makeasnek

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

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.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

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.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

This requires multiple transactions on the blockchain

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.

The amount that both sides put in “escrow” is the max payment imbalance that a channel can accept

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.

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.

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.

If some calamity happens, these funds are lost in nirvana.

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.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

I'm just using the lemmy.ml web interface, which does.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

BTC's protocol has gotten steady, incremental improvements for 15 years without a single hour of downtime. Lightning was deployed a few years ago and continues to grow each year and get easier to use and deploy. Migration to quantum-resistant algorithms is in the interest of all parties who use the system including miners, banks, hedge funds, developers, users, etc. It's a very easy problem compared to other questions they faced around blocksize, taproot, etc.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Quantum computing is not a threat at all tbh. Computers that can crack public key encryption are "20 years away" and require some fundemental shifts in our ability to control physics. And that's the lab production version, not one available on the open market.

Quantum-resistant algorithms already exist and continue to be refined. Things will get migrated long before they become a realistic threat.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

This may be true for Cardano, but not for Bitcoin. As more BTC gets mined, your percentage of the total supply goes down

This is so terribly incorrect. Bitcoin has a fixed supply. Those miners are selling those coins on the open market and they are running out as you say. 1 BTC is the same portion of the total final supply it was a year ago or 10 years ago.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t the pools send the block that needs to get mined to it’s participants? If that’s the case, imagine if those 2 top pools decide to do sus stuff or if they get compromized by malware. This could create some trouble until miners migrate. Again, correct me if I’m wrong. Having 2 such large mining pools is not cool and there is no hiding from that fact.

I've love to see more pools, but I just don't think its as big of an issue as it's often made out to be, since they don't actually control the hashpower. The blocks they send to participants are immediately verifiable as real or not, miners don't have to take a pool's word for it and will often have full nodes monitoring the blockchain to make sure any given pool doesn't go over 51% hashpower.

Pools really can't do sus stuff. There are a few things pools could do or try to do:

• Censor transactions by refusing to include them in blocks. They are financially incentivized not to do this, since not including a tx in the block means selecting the next least valuable tx in terms of fees. The immediate damage from this is basically nil, the next block will probably be made by a different pool and the tx will go through. So transactions can't get censored, only delayed. But people will notice, and that pool will lose all its hashpower and its means of making money, which is exactly what happened when this scenario happened before. Bitcoin has faced, and beaten back, this exact attack before.

• Conspire to perform a 51% attack. They don't just need 51% between each other, they need enough hashpower to roll back previous blocks, which means maintaining 51% for several blocks in a row. One of the primary reasons 51% attacks are not viable is that you need to give that Bitcoin to somebody, get something of value in return, and then un-spend it. They need to transfer you that equivalent amount of value before it gets unspent. Nobody transferring hundreds of millions or billions of dollars worth of value is going to be happy with a one block confirmation. Or even a three block confirmation. Even if they were, what items can you actually transfer that quickly? It's just not viable as an attack method, there is no money to be gained. Pool operators are fallible at the rest of us, if there was a viable way to do a 51% attack, somebody would have done it by now. But it's not.

What do you mean, coins in transit can’t stake? I have 10 coins (wallet staked), you have 0 coins (wallet staked), I send you 5 coins (atomic operation)

If a block moves a coin from a to b, that coin can't also the coin that stakes that block. Granted, I am showing some ignorance of Cardano here, but that's how other PoS systems work. And there is usually a "cooldown" of a couple blocks to prevent that coin from staking for a while for security reasons.

I didn't know about cardano's capped supply, you've taught me a few things in this thread. Until the system is actually decentralized and the cardano devs give away the master keys and let the network truly run on its own, I have little interest in it. And based on some cursory reading, centralization of relays and growing chain size are much more of a concern than with Bitcoin. Best of luck to you.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

I'm not saying it doesn't impact the price, I'm saying it doesn't matter. Bitcoin's current price looks like a steal to me if it's going to be the underlying currency for the global economy.

All currency is speculated on. The market finds the right price. Then it corrects. The price goes up and down. That's how markets work. The USD is guaranteed to lose value and buying power over time due to an inflationary supply. That's not even throwing in the US's declining role as a global currency hegemon and the reduced demand it causes.

Bitcoin? It could go up or down relative to other currencies or goods, but my portion of the supply relative to the whole will always be the same. That's why I buy bitcoin.

makeasnek , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago) to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

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.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

The previous poster is alleging BTC is being "pumped" by tether because tether is collateralizing their coin by buying BTC. I'm pointing out that they also buy USD yet nobody is complaining that USD is being pumped.

If you buy a stablecoin, the hope is that the stablecoin is tied to an actual dollar (or whatever it is supposed to represent). This means if you buy $1 in tether, tether should buy $1 USD on the open market, put it in a vault, and wait until somebody else comes back to sell that dollar back to Tether. But you can buy other stuff too, other assets, which when you start managing large amounts of money is important for risk management. Plus they can make some returns that way. Some stablecoins pass the returns on to people who hold the stablecoin. Generally, these stablecoins are collapses waiting to happen for these and many other reasons.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

The whole idea behind IOG is to build the Cardano to the point it can become an independent, self-sustaining and self-developing thing.

So weird how proof-of-work currencies like Bitcoin were able to do that without making a centralized governance structure which promised to hand over the keys later.

yes TWO mining pools control more than half of the Bitcoins block production

Mining pools have been getting more distributed the last few years thanks to some network upgrades. Pools relay the results of mining, they don't do the actual mining, they have no hashpower. In the past, pools have tried to censor transactions, and seen their pool get abandoned by the entire network. They couldn't censor them of course, they could only temporarily delay them. Pools have no power. They can't double-spend or 51% attack because nearly all of the BTC they acquire flows right back to miners. They can't afford the cost of a 51% attack more than any other entity or nation-state. They can't spend money which isn't theirs, even if they could do a 51% attack. If you look at hashpower instead of pools, you will see it's much more decentralized.

Actually, in Cardano, the rich don’t really get richer because every single holder no matter how small gets rewards proportional to their holdings (if they stake or delegate, which is risk free and no locking unlike Ethereum and Solana garbage PoS).

The rewards proportion isn't why the "rich get richer". The rich get richer because coins in transit can't stake. This means the only coins that can stake are existing coins, sitting in wallets, doing nothing but staking. You are printing an inflationary currency supply, making new coins, and giving those coins to those who are already sitting on the most coins. The more coins you have, the greater portion of your coins will be sitting instead of moving, because why not, it's free money right? For doing nothing. It's why supply inflation/currency devaluation hurts the middle class more than anybody else. They have an emergency fund, they have a savings account, they are saving up for a down payment. They have more cash on hand than rich people or poor people. Rich people have assets. Poor people don't have enough money to be effected. The proportionality doesn't matter here. What matters is the direction of the new coin flow: towards those who are already sitting on coins.

In a fixed supply, your coins may gain value over time due to deflationary pressure. Every coin is effected the same way. In cardano and other inflationary currencies, you've added an additional layer where you are printing coins and handing them to those with the most coins already. Not only does this give them more coins, it reduces the value of the coins held by people whose coins recently transited.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

I'm saying that the transition to a Bitcoin-based economy will be a massive shake-up in global wealth distribution. Where each individual person ends up at the end of it is a factor of how soon they stop calling it a ponzi scheme and instead recognize its value as a currency. We have an opportunity to fix global wealth inequality, particularly the wealth inequality enforced through the dollar the the debt-cycle trap so many countries have fallen into. The dollar is a tool of US imperialism, it's traditional colonialism with a few extra steps. We extract trillions of dollars of value from other countries which rely on the dollar because we print currency which is essentially a tax on the entire world.

There is a fantastic overview of how the US uses the dollar to control other countries and extract trillions of dollars from them while keeping them in a cycle of debt. The Human Rights Foundation https://youtu.be/7qRWurFaUD0?list=PLe0djdakvnFb0T-oZAeF49A-EZChise4n&t=14009 and another one on how France abuses its currency influence in Africa to keep the colonial legacy alive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-u1Pjce4Lg&pp=ygUxaG93IGZyYW5jZSBjb250cm9scyBlbnRpcmUgZWNvbm9taWVzIGZyYW5jb2RvbGxhcg%3D%3D

Bitcoin is still capitalism, it can't fix capitalism's flaws, but it can move us towards a world where the flaws of fiat currency and currency imperialism are fixed. It can move us to a world where the government isn't constantly printing away the value of your hard-earned money, where governments must increase taxes to fund wars. That world looks very different.

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

Its sole purpose is to be a global currency you can send from A to B effortlessly and without relying on trusted intermediaries. It has done that for 15 years, every day, every hour, without a single hour of downtime or hack.

Even if these statistics are perfect, it's nonsense framing to not put them in context. How does that electrical compare to the electrical burden caused by SWIFT? Western Union? etc. https://endthefud.org has a number of great sources for that

makeasnek , 5 months ago to Technology in Over 2 percent of the US’s electricity generation now goes to bitcoin

IDGAF about Tether, IMO it will collapse one day, and the world will be better for it. It's a currency whose basis is "trust me bro".