Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

https://lemmy.world/post/11508098

Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin - Lemmy.World

Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin::US government tracking the energy implications of booming bitcoin mining in US.

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.

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.

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.