The lightning network?s efficiency is a direct result of the centralization of its hubs. This isn?t particularly interesting or even novel. It?s just network topology in action. I?m confused why this is contentious? This centralization obviates the point of Bitcoin?s decentralized design because it adds risk for censorship, invasion-of-privacy, etc.
Sure. Again, centralization is the reason LN is as efficient as it is. The more centralized LN is, the more you must trust the operators of the big LN hubs.
My point is, on the LN, bad actors can?and do?absolutely do these things.
I asked you to explain your reasoning for believing that Lightning is a centralizing force with bitcoin and, through three paragraphs, all you literally did is regurgitate the same baseless claim that lightning is centralized without any actual reasoning. Lightning is not centralizing one bit. One analysis of the topology if LN and you'd immediately see this. If you ran your own node, you'd also see this clear as day. Try rebalancing a channel and you'd see your node calculate hundreds of possible routes a payment could take from one channel of yours to another. Don't like one of the routes it could take? Fine, block that node and it will just take a different path. It is a mesh network through and through and to insinuate that it is a hub and spoke topology makes it clear that you don't have any experience using the technology.
Sure. Let?s define it. In this context, I understand ?trust?. In the context of Bitcoin, users do not need to trust the payment system. Bad actors (miners) cannot change order-of-transactions, block transactions, etc. because it would be too costly to do so (thanks to PoW).
To put it more succinctly, trust is the need to place confidence into someone else that they'll do the right thing and can be relied upon. As I said, with lightning, you are always in complete control of your bitcoin keys at all times. Raw lightning transactions are quite literally raw bitcoin transactions. If you're an active participant of the lightning network, you do not need to place any trust into other lightning node operators at all. That's completely contrary to your earlier claim that you need to trust other node operators. Onion routing provides privacy similar to the Tor network. Even if I had a direct channel with a peer and I make a LN payment directly to that peer, they don't know if the payment truly came from my node or if it was routing from other peers on the network. Sure, there might be some form of Sybil type attack similar to like what can take place on the Tor network, but doing so would take a great deal of capital unlike the negligible costs associated with Tor. So again, there is no trust that you must place into the network to route transactions on it. No one has the keys to your funds at any time and no one can force you to route payments through them. There are thousands of possible routes across the network with no clear centralized hubs.
Earlier you claimed I was just spouting some B.S. I read in a magazine and I took offense to that. But when you quite literally spout off a common talking point but don't actually back it up with either real-world facts or at the very least some simple reasoning beyond that talking point, it really makes me wonder who the one is that is just regurgitating talking points they heard once or twice.
You gave numbers. But it?s not clear the full picture. And again, I understand the mechanisms at play well enough to know what you?re suggesting is just not realistic. Again, I don?t need to know the details of a semi truck?s route to know that a Prius will always do it by burning less gas. I add more detail on this below?
Yes, I gave you real-world numbers and they are not anomalous whatsoever. What do you continue to insinuate that they are not realistic? Especially considering you've never used the technology before? You say you don't need to know the details of it all to understand it, but quite simply if you knew the details of it all you'd understand why it is realistic. Simply put, by allowing the consolidation of transactions into a single on-chain channel fund, you can now spread the costs of the on-chain fee across hundreds of transactions. So if the channel open on-chain transaction cost you $1 and you have 100 lightning transactions take place over that channel, then that $1 fee cost can be spread across all those off-chain transactions. It is a simple efficiency to understand and I am not sure why you contend my numbers. Would you like me to offer you up some screenshots of the data from my lightning node? Not sure what more you'd like as proof. I suppose simply because it runs counter to your narrative, it just must be false!! Instead you continue to offer up some strange analogy between a semi-truck and a Prius.
Ohhh my. Who do you think is mining Bitcoins? The poor? Or the already-ultra-wealthy, who can afford millions of dollars of mining equipment, facilities, electric bills, etc? What about Proof of Stake? That is even more transparently a scheme where the already-wealthy are granted the most votes.
You don't need millions of dollars in mining equipment to mine bitcoin. I sold my bitcoin miner for $200 on ebay. You can find cheap miners all over the place. The big mining operations all use the same bitcoin miners in their operations at scale. It isn't like the big operators are using different types of miners than small operations. If you can mine with 1000 big coin miners, you can mine with one of those same machines given the same electricity costs. And yes, there are instances of people in these nations with unstable currencies opting to mine bitcoin.
I agree proof-of-stake is really just more of the same (people with power/money with the control). As I said, I debate the merits of bitcoin and so let's just stick with that.
Democracy is 1 person 1 vote. Bitcoin couldn?t be further from that ideal.
The US is not one person one vote, does that make it not a democracy?
This argument just pains me. It?s incredibly dismissive of the colossal waste in the system. ?Everybody exhales CO2, and my tire fire factory is no different!! LOL And one day, it may be more efficient, just you wait!? It?s a bad argument, man. Bitcoin is thousands of times less efficient than existing payment systems. Are its use-cases (which I maintain are already also detrimental) worth that? I think that?s a tough argument to make.
But the energy-use is only part of the equation. The other is: e-waste from discarded/broken ASIC mining equipment, video cards, servers, etc. A single Bitcoin transaction is responsible for nearly 300 grams of e-waste?that?s about 2 iPhones. Bitcoin alone produces more ewaste than the entire country of Germany, a nation of 83 Million.
The climate scientist Michael Mann said that no one is without "carbon sin". It is an acknowledgement that everyone contributes to climate change through our actions in some fashion. Who has a lower carbon footprint, the carnivore that doesn't ever fly? The vegan who drives a pickup truck? The couple with no kids, but travels the world? The push from the fossil fuel industry to put the burden onto individual action is a deliberate effort to shift the narrative and blame onto others and away from them. At the end of the day fossil fuels are to blame for climate change and we must shift away from using fossil fuels as a means of energy production. I often see this immense outrage over bitcoin's energy use from people who eat meat or drive big trucks and it is really just a bunch of virtue signaling. It lacks the calmed reasoning that realizes that bitcoin's emissions is the tiniest fraction of a percent of our world's carbon emissions and energy production. Yes, bitcoin does use a lot of energy, but so do a lot of things we use. Cloths dryers in the US alone use as much energy as bitcoin. Phantom energy loss from power adapters use as much energy loss as bitcoin does. You don't hear any outrage about the energy use of those things though. At the end of the day we just need to make sure that the energy we're using is for things humans find useful. So ultimately that is where the disagreement and outrage comes from when it comes to bitcoin. The people outraged over bitcoin's emissions and not the meat on their plate is simply because they're outraged over bitcoin and not the meat they enjoy. All the while it distracts from the real issue which is fossil fuels.
Yes, e-waste is a concern as it is with all computing industries and bitcoin's computing life-cycle with ASIC has been increasing over the last few years. There is also reason to believe Moore's law is slowing down, so I don't think the e-waste issue is any different for bitcoin than it is for other computing industries. Your analysis of "transaction per e-waste" is also a tired talking point that completely misunderstands how bitcoin works. Equating things on a per-transaction basis is a misunderstanding of how it functions as on-chain transactions are settlements and bitcoin doesn't scale on a strictly transactional basis. In otherwords, there is no correlation to the amount of e-waste or energy consumed to how many transactions are processed. A single bitcoin transaction can also equal hundreds/thousands/millions of individual point of sale transactions.
Last year, a single coal mine in China flooded, and Bitcoin?s hash rate dropped to the tune of 35%. Just 0.1% of miners control half of all mining capacity (source: https://fortune.com/2021/10/26/bitcoin-mining-capacity-ownership-concentration-top-investors-nber-study/ ) Additionally, there are very few manufacturers of ASICS, which is yet another source of centralization.
Do you have a source showing mining getting more decentralized in the last several years?
Bitcoin's hashrate didn't fall that much because of a single coal mine. It fell that much because China shutdown and put a ban on coal mining across the country. If anything, it shows the resiliency of the bitcoin network to not even be phased by a massive drop in mining power.
Missed in your Forbes article with NBER research was the fact that those 0.01% of miners consists of 50-60 mining entities that make up that percentage. This is just the make up you get when you have thousands of people and corporations around the world that are mining bitcoin. You have a long tail of thousands of individual miners mining bitcoin with corporations that have large amounts of hash rate making up the top percentages. But those top percentages on their own have been continuing to get more decentralized on their own as proof to the fact that there are over 50-60 mining corporations in that small top percentage alone. In 2015 there were only about 20 mining companies that made up an even much larger percentage of the hashrate pie. Many of these new bitcoin mining companies are new within just the last few years with companies like Stronghold Digital Mining, Riot Blockchain, Bitdeer, Foundry Digital, etc and have moved a lot of their operations to the US.
That's for mining entities, but even the mining pools have become more decentralized compared to what it looked like in say 2015. In 2015 there were just 3 mining pools with over 50% of the hashrate with several entities controlling over 20% of the hashrate alone. Today there isn't a single mining pool that controls over 20% of the hashrate and there are 6 mining pools that have between 10-20% of the hashrate. One look at the historical breakdown of the mining pool trends over time and you can clearly see it becomes more and more distributed as time goes on. So I am afraid your claim that mining has become more centralized as time went on fails to even the slightest scrutiny.
https://btc.com/stats/pool?percent_mode=latest#pool-historySorry, I?m not trying to disparage you. Maybe it?s a coincidence that you?re talking about the same few countries every other Bitcoin enthusiast I?ve listened to brings up. Were you interested in the problems in Venezuela and Lebanon before you got interested in cryptocurrency?
"I'm sorry for disparaging you...but before I go, let me disparage you one last time by calling into question the source of your empathy."
Oh, please. Save it. Trying to insinuate that I have no empathy for others and the only reason I care about any one else's plight is because of bitcoin is insulting. As I said, the main reason I am vegan is because I have empathy for others. Even if it being vegan didn't save animals, I would still be vegan because of the horrible work conditions that humans are forced into in the meat industry. People in hardships in other countries have always empathized with and I've always made it a point to help out where I can. Whether it is refugees from geopolitical turmoil, or villages like those in Ecuador destroy by Chevron's carelessness, Uyghur muslims being concentrated and killed in China...to say I don't care about any of those things going on and the only reason I might care for others is because of my interest in bitcoin is extremely disrepectful and frankly I am done debating you because all your arguments are either complete logical fallacies, ill-researched talking points, or insulting name calls.
Cheers.