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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2023
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I'm not a crypto guy by any means. But your point 5 doesn't make sense. Almost all of our digital infrastructure is systems being supported by other systems.
If you want to look at debit/credit card processing that is legitimately "bad enough that it requires a separate tech to work properly". The banking systems that existed before cards needed new systems to process those payment methods. From the outside looking in, your critique could literally be applied anywhere for anything.
Again I don't even use Bitcoin. That's just a bad argument.
Thing is Bitcoin maximalists are always defending Bitcoin as being perfect, that's a major difference in the attitude of those who use the technology vs everything else (except Linux maximalists that are pretty much the same type of people).
To expand on that point and explain WTF I'm taking about:
Bitcoin's network is so slow and transactions so expensive when demand is high that people now need to move their funds to a parallel network (called a Layer 2) where transactions happen in isolation and when people close their "account" the funds are moved back to the main network with balances being updated based on what happened on the Layer 2.
A problem is that it doesn't eliminate the speed and fee issue completely as people still need to move their funds from Bitcoin's network to the lightning network (and back eventually). That means during busy periods you're still paying 30$+ to move your funds to the cheaper alternative and you still have to wait, potentially for hours, for that transaction to happen if you didn't have enough funds in your lightning wallet to pay for whatever you're buying. All of that means it's not worth it for someone who doesn't have a lot of money in the first place to buy Bitcoin to use it as cash, when the whole point of Bitcoin was to be trustless electronic cash (see Bitcoin.org for the whitepaper).
When transactions fees are low enough on the main network that small transactions aren't as issue anymore? Well the Lightning network isn't as useful anyway because transactions also happen quickly enough that it's not an issue in most cases.
The point of crypto is to have a trustless decentralized system. Not Lighting network has watchdogs making sure fraudulent transactions don't happen (not trustless) and a tendency to centralize: https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800
There's a whole lot of info out there about the flaws of both the main and the parallel networks and there's even maximalists that believe Bitcoin is perfect as it is and the Lightning network shouldn't exist.