News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
This isn't propaganda and none of this has been debunked. Bitcoin can only handle a theoretical maximum of 7 transactions per second (in practice it's closer to between 3 and 5) and I'm not aware of any cryptocurrency that can handle more than 60 transactions per second. Regular financial transaction networks meanwhile handle thousands of transactions per second while consuming far less power (both in terms of electricity and computing power).
So you have not heard of the lightening network?
In practice, How many transactions are done on the lightning network before returning to the main network?
Bitcoin lightning solves this scaling problem by keeping transaction data off-chain but using the main chain for security. You lock up liquidity in lightning and then you can send infinite transactions through that channel between you and anybody else on the planet who uses lightning. Transactions settle in seconds and cost pennies in fees. Often less than a single penny.
Lightning adds a layer of complexity and additional failure points. It also centralizes power in the bitcoin network even further.
It doesn't actually change anything about the fact that Bitcoin isn't a currency: Despite the fact that it's claimed to be theoretically able to handle millions of transactions per second, it only handles a few million per month or about half of all Bitcoin transactions after having been around for six years (and most transactions aren't payments for goods or services). The vast majority of online commerce does not accept bitcoin nor any other cryptocurrency, which isn't surprising, given that their values fluctuate wildly. Currencies need, acceptance and stability, neither of which applies to anything crypto.
Complexity, sure, though honestly I find the UX simpler than on-chain payments due to instant confirmation times. It doesn't centralize power at all. Lightning nodes are just as easy to run as Bitcoin nodes, you don't need high-powered servers to run them. They are dependent on main chain for security, which is highly decentralized as it is. If anything, it increases decentralization as miners are no longer the only ones who can earn BTC for supporting the network. Miners must buy expensive ASICs, but you can run a lightning node off a 10 year old laptop and that isn't something that will change anytime soon. Bitcoin started with one of the most equitably distributed resources in the world: energy. And now it's adding the second most equitably distributed resource in the world: bandwidth and storage.
Hard things to get hard numbers on due to the opacity of lightning payments. The theoretical maximum is not based on some made up fantasy, it's based on decent back-of-the-napkin math on how it can scale. The base chain's scalability issues were due to limited blockspace, lightning does not have that problem, there are no real scaling limits on it as a result except "the storage and bandwidth of whatever portion of the internet participates in it" which is massive.
Determining value relative to other currencies is a single API call, that is not complicated. The reason they don't accept it is due to lack of usability for many online merchants in their integrated platform and the belief that many users would prefer not to pay in crypto. Which is weird considering 1 in 5 Americans own crypto, which is a number that continues to grow. I think a lot of them dropped support due to high on chain fees, but lightning has solved that to the point that accepting lightning it 10-1000x cheaper than credit cards for a merchant. That's a savings they can pass on partially to customers as well, which means customers can be incentivized to use Bitcoin. We are just now seeing the effects of that. At the same time, many online merchants do accept and even prefer cryptocurrency. Same with many online contractors. PayPal is a royal pain to use, and so are most other platforms for online international payments. There are some items I would refuse to sell online with PayPal due to rampant buyer fraud and chargebacks. Same reason why when you go on Facebook marketplace everybody refuses to take venmo for so many items.
How many merchants is enough until people are satisfied Bitcoin is actually useful? Idk. As far as I can tell, from Bitcoin detractors, basically all of them. Transaction volume grows, on average, over time, and that trend has not been broken yet. Fees also grow on main chain, which indicates increased demand for chain space since supply has not changed there.