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Bitcoin is not acceptable in 2024, and Lightning doesn't help. Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody.

swagmoose 2y ago
Do you think you're being reasonable in saying that? I think micropayments are desperately needed, and I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there
- Hizonner 2y ago
  Yes, I do. If you really want micropayments, then use one of the newer, better base systems that do the same things better on every metric, including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world. Even if Bitcoin were the only choice available, micropayments aren't needed desperately enough to justify the climate impact. But in fact it's not.
  - kordlessagain 2y ago
    Micropayments, especially when coupled with authentication for APIs, are desperately needed for AI calls (think tokens). And, mining costs have nothing to do with validating payments, so it doesn't cost more to run transactions over Lightning.
  - throw10920 2y ago
    > including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world. Lightning network consumes half of the energy on the planet? Because L402 pretty clearly states that it uses Lightning and not plain Bitcoin. Using the power consumption of all Bitcoin would be deceptive and dishonest.
    - snapplebobapple 2y ago
      no, it's just that there is a subset of environmentalists that are totally unhinged and think they know better than everyone what should and shouldn't get an energy allotment. Rather than calmly advocating for raising the carbon tax until the externalities present in carbon emission are priced (and seeing what uses are actually cut in the face of proper pricing), they take to any social media they can to complain about a specific use of energy they don't like. I am just happy it has been kept to Karen level virtue signalling online and hasn't yet converted to [insert favorite authoritarian from history here] levels of repression on the populace because the thing that has made the last few hundred years of massive progress work is recognizing we are too dumb to make those decisions and letting individuals pursue their own ideas and spectacularly succeed (but mostly fail).
      - Hizonner 2y ago
        Goodness, child. What I suggested was that people shouldn't voluntarily support a stupid and wasteful project like Bitcoin (especially when, again, there are alternatives that are superior in every way including carbon). YOU are the only one talking about coercion. Perhaps that says something about your mindset. But OK. It turns out I'm not opposed to what you suggest. By all means, let's go ahead and raise carbon taxes high enough to drive emissions down low enough that we all parboil at least a bit later in the game. That should happen regardless of Bitcoin. We can start by raising them above their current median worldwide level of (checks notes) zero. This will, of course, involve overcoming the political obstacles that have kept them from catching on, but sure, great. I haven't run any numbers, but I'm guessing that any meaningfully effective carbon tax is going to be higher than the Bitcoin block rewards you could get from the electricity the carbon represents... and that such a tax would drive the price of electricity in general up enough that Bitcoin fees would put even Lighting out of reach of most users. In a sane, functioning market, that would kill Bitcoin, since there are cheaper and more effective alternatives. But I imagine it'd still stick around the way it always has, as a speculative vehicle for would-be rent seekers. Seems like there's no greatest fool out there in the Bitcoin market.
        throw10920 2y ago
        > Goodness, child. > Perhaps that says something about your mindset. This is extremely inappropriate for HN and clearly against the guidelines. Please don't do it.
    - Hizonner 2y ago
      Lighting is built on Bitcoin. Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain. In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol. And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.
      - throw10920 2y ago
        > Lighting is built on Bitcoin So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. > Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain ...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that powers L402 consumes 0.5% of the world's energy. > In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol. What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful. > And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist. I don't see any problems with any of this.
        Hizonner 2y ago
        > So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved. > What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful. Bitcoin can do, charitably, six TPS, and there is massive community resistance to changing that. It takes a minimum of two on-chain transactions to be able to use Lightning: one to get the Bitcoin to fund a channel (it is not legitimate to assume many people already have Bitcoin, because they don't), and a second to actually open the channel. In reality, anybody who used Lightning on a regular basis would also do multiple other on-chain transactions, to change the funding level, eventually to close the channel, probably to have multiple channels, and occasionally to lock in balances when counterparties misbehaved or were suspected of misbehaving. But let's pretend it's just two. That means that, even if Lightning uses the entire capacity of the Bitcoin block chain, freezing out all other transactions. it can create at most three channels per second, worldwide. According to Wikipedia, the New York Times has 9.9 million online subscribers. It would take 3.3 million seconds, (917 hours, 38 days) to onboard all the subscribers of that one Web site, if the Bitcoin chain were doing nothing else. And the fees would of course spike through the roof if that actually happened. Now suppose this thing caught on to the level of, say, Instagram, which supposedly has 2.4 billion user accounts. I picked Instagram as an example of a "middling" platform, before I looked at any user numbers from any service. Let's be nice to you and say that people have three Instagram accounts apiece (they don't), but for some inexplicable reason each of them would only have one Lightning channel. Let's further say that only half of them would join "the micropayments system" (micropayments have no prayer of working if there are more than one or two systems with significant use). That's 400 million channels. Creating them would take 1543 days, or over four years, of the full capacity of the Bitcoin chain. And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic. This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.
  - RustyRussell 2y ago
    If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. There is huge incentive to claim to be so, however! But if you're trying to build something for decades, as you should be for internet infrastructure, there isn't much option.
    - throw0101d 2y ago
      > If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". On that metric I would think Monero or some such would be better: * https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocurrencies/ https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocu...
      - DINKDINK 2y ago
        >Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". Conflates two orthogonal issues: Identifiable payment vectors and publishing preservation / ability to be censored.
        Hizonner 2y ago
        Finding and shooting the people publishing certain transactions is a fabulous way of censoring those transactions.
  - ballofrubber 2y ago
    PoW makes green energy investments possible. Today. https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_b_Green_Crypto_Mining_A_Quantitative_Analysis_of_the_Profitability_of_Bitcoin_Mining_Using_Excess_Wind_Energy_b_b_i_The_Journal_of_Energy_and_Development_i_b_b_vol_48_no_1_pp_1_22_b_/25055597/4 https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_b_Green_...
- roughly 2y ago
  "We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. "I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true. Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built into the creation of the coin. It's a fine speculative asset, but by this point in its existence, it should be pretty obvious it's not an actually useful currency for this kind of exchange.
  - Animats 2y ago
    > "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exchange.
      - wongarsu 2y ago
        You could also argue that Patreon is a successful micropayment platform, with most subscriptions being in the $1-$3 range.
        Ekaros 2y ago
- kylebenzle 2y ago
  Bitcoin Cash works for small payments as Bitcoin was originally designed to do. Artificially limiting the block size to try and push fees up as high as possible is simply not a good designe choice that was added long after Satoshi left.
  - RustyRussell 2y ago
    It was Satoshi who introduced the block size limit though. Awkward!
    - kylebenzle 2y ago
      Yes, TEMPORARILY, lol. Awkward for who?
      - RustyRussell 2y ago
        Can you provide evidence of this? Thanks!
        hggh 2y ago
        https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/233/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...
kylebenzle 2y ago
50% of what you say is 100% correct. Bitcoin was hijacked and corrupted on purpose with injected hacks like "segwit" and rbf. So you are 100% right, BTC is broken and LN doesn't help. But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) still functions as Bitcoin perfectly well, it just doesn't have the "crypto-bro" idiots pushing it as an investment.
- acdha 2y ago
  > But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Do you have a citation for this? The reported transaction figures are orders of magnitude smaller than VISA, and cost more.
- Dylan16807 2y ago
  Segwit made transactions smaller, right? What was the problem with it?
  - janandonly 2y ago
    No, SegWit decoupled (segregated) the witness data from the signature data. Also the signature data has a lower “weight” now. It also happens to have been a soft fork for Bitcoin where the block size was increased to roughly 4 MB.
    - Dylan16807 2y ago
      But you can discard the witness data after a short while, can't you? I don't think that was practical with the old format? Also isn't the signature part of the witness?
motohagiography 2y ago
The customer for this L402 protocol is obviously a media network, especially ebooks, and plausibly an alternative to spotify, applemusic and closer to the bandcamp model, content providers of all kinds who are currently subject to the chokepoint of payment processors. Emerging use cases would be domain specific LLMs trained on proprietary data sets in health, legal, accounting, and other professions. What it needs is a new there there on the other side of it. The objection to PoW is thinly veiled objection to tying it to physical value instead of policy. The objection would be the same for gold. What they object to is physical constraints on political authorities, and these sort of "bitcoin bad!" comments should not be admitted to spoil serious discourse. The economic case for PoW is that it converts any source of energy anywhere in the solar system to transferrable stored value. It would make a lot of space based energy harvesting projects economically viable, but also remote hydro projects that can't transmit electricity long distances, but can absolutely provide compute as an economic service from long distances and make the a local hydro system economically viable. PoW tokenizes electricity via compute. It's a very elegant idea, and the opposite of environmentally unsustainable because it actually rationalizes the price of electricity with endogenous demand. The same people objecting to bitcoin micropayments schemes also object to nuclear because it would actually solve the zero-sum problem narratives they want to sustain and manage. These views are not without controversy, and personally I reject them on principle.
- hakfoo 2y ago
  Frankly, when you describe PoW that way, it sounds like something you'd get by giving an investor a monkey's paw. If you had a source of power, you had to use it, either directly or indirectly, to make goods and services-- satisfy actual needs somewhere-- to exchange it for stored value. Your model cuts productive economic activity right out of the loop, Why would anyone bother using their hydro/solar/nuclear resources to run a factory when they can just use it to grind for Bitcoin directly? Well, at least until the economy becomes so wrapped around this delusion that we end up with real-world scarcities, and all the Bitcoin in San Francisco won't buy you one taco. I arch my back at trying to restore "physical value" to economic prominence. Fiat currencies are a socially progressive tool. It gives us the chance to decide as a civilization whether and how much to incentivize those who hoard, those who invest, and those who spend. Conversely, physical, undilutable wealth reassures only the existing wealthy, who can ossify their position with no fear of inflation undermining their treasuries.
localfirst 2y ago
100% thanks for saying this and im surprised you weren't flagged and downvoted in previous crypto bull runs such statements would been censored
- dinobones 2y ago
  Lol wut? HackerNews has absolutely hated Bitcoin since its inception.
constantlm 2y ago
What an ignorant take.
throw10920 2y ago
> Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody. I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint. If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on top. Then I don't care what you use the power for, as long as I can get some, too. The problem isn't PoW, the problem is uncaptured externalities. I don't think that a distributed ledger is the right way to solve this, but flawed attacks on a solution being proposed to a terrible current state of affairs, without presenting any other solution whatsoever, is irksome, and doesn't help anybody.
- Rhapso 2y ago
  The problem with PoW is that it creates a system where any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates. If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok. Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocurrency.
  - derangedHorse 2y ago
    This is based off a biased and incorrect assumption that "any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates". It ignores miner advantages bred from more efficient governance where externalities are covered by clear regulations and proper enforcement. Any venture can be made to have negative externalities and Proof of Work doesn't lend itself to either more or less of those than most other industries.
    - Rhapso 2y ago
      Yep. You are entirely correct but you miss the point. That "regulatory efficiency" doesn't and can't exist in our current flavor of capitalism. Yes, it is the same as any other industry. But pointing it out about Bitcoin doesn't scare the population as much as pointing it out for their entire economy.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RustyRussell 2y ago
Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions, especially given that it's such a price-sensitive buyer, and curtails so well. Curiously, this energy hunger is driving decentralization despite the otherwise inevitable benefits of scale.
- throw0101d 2y ago
  > Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions […] There is no such thing as "wasted energy". The fact that cryptocurrency mining exists means there is load on the grid, which needs to be given supply. If that load/demand goes away, then the supply can be reduced or shutdown. I.e., if there is no demand the power would not be generated in the first place.
  - DINKDINK 2y ago
    >There is no such thing as "wasted energy". Your argument's basis is detached from reality: https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-150-bcm-in-2019-world-bank/ https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15... Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101/ https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...
    - boesboes 2y ago
      if you think crypto is only using wasted energy, you are detached from reality
    - throw0101d 2y ago
      How many coins were mined in 2023? How many transactions were completed in 2023? What percentage of each used this so-called "wasted energy"? 100%? 75? 35? Other? And in 2022? In 20221? How about the miners that are using coal plants? * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m... * https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/crypto-mine-comes-to-indiana-and-major-polluting-coal-plant-stays-open/70992299007/ https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/c... Is that using "wasted energy"?
RamblingCTO 2y ago
100% agree. blockchain is still a solution that's looking for a problem and payments ain't it. the foundational assumptions are wrong and don't match the user's reality.
AtlasBarfed 2y ago
Ai friendly protocol, yeah my payment gateway I actually want to be AI resistance
BigParm 2y ago
The currency only has value because it was purchased indirectly via compute. Just like how dollars became valuable because they were purchased with gold. The cost of gold was mining. Is Bitcoin inherently worth less than dollars? What about gold? Why? I don't see how you can make currency valuable unless you pay something for it. So I don't see how dollars are environmentally more friendly than dollars. If that's your point.
- salomonk_mur 2y ago
  Dollars have not been purchased with gold for a long, long time. As a matter of fact, most dollars are indeed created without "paying something for them". Out of thin air. They are just points in a database, no more real than the Bitcoins you say need to be "mined".

swagmoose 2y ago

Do you think you're being reasonable in saying that? I think micropayments are desperately needed, and I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there

Hizonner 2y ago
Yes, I do. If you really want micropayments, then use one of the newer, better base systems that do the same things better on every metric, including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world. Even if Bitcoin were the only choice available, micropayments aren't needed desperately enough to justify the climate impact. But in fact it's not.
- kordlessagain 2y ago
  Micropayments, especially when coupled with authentication for APIs, are desperately needed for AI calls (think tokens). And, mining costs have nothing to do with validating payments, so it doesn't cost more to run transactions over Lightning.
- throw10920 2y ago
  > including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world. Lightning network consumes half of the energy on the planet? Because L402 pretty clearly states that it uses Lightning and not plain Bitcoin. Using the power consumption of all Bitcoin would be deceptive and dishonest.
  - snapplebobapple 2y ago
    no, it's just that there is a subset of environmentalists that are totally unhinged and think they know better than everyone what should and shouldn't get an energy allotment. Rather than calmly advocating for raising the carbon tax until the externalities present in carbon emission are priced (and seeing what uses are actually cut in the face of proper pricing), they take to any social media they can to complain about a specific use of energy they don't like. I am just happy it has been kept to Karen level virtue signalling online and hasn't yet converted to [insert favorite authoritarian from history here] levels of repression on the populace because the thing that has made the last few hundred years of massive progress work is recognizing we are too dumb to make those decisions and letting individuals pursue their own ideas and spectacularly succeed (but mostly fail).
    - Hizonner 2y ago
      Goodness, child. What I suggested was that people shouldn't voluntarily support a stupid and wasteful project like Bitcoin (especially when, again, there are alternatives that are superior in every way including carbon). YOU are the only one talking about coercion. Perhaps that says something about your mindset. But OK. It turns out I'm not opposed to what you suggest. By all means, let's go ahead and raise carbon taxes high enough to drive emissions down low enough that we all parboil at least a bit later in the game. That should happen regardless of Bitcoin. We can start by raising them above their current median worldwide level of (checks notes) zero. This will, of course, involve overcoming the political obstacles that have kept them from catching on, but sure, great. I haven't run any numbers, but I'm guessing that any meaningfully effective carbon tax is going to be higher than the Bitcoin block rewards you could get from the electricity the carbon represents... and that such a tax would drive the price of electricity in general up enough that Bitcoin fees would put even Lighting out of reach of most users. In a sane, functioning market, that would kill Bitcoin, since there are cheaper and more effective alternatives. But I imagine it'd still stick around the way it always has, as a speculative vehicle for would-be rent seekers. Seems like there's no greatest fool out there in the Bitcoin market.
      - throw10920 2y ago
        > Goodness, child. > Perhaps that says something about your mindset. This is extremely inappropriate for HN and clearly against the guidelines. Please don't do it.
  - Hizonner 2y ago
    Lighting is built on Bitcoin. Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain. In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol. And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.
    - throw10920 2y ago
      > Lighting is built on Bitcoin So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. > Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain ...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that powers L402 consumes 0.5% of the world's energy. > In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol. What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful. > And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist. I don't see any problems with any of this.
      - Hizonner 2y ago
        > So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved. > What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful. Bitcoin can do, charitably, six TPS, and there is massive community resistance to changing that. It takes a minimum of two on-chain transactions to be able to use Lightning: one to get the Bitcoin to fund a channel (it is not legitimate to assume many people already have Bitcoin, because they don't), and a second to actually open the channel. In reality, anybody who used Lightning on a regular basis would also do multiple other on-chain transactions, to change the funding level, eventually to close the channel, probably to have multiple channels, and occasionally to lock in balances when counterparties misbehaved or were suspected of misbehaving. But let's pretend it's just two. That means that, even if Lightning uses the entire capacity of the Bitcoin block chain, freezing out all other transactions. it can create at most three channels per second, worldwide. According to Wikipedia, the New York Times has 9.9 million online subscribers. It would take 3.3 million seconds, (917 hours, 38 days) to onboard all the subscribers of that one Web site, if the Bitcoin chain were doing nothing else. And the fees would of course spike through the roof if that actually happened. Now suppose this thing caught on to the level of, say, Instagram, which supposedly has 2.4 billion user accounts. I picked Instagram as an example of a "middling" platform, before I looked at any user numbers from any service. Let's be nice to you and say that people have three Instagram accounts apiece (they don't), but for some inexplicable reason each of them would only have one Lightning channel. Let's further say that only half of them would join "the micropayments system" (micropayments have no prayer of working if there are more than one or two systems with significant use). That's 400 million channels. Creating them would take 1543 days, or over four years, of the full capacity of the Bitcoin chain. And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic. This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.
- RustyRussell 2y ago
  If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. There is huge incentive to claim to be so, however! But if you're trying to build something for decades, as you should be for internet infrastructure, there isn't much option.
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    > If censorship resistance and reliability are your metrics, there really isn't a serious competitor. Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". On that metric I would think Monero or some such would be better: * https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocurrencies/ https://www.investopedia.com/tech/five-most-private-cryptocu...
    - DINKDINK 2y ago
      >Given the public ledger of Bitcoin, I would hardly say it has "censorship resistance". Conflates two orthogonal issues: Identifiable payment vectors and publishing preservation / ability to be censored.
      - Hizonner 2y ago
        Finding and shooting the people publishing certain transactions is a fabulous way of censoring those transactions.
- ballofrubber 2y ago
  PoW makes green energy investments possible. Today. https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_b_Green_Crypto_Mining_A_Quantitative_Analysis_of_the_Profitability_of_Bitcoin_Mining_Using_Excess_Wind_Energy_b_b_i_The_Journal_of_Energy_and_Development_i_b_b_vol_48_no_1_pp_1_22_b_/25055597/4 https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/_b_Green_...
roughly 2y ago
"We must do something, this is something, therefore we must do it" "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. "I don't see modern payment networks doing anything to get there" - this is also true. Neither of those imply we must solve this problem with Bitcoin, and neither of them contradict OP's statement. Bitcoin is slow, energy inefficient, and a shit transaction currency because of philosophies built into the creation of the coin. It's a fine speculative asset, but by this point in its existence, it should be pretty obvious it's not an actually useful currency for this kind of exchange.
- Animats 2y ago
  > "Micropayments are desperately needed" - this is true. Probably not. They've been proposed all the way back to Chaum's DigiCash, but no micropayment system has ever really taken off. Not just crypto schemes. Schemes to put micropayments on your cellular phone bill were a flop. Even 976 numbers never got traction outside of dial-a-porn and have mostly died out. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. Not from consumers wanting to send them.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exchange.
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      You could also argue that Patreon is a successful micropayment platform, with most subscriptions being in the $1-$3 range.
      - Ekaros 2y ago
kylebenzle 2y ago
Bitcoin Cash works for small payments as Bitcoin was originally designed to do. Artificially limiting the block size to try and push fees up as high as possible is simply not a good designe choice that was added long after Satoshi left.
- RustyRussell 2y ago
  It was Satoshi who introduced the block size limit though. Awkward!
  - kylebenzle 2y ago
    Yes, TEMPORARILY, lol. Awkward for who?
    - RustyRussell 2y ago
      Can you provide evidence of this? Thanks!
      - hggh 2y ago
        https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/threads/233/ https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...

kylebenzle 2y ago

50% of what you say is 100% correct. Bitcoin was hijacked and corrupted on purpose with injected hacks like "segwit" and rbf. So you are 100% right, BTC is broken and LN doesn't help. But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) still functions as Bitcoin perfectly well, it just doesn't have the "crypto-bro" idiots pushing it as an investment.

acdha 2y ago
> But POW BITCOIN, as designed and built originally actually works fine at Visa-level scale while maintaining low fees. Do you have a citation for this? The reported transaction figures are orders of magnitude smaller than VISA, and cost more.
Dylan16807 2y ago
Segwit made transactions smaller, right? What was the problem with it?
- janandonly 2y ago
  No, SegWit decoupled (segregated) the witness data from the signature data. Also the signature data has a lower “weight” now. It also happens to have been a soft fork for Bitcoin where the block size was increased to roughly 4 MB.
  - Dylan16807 2y ago
    But you can discard the witness data after a short while, can't you? I don't think that was practical with the old format? Also isn't the signature part of the witness?

motohagiography 2y ago

The customer for this L402 protocol is obviously a media network, especially ebooks, and plausibly an alternative to spotify, applemusic and closer to the bandcamp model, content providers of all kinds who are currently subject to the chokepoint of payment processors. Emerging use cases would be domain specific LLMs trained on proprietary data sets in health, legal, accounting, and other professions. What it needs is a new there there on the other side of it. The objection to PoW is thinly veiled objection to tying it to physical value instead of policy. The objection would be the same for gold. What they object to is physical constraints on political authorities, and these sort of "bitcoin bad!" comments should not be admitted to spoil serious discourse. The economic case for PoW is that it converts any source of energy anywhere in the solar system to transferrable stored value. It would make a lot of space based energy harvesting projects economically viable, but also remote hydro projects that can't transmit electricity long distances, but can absolutely provide compute as an economic service from long distances and make the a local hydro system economically viable. PoW tokenizes electricity via compute. It's a very elegant idea, and the opposite of environmentally unsustainable because it actually rationalizes the price of electricity with endogenous demand. The same people objecting to bitcoin micropayments schemes also object to nuclear because it would actually solve the zero-sum problem narratives they want to sustain and manage. These views are not without controversy, and personally I reject them on principle.

hakfoo 2y ago
Frankly, when you describe PoW that way, it sounds like something you'd get by giving an investor a monkey's paw. If you had a source of power, you had to use it, either directly or indirectly, to make goods and services-- satisfy actual needs somewhere-- to exchange it for stored value. Your model cuts productive economic activity right out of the loop, Why would anyone bother using their hydro/solar/nuclear resources to run a factory when they can just use it to grind for Bitcoin directly? Well, at least until the economy becomes so wrapped around this delusion that we end up with real-world scarcities, and all the Bitcoin in San Francisco won't buy you one taco. I arch my back at trying to restore "physical value" to economic prominence. Fiat currencies are a socially progressive tool. It gives us the chance to decide as a civilization whether and how much to incentivize those who hoard, those who invest, and those who spend. Conversely, physical, undilutable wealth reassures only the existing wealthy, who can ossify their position with no fear of inflation undermining their treasuries.

localfirst 2y ago

100% thanks for saying this and im surprised you weren't flagged and downvoted in previous crypto bull runs such statements would been censored

dinobones 2y ago
Lol wut? HackerNews has absolutely hated Bitcoin since its inception.

constantlm 2y ago

What an ignorant take.

throw10920 2y ago

> Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody. I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint. If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on top. Then I don't care what you use the power for, as long as I can get some, too. The problem isn't PoW, the problem is uncaptured externalities. I don't think that a distributed ledger is the right way to solve this, but flawed attacks on a solution being proposed to a terrible current state of affairs, without presenting any other solution whatsoever, is irksome, and doesn't help anybody.

Rhapso 2y ago
The problem with PoW is that it creates a system where any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates. If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok. Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocurrency.
- derangedHorse 2y ago
  This is based off a biased and incorrect assumption that "any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates". It ignores miner advantages bred from more efficient governance where externalities are covered by clear regulations and proper enforcement. Any venture can be made to have negative externalities and Proof of Work doesn't lend itself to either more or less of those than most other industries.
  - Rhapso 2y ago
    Yep. You are entirely correct but you miss the point. That "regulatory efficiency" doesn't and can't exist in our current flavor of capitalism. Yes, it is the same as any other industry. But pointing it out about Bitcoin doesn't scare the population as much as pointing it out for their entire economy.

deleted 2y ago

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RustyRussell 2y ago

Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions, especially given that it's such a price-sensitive buyer, and curtails so well. Curiously, this energy hunger is driving decentralization despite the otherwise inevitable benefits of scale.

throw0101d 2y ago
> Why? Using wasted energy at scale doesn't seem to cause significant CO2 emissions […] There is no such thing as "wasted energy". The fact that cryptocurrency mining exists means there is load on the grid, which needs to be given supply. If that load/demand goes away, then the supply can be reduced or shutdown. I.e., if there is no demand the power would not be generated in the first place.
- DINKDINK 2y ago
  >There is no such thing as "wasted energy". Your argument's basis is detached from reality: https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-150-bcm-in-2019-world-bank/ https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15... Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101/ https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...
  - boesboes 2y ago
    if you think crypto is only using wasted energy, you are detached from reality
  - throw0101d 2y ago
    How many coins were mined in 2023? How many transactions were completed in 2023? What percentage of each used this so-called "wasted energy"? 100%? 75? 35? Other? And in 2022? In 20221? How about the miners that are using coal plants? * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-miners-revive-fossil-fuel-plant-co2-emissions-soared https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m... * https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/crypto-mine-comes-to-indiana-and-major-polluting-coal-plant-stays-open/70992299007/ https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/c... Is that using "wasted energy"?

RamblingCTO 2y ago

100% agree. blockchain is still a solution that's looking for a problem and payments ain't it. the foundational assumptions are wrong and don't match the user's reality.

AtlasBarfed 2y ago

Ai friendly protocol, yeah my payment gateway I actually want to be AI resistance

BigParm 2y ago

The currency only has value because it was purchased indirectly via compute. Just like how dollars became valuable because they were purchased with gold. The cost of gold was mining. Is Bitcoin inherently worth less than dollars? What about gold? Why? I don't see how you can make currency valuable unless you pay something for it. So I don't see how dollars are environmentally more friendly than dollars. If that's your point.

salomonk_mur 2y ago
Dollars have not been purchased with gold for a long, long time. As a matter of fact, most dollars are indeed created without "paying something for them". Out of thin air. They are just points in a database, no more real than the Bitcoins you say need to be "mined".