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Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2024
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How much goes to the dollar?
There's a powered device or 5 in every store connected to a credit server.
All that energy for bitcoin only supports 7 tx/s. Digital dollar payments do tens if not hundres of thousands per second.
tx/s?
Transactions per second
Transactions per second. Bitcoin is slow and expensive to get your transaction "approved".
Expensive is relative. It's expensive to send a $5 transaction and pay $1 in fees. However, you can move a million dollars in value and pay that same $1 in fees. That $1 in fees can also open a lightning channel which can contain essentially infinite transactions within it. For small transactions, Lightning transactions settle in under a second for fees measured in pennies.
Compared to a bank wire, western union, or other remittance services, $1 is an absolute steal.
On main chain. Via lightning you can support all the capacity of Visa/Mastercard/banks and then some. Main chain provides the security for lightning, lightning provides the transaction storage space and infrastructure.
The lightning infrastructure, if you graph it, looks very similar to existing global payment networks. The difference is that transactions settle instantly because they are protected by the underlying blockchain and they are automated with no middlemen to delay things. No complicated currency conversions, no banks negotiating liquidity in blocks manually and having to buy/sell other assets to stay in balance, no bank holidays, less fees. Which means you can take your money from person-to-person faster, which reduces friction in the economy. Which is exactly what a good currency should be.
Are you paid to post that nonsense?
For those in blissful ignorance: This uses so-called channels between participants. Opening a lightning channel means, basically, putting bitcoin in "escrow" on the blockchain. This requires multiple transactions on the blockchain. Bitcoin doesn't even have enough capacity to open a channel for each baby being born.
The amount that both sides put in "escrow" is the max payment imbalance that a channel can accept. Say, you want to use a channel to buy a car for $20k, then you need a channel that both you and the other guy have put in $20k in bitcoin.
If some calamity happens, these funds are lost in nirvana.
It literally requires one to open and one to close, so like $1 most of the time in fees. If you have a custodial wallet, it requires zero. You can keep a channel open forever. Within that channel, you can have essentially infinite transactions between you and any other party and you can use the channel to route payments to anybody on lightning network. All those transactions settle within a second and have fees measured in pennies. A channel doesn't need to be opened for every baby being born, babies don't use money. Seriously though, there are additional improvements coming down the pipe (like channel factories) which enable you to use one on-chain tx to make hundreds of channels. People do not understand the scale lightning works at.
All of this is abstracted away for you as a user, you don't have to worry about it, especially for custodial wallets. Most people earn and spend roughly the same amount each month, so liquidity isn't anything they ever need to think about. There are also automated ways to rent inbound liquidity which are incredibly cheap, that can be done with self-custody wallets.
Wrong. If you want to buy a car for $20k, you have to put $20k into lightning. The other guy doesn't have to put in anything aside from the $1 in on-chain tx fees to be on the lightning network in the first place, which he doesn't even pay if he has a custodial wallet. Then you send that 20k to the guy with the car. Now you can receive up to 20k in payments in that channel. Not that you would spend $20k via lightning, if you are buying a car and moving that much money, use main chain.
Calamity doesn't happen, funds don't get lost. Custodial wallets literally never encounter this, it's all handled by your custodian. Non-custodial wallets also rarely encounter this, all the incentives are lined up to make "force closes" (which is what I assume you are referring to) rare. And of those force closes, the only risk is that your counterparty publishes an old version of the channel. You have like five days to correct and publish your more recent version to claim your funds. And if they tried to cheat you out of your funds, you get your funds and they pay a penalty. Given that watchtowers are basically automated, this never happens. Your funds from one of your channels might be stuck on-chain for a few days at worst, this is not a nightmare scenario. Banks and traditional payment processors have random holds all the time, especially when dealing with anything international. The difference is, the funds in lightning are always yours because you have the key. There is no scenario where when properly used, you lose funds in lightning.
I can see that you don't know how this works. That's ok. It's nonsense. No one needs to know about that.
Custodial wallets work just like checking accounts, without the regulation. Crypto victims like to say: Not your keys, not your coins. The custodian owes you the crypto that you have in your account/custodial wallet. You own a debt payable in crypto. If the custodian goes bankrupt and can't pay the debts, you are screwed (as so many crypto victims have found out to their shock). The money in a normal checking account is covered by a mandatory deposit insurance scheme, so you don't have to worry about that.
Because custodial accounts replicate checking accounts, they can be just as fast and efficient, in themselves. Having to pay the upkeep of the blockchain in the background means, that they can't be as cheap as actual checking accounts. If a custodial wallet offers you better conditions than a checking account, they must be gambling with the crypto (that you loaned them) in some way, that a normal bank is prohibited from doing with customer funds.
For the sake of completeness: Exchanges in more regulated jurisdictions work like stock brokerages. They must hold the assets. In case of bankruptcy, they are special assets that belong to the customer and are not used to pay creditors in general.
While Lightning doesn't need you to open a channel for every new recipient and has smart routing through other participants, I still think it's an inconvenient solution we don't have to take.
We have Solana, a 300.000+ TPS Layer-1. We have much smarter Ethereum Layer-2's that don't require this bullshit. We have many ways to tackle this problem, it's the hyperfocus on Bitcoin that, in my opinion, makes people go for Lightning network anyway.
Solana is incredibly centralized compared to BTC. The higher the TPS on your base layer the harder it is to meet the hardware requirements to run a full node. Scaling in layers is the solution.
Eth's L2s are a confusing mess. They offer a variety of degrees of security and decentralization, some of them, like Polygon, are a network run with only 15 validators, yikes! And many of them are secured by a single bridge. There have been plenty of notable bridge hacks, it is not fun when your currency gets depegged.
Solana currently has 1777 validators - which doesn't look like much compared to Bitcoin, but is actually way more than enough for any practical intents and purposes.
You need the same infrastructure for any electronic payment system.
What you don't need for anything is crypto "mining", which is almost pure overhead. That's what the article is about.
It's not pure overhead. It's the means of initial distribution and also mining is the backend for handling transactions. Not that I think it's efficient by any means. It's just that it was necessary for Bitcoin to ever become something that mattered.
Mining is barely transactional in nature. Pretty much all of it is calculating hashes, which, on one hand, is super important as part of Proof-of-Work consensus, the most decentralized one we have, but on the other we have other reasonably secure options that waste two orders of magnitude less power.
It's not necessary to perform any of the functions of crypto, including money laundering. That makes it pure overhead; pure waste. There are offshore banks that facilitate tax fraud and other criminal activity. Crypto, somehow, allows exchanges to escape the scrutiny that falls on these banks. Objectively, there is no good reason why all this waste should let you avoid scrutiny of regulators or police.
This doesn't mean we can't do better than both.
We can do better than capitalism entirely. It's just that we can't. Gotta get rid of the mentality behind it first.
Crypto capitalism is super bad idea exactly because it's uncontrollable, i.e. all the bad stuff of capitalist economy, uncaged.
It encourages money hoarding, which cripples the capitalist economy, it does not allow to control emission, which is actually bad because it's essential to driving economy out of crises, it does not allow to block criminals' access to money and transactions, it severely complicates taxation and other important economic actions.
Crypto capitalism has the potential to exacerbate inequality, and cause a giant slew of problems sending modern economy into chaos. But yes, your 500 ADA salary will be truly yours.
I'm pro-crypto, by the way. While posing new risks, crypto can be super helpful as means of unsanctioned money transfer, breaching artificial limitations, keeping governments in check by always being able to support protesters, etc. But making it the world go-to currency is a bad idea.
Ok, but thinking crypto won't be widely adopted is just wishful thinking. Do you honestly see a reality in the future where it's not widely adopted?
If so, I would be curious to hear how that would work and what would people use instead?
Uhm...people would use traditional finances? Banking system ain't going nowhere, and CBDCs make their turn - as dystopian as they are, it's super easy to force them upon people.
What would be wishful thinking is assuming most countries will happily adopt crypto. And besides - that's even more of a dystopian scenario.
What makes you think the FIAT system won't end up in a hyperinflation? And if it doesn't (lol), what makes you think people won't wake up and realize crypto only goes up against FIAT and it's fixed supply? And if we do get CBDCs (which I believe we will, especially since that's probably the only way they can try to save and transition the current system into something that doesn't implode), what makes you think people will just gladly welcome them and not opt out for the alternative (crypto)? I hold strong belief we will live in a hybrid CBDC + crypto world fairly soon.
People had 15 years to "wake up" now, yet they didn't. Partly due to volatility which makes planning near economic future impossible, partly due to scare, but most importantly because they still get their wages in fiat, pay for products in fiat etc., and generally have little left to invest.
The state doesn't have incentive to change the regulations that favor crypto because crypto is generally worse as actual money as opposed to store of value for the reasons described above.
Crypto bros will shill "crypto everywhere soon" narrative every time they can, and I've seen it since at least Mt. Gox era. But until the regulations will be there (and they won't), nothing is gonna happen.
I appreciate your opinion. But why do you think FIAT will survive and how?
I've kinda answered it already - because most governments will keep it alive by never ever going crypto. After all, this will probably be in the best interest of the general public as well, and it doesn't appear that concepts of going full crypto are popular among masses.
I don't think you understand my question. I'm not asking why governments will or will not ditch FIAT for crypto.
I'm asking you what makes you think FIAT will survive and not hyperinflate. And if you think so, why? Like, what will prevent USD let's say from bleeding out in terms of value, or even dying suddenly (by suddenly I mean hyperinflation that kills it in years time after it begins).
That's a job of central banks, and they normally manage it well enough. Sure, crypto offers more reliability on that front by making it impossible to control emission. But at the same time, this means money can't be printed when it would be highly beneficial for the economy, for example when recovering from economic crisis - without extra emission the country will be screwed up real bad. At the end of the day, the fiat emission is agile for good reasons.
I don't think money should ever be printed or burned. I guess we can only agree to disagree.
Alright, let's settle on that.