise things might get bad!"
  - landemva 5y ago
    Deflation is natural due to increasing uses of new technology which make products and services cheaper and better. Deflation, purchasing power increase, is good for savers. Those gorged on debt like to "fight deflation" because inflation makes their debts cheaper to pay. The "deflation is bad" cheering squad is talking their book of over-levered speculation.
    - imtringued 5y ago
      People considered deflation bad enough to fight two world wars. After all, deflation makes a lot of people redundant since the wealthy don't want to share. For example, Germany wants to produce every product on the planet and everyone to world in Germany. The idea of letting the Greek work in Greece is an abhorrent idea to most Germans. Germans want to save as an end itself. They sell products and services to Greece without ever buying anything from Greece. This is bound to collapse at some point because the Greece debt that is fueling Germany's ecpnomy is unsustainable. Oh wait it did... and the same story is happening with italy, spain, protugal and even more african countries. All those countries ought to not exist because Germany is running the show right? Who is Germany going tp sell its products once they are gone? Oh right. Nobody. This very same relationship between countries also happens within countries. There are some individuals that are slightly more profitable to hire so they get the whole 40 work week even if they only want to work 25 hours for example. Those 15 hours cannot be worked by a poorer person that actually needs the money. You are now in a paradoxical situation where there is simultaneously too much money and yet not enough to employ everyone. It clearly is an allocative failure. But since the liquidationists see the failure in the existence of properly run businesses, not the fact that they hire and distribute the money to people that don't need it they will simply shut the entire business down. After all, to get rid of the slightly more productive person that is earning more than he intends to spend, you first have to get rid of all the dozens of slightly less productive people first. During a depression, employers will fire those people whose supply and demand actually matches pretty well and ironically they tend to fire those whose supply exceeds their personal demands very late even though that is the origin of any depression. So the liquidationists end up with a very simple conclusion, shut down the business even though it is needed again in a few years, shut it down even though the cost of reopening exceeds the cost of keeping it open. Liquidationism has no proven track record, it has always ended in failure

jrc2022 5y ago

succinct description of the issues with all things crypto. I'm still optimistic about the future of cryptocurrencies/smart contracts, just not necessarily the current iterations.

deebosong 5y ago
Not to argue, but may I inquire what that might look like for you? Reason I ask is, I assume there will be some remnant leftover if/ when all the hype/ bubble aspects of the current iteration of all this cryptocurrency insanity implodes, that will actually become useful, but be so pragmatic and dull that laymen (such as myself) won't even realize I'm using the useful, stable, safe, secure, cheap, and practical tech that is appropriate to where it'll end up. I say this without any ground-level experience with the tech, with no skin in the game, and just based off of seeing how things tend to play out.
- chaxor 5y ago
  I actually like tokens that are kept completely separate, but are tracking something like storage or compute used/spent. This way you can trade encrypted web storage of an app you want to deploy (large dataset for ML training for example) for some computing or storage you lent to others. This way you can get around the insane prices that AWS charges.

randomhodler84 5y ago

What a long an pointless article to say “I don’t get it”. Nothing is as explicitly wrong, it just misses the point. Author seems to love authority and defer to such.

tchock23 5y ago
Care to offer a similarly detailed rebuttal that excludes an ad hominem?
- randomhodler84 5y ago
  It’s a typical UK authoritarian attitude. The article mentions sdiehl and that guy basically worships state boot on the money supply: Can’t see the point of money that that queen doesn’t endorse. It’s all for criminals don’t you know… Anyone citing him is -100pt for credibility. Yeah, I don’t trust the State with my money. The author has failed to address the issues of: * Wartime savings and safe transfer of funds (escape!!) * bank haircuts and bailouts * money printer goes brrr * state confiscation of bank funds by emergency order (Canada) * state confiscation of bank funds by economic failure (Cyprus haircut) * social credit systems linked to the monetary system (cbdc) * connectivity to the global banking system (Russia/china) * local failing fiat currencies in the world (lots of places, Lebanon and Turkey come to mind) And each of those is a nuanced and deep discussion about the nature and philosophy of money.
  - somewhereoutth 5y ago
    Money, as opposed to goods for barter, only exists because of the State. Bitcoin is essentially a decentralised ledger for recording transactions. That those transactions have any meaning, financial or otherwise, is entirely and solely determined by those who use the ledger. Should those who use the ledger one day decide the numbers are in fact meaningless, then Bitcoin becomes worthless.
    - randomhodler84 5y ago
      Yes, exactly. And that is what is so powerful an idea, that we could detach the idea of money backed by the state from a shared internet peer to peer network, like the file sharing networks a decade ago. In that p2p content networks were able to dominate the global internet flows until big CDN aka Netflix stepped in. CBDCs are like this for the 2020s. CBDC is Netflix. Bitcoin is BitTorrent. Plan accordingly.

danuker 5y ago

About the network partition: it only takes one state update between partitions to break the attack. The most Bitcoin network reorganizations seen by Blockchain.com in one day was 7: https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-orphaned-blocks https://www.blockchain.com/charts/n-orphaned-blocks

tromp 5y ago
Bitcoin doesn't partition easily, thanks to a dedicated satellite network [1]. [1] https://blockstream.com/satellite/ https://blockstream.com/satellite/
- CyberDildonics 5y ago
  How does this matter at all, since everyone is already connected to the internet?
  - danuker 5y ago
    The collection of arguments that make up OP's article includes the consequences of a network partition - replacement of one of the parallel histories when the partitions rejoin. Yes, the consequences are bad, but the risk is very low. Though not negligible, when facing powerful enemies like ISPs or nation states, you need to be aware of it.
    - CyberDildonics 5y ago
      This person was talking about satellites that have nothing to do with mining. Someone who has their internet go down isn't creating an alternate history that splits them off. They stop getting updates, then start getting updates again. These satellites are also nonsense because they are just renting time on them to broadcast. If there is no actual internet connection, you can't make transactions in the first place.

chaxor 5y ago

"blockchain has failed and needs to be retired" ... Isn't git a Blockchain? I don't think git has failed.

jazzyjackson 5y ago
in crypto parlance blockchain is short for "blockchain+consensus mechanism" eg proof of work, a blockchain isn't useful as currency if it's trivial to rebase history

howinteresting 5y ago

The idea that proof of stake cannot be regarded as a consensus mechanism is nonsense. The weak subjectivity model (where if you're just coming online or have been offline for a while, you need to get a recent block hash from elsewhere) is completely fine in practice. Trying to make a big deal out of it is the domain of either BTC maxis or reflexively anti-crypto people. There is such a thing as a security model that is too strong and can be weakened without practical consequences, and (strong) subjectivity is a good example of that.

3np 5y ago
While this is not an issue for Bitcoin (which runs and syncs fine on a raspberry pi with an SSD), in principle it could be resource-intensive enough to sync that if you fall behind you will never be able to catch up trustlessly even with very performant hardware. Ethereum (referring here to the PoW chain, which isn't going anywhere anytime soon regardless of how the PoS transition goes) is getting dangerously close to this point. Syncing a full history archive node (which you will need if you want to have proper independence) from scratch took us close to half a year, with a recent high/mid-range 4c8t desktop CPU, 64GB RAM, ~500Mbps network, and NVMe SSD. Took us around 1-2 months on a dedicated Xeon server with striped Samsung enterprise NVMe drives in a colo with effort spent on tightening software, kernel, and filesystem parameters. IO and context switching seemed to be the bottlenecks. That was ~2 years ago. Storage requirements for this is now >4TB. This is still doable, but expensive. Other chains, like BSC, are even worse than this which results in the de-facto centralisation that anti-big-blockers were so insistent about during the segwit saga. After the experiences above I have a little bit more sympathy for that stance.
- jlokier 5y ago
  > Ethereum [..] is getting dangerously close to this point. Not any more. Ethereum (PoW) sync time and storage size have improved a lot since you measured them. (I've worked on algorithms to improve both these areas so I know them well.) Since we're talking about scaling issues, rather than what's readily available in the well known implementations, I'll describe the best implementations that I know about. Sync time: Syncing a full history archive node has been done in less than 1 day. It's reduced a lot from the multi-month syncs before, even though the chain is larger now. Syncing just the state for recent history is commonly done in under 6 hours. Both can be reduced further. Storage size: The entire full history archive state fits in about 400 GiB. With all blocks but just recent history (i.e. a typical node) it's about 200 GiB, and when reduced to 1 year of blocks (EIP-4444) the total storage required for an Ethereum node fits into about 100 GiB. Storage I/O: I don't have hard figures for this, but both the sync algorithms and storage compression techniques reduce IOPS load significantly. Storage of full history in particular has been hugely improved over the 9-10 TiB required by Geth or OpenEthereum shown at https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive https://etherscan.io/chartsync/chainarchive You can fit a full history archive node on a Raspberry Pi and small consumer SSD now if you want.

jerry1979 5y ago

The author brings up scaling, slow upgrades, and energy use as the failure vectors for Bitcoin. The scaling section links to a Frances Coppola blog from 2018 which sites the "lightning network not mathematically possible" blog post from 2017. Article does not mention progress made over the last 4 years in lightning, nor does it mention other scaling options such as federated chaumian e-cash systems. I see the slow upgrades in bitcoin as a feature. I see the energy problem as something that we need to solve with pollution legislation. I skipped over the parts about NFTs and Ethereum, and only checked out the parts related to bitcoin.

whiskyant 5y ago
If the lightning network isn’t possible, why is it up and running with thousands of people using it?
- muzika 5y ago
  Exactly
- jakupovic 5y ago

nguyenlehoang 5y ago

If I have to choose between bitcoin and the banking system I will definitely pick the first one. Why ? The reason is obvious the banking system is there for hundred years and it's doesn't change that much, this kind of system attract people with evil personality. On the other hand, there is a system that constantly changed and fix it problems with people in generally have better persona. Which one would you pick ?

jeremycarter 5y ago
Lol wot
- kayamon 5y ago
  Yes? Why would you use a closed source system backed by nothing and full of exploits when there's a more modern open source system?