That this factual statement is moderated down to being nearly transparent says more about Hacker News (which I have been a member of since it was Startup News) than it does the topic.
Indeed. I also like the "no one wants this" comments where people like me comment along the lines of: "I'm an example of someone who wants this." And get moderated down to oblivion.
This toll will have 0 impact on congestion and just extract money from folks that are already over taxed. It's a slap in the face to working class NYers.
Visa alone processes 100,000,000 transactions per day. All of them with "purchase protection". ie, there's reversibility for fraud via charge-backs, etc. We live in the real world where people make mistakes and need some help to fix it. This is why "crypto", as it is, will _never_ be a reasonable alternative.
Lightning requires an on-chain transaction to create a channel, which means that you would need about 75 years, trillions of dollars of electricity and the entire remaining block reward to set up a channel for everyone alive now, assuming no births or deaths. Stop thinking about lightning, it's just meant to distract people from the actual scaling issues.
- 96% reduction in block space over the naive approach, per the paper. (EDIT: the signature aggregation being referred to is Schnorr signatures, and it's become reality since the paper was published)
- 7 transactions per second, 86400 seconds per day, 365 days per year
8000000000*(1-0.96)/7/86400/365 = 1.45 years
Current transaction fees are $3. Assuming that stays constant, every group of 20 users would need to come up with $3 between them.
Are you assuming the chain does nothing else at the time? And that fees wouldn't explode the second people actually tried to use it, and block space would dry up? Seems like using only the free portion of block space would allow you to arrive at a more realistic conclusion. Blocks seem to be going out pretty full thanks to ordinals.
I expect lightning adoption (to the extent it happens) to take place over decades, not just 1.45 years, so there's plenty of buffer already.
In the past, fees have at times been both lower than today and higher than today. That will be true in the future too. Satoshi Dice didn't ruin bitcoin in 2013, and neither will ordinals in 2023.
BTC's Lightneing Network solves the scaling issues; admittedly work still needs to be done but the infrastructure is sound; where it fails is entirely outside of the technical sphere.
Admittedly, I was more focused on Kazakhstan's populace uprising more than Canada's issues for personal reasons when the two occured--I can share why but are entirely moot for this argument.
As time went on and Bitcoin was used to bypass this egregious example of financial censorship I started to realize that this was a milestone: we can solve the technical issues with our technology, as we had in Ukraine in 2013/14 during the Maidan Revolution and would later do again during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in '22. But this is only a part of the solution.
What bifurcates it as a success or as a failure is often not even the goals it has accomplished but rather sadly it is entirely on the Governing body and the narrative the population that it governs adopts to said Governments actions; in the case Ukraine it was a complete success and has led to things like United24 because of it's immense impact in the early days of the war in the case of Canada, an incredibly draconian society masking as a liberal democracy as seen during COVID, showed its true face.
Many were aghast to see not just how myopic, but how absurd the laws they were enforcing were regarding seeing family or traveling even within provinces, but stood idly by and thought that nobody would resist and it was only a matter of time before things went back to 'normal' if they just obeyed (and things got extended further and further); it was a complete shock to me! I was working on a side-project with mainly people from Toronto and it was shocking to see the sheer brutality and contempt they had for their own from within...
Activism and street demos only work if they derail Society from it's normal operations, that is what it's intended goal is: to make Society pause and address the internal affairs of it's supposed Social Contract. Failing to do so, and let 'business as usual' continue while letting them 'vent' is the exact ultimatum most authoritarian and despots desire, as they can manipulate and shape it to serve it's own end: think the '2 minute Hate' illustrated in 1984.
As an early adopter of this tech, who has made most of his entire tech career in this space: I think Crypto has no real utility if it cannot secure it's own providence: and 99% all fail at that, even the best funded (ETH), whereas Bitcoin does solve this--when people see energy being mispsent what they fail to realize or take into account is the true cost of REAL verifiable security with an immutable record (ledger).
They never consider what this is for until things like this happen, often far too late, and they seem to undervalue the immense need for providence and trust in an ever-growing digital World until it directly harms them--most here never really ever experiencing this hence the prevailing sentiment of 'its all just grifters' not realizing that it is the VC and Ivy Leagues who start or hi-jack projects that actually do the most grifts.
Sadly, where this technology comes short is to ensure that tyrants do not suspend constitutions via decree, threaten legal action against legitimate businesses (exchanges), and ensures that the serfs/plebs who make Society function have a valid legal recourse to dispute and arbitrate these matters.
That's why street demos and activism is a fundamental part of being a Citizen in Western Society: minor disruptions to daily Life pale in comparison to reverting to the barbarism of living under authoritarian and despotic regimes: some of us are (un)lucky enough to have living generations who survived/lived through this first hand so we have a working memory to base our out-views on.
I don't want to be associated with illegal activities. Crypto transactions are traceable so I could receive tainted coins from some criminals and become a suspect myself. Cash and traditional banking don't have this problem.
Pro-tip (at least for me): control (^) doesn't change this, so you can just hold all the modifier keys rather than trying to remember which 3 let you paste as plain text.
