makeasnek

I’ve had bitcoin transactions that literally took several days to process. This was also using an average fee.

I use Bitcoin regularly, this has literally never happened to me. If your transaction took days either you accidentally set a super low fee or your wallet was bugged somehow. Generally speaking the only way an "average fee" transaction takes more than a block or two is if you pay an average fee right before a rare massive fee spike, in which case, you can do a "replacement" transaction by upping the fee or just wait. Look up "average Bitcoin transaction fees" if you want to see rarity and size of fee spikes.

A handful of minutes or hours in a high-fee scenario, btw, is still much faster than ACH or international wires. Even if the money appears to move that quickly with traditional banking, full settlement is often measured in days to weeks, ask any vendor whose had a chargeback or anybody whose tried to "withdraw" from their Venmo right after depositing to it. Bitcoin's main chain and Fedwire (used to settle liquidity between US banks) have equivalent daily transaction capacity.

You can open a lightning channel with a single on-chain transaction. That lightning channel can stay open for years and process trillions of transactions, instantly, for pennies in fees. If you need a transaction done quickly, you shouldn't be sending it on main chain to begin with.

Long-term the vision is for folks to be using lightning or other L2s for everyday transactions, not main chain. Most Bitcoin transactions by transaction count are already on lightning. Lightning has been out for 5+ years now. It works well and gets better every year.

45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction.

Don't listen to people who are critical of a thing if they clearly don't even understand the basics of how it works. On main chain, a Bitcoin transaction typically take up to ten minutes (the time between blocks). It can take longer if you set a super low fee, but you can guarantee your payment goes into the next block by paying an average fee, usually around $0.75. Your wallet does this all automatically.

On lightning where most transactions occur these days (secured by main chain) transactions settle fully in under a second. Do your own research.

Besides, we all know Bitcoin only takes a single rainforest per transaction, it's been that way since the great rainfork which is ancient history at this point.

In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It works, it scales, it's been out for 5+ years now and continues to improve. I can send money to anybody on planet earth in under a second for a penny in fees which i can't even do with my bank account. But it's a failure. Lol.

And what about the problem of force closing channels and causing the people to pay the fees on chain which can be quite expensive?

On-chain fees are like $.50-$1 most of the time. This only matters if you operate a routing node. If you do, it's something you need to take into account and plan your channels wisely. There's no incentive to force close, non-forced-close is cheaper for everybody, so forced close only really happens if the other node just goes awol for whatever reason. People who are using "regular" lightning wallets never have to worry about this since a lightning service provider (LSP) handles everything. The number of LSPs continues to increase over time and wallets are talking about adding the ability to automatically select LSPs based on published pricing. Importantly, LSPs do not custody funds so there is no rug risk there.

The other situation that gets talked about in relation to channel closes is if a malicious party broadcasts an old channel state to chain (and you have to step in and say hey no actually this is the newest most correct channel state). This is an attack that exists in theory but in practice there is anti-incentive to do it. You lose funds trying it and most lightning wallets and all lightning service providers (LSPs) automatically monitor the chain for this so your chance of actually accomplishing this are basically zero. I have never seen this happen in the wild nor have I ever heard of it happening.

Zeus gets a new version like every month and it's open source. There's plenty of FOSS lightning wallets. Electrum is a good desktop one.

It sounds like you know a good deal about the tech and are interested in it. Encourage you to research more on lightning as well as Ark.

It doesn't. You can run a node on a raspberry pi. The only time having a large amount of liquidity matters is for sending large payments, but multi-channel payments are becoming a thing (break payments up until several smaller payments) so even that is not a problem long-term.

both credit/ debit and crypto rely on some sort of network

Credit/debit rely on centralized networks which will have more of the same systems running the same software. Bitcoin is decentralized, running on several versions of several softwares and updates don't roll out to the entire network at once. Much more resistant to this kind of outage. Which is why Bitcoin has a better uptime than pretty much any bank or other financial provider. It's simply more resistant to this kind of failure.

Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, but it is clear that he supports and is supported[1] by Project 2025’s many authors[2] including his own press secretary and many members of his cabinet. He has, for example, called Project 2025 “our agenda”[4] and is personally mentioned hundreds of times in the document. By the Heritage Foundation’s own count, Trump already implemented a majority of their recommendations during his last term [3] and 81% of Project 2025’s authors held official appointments in his administration[5].

1. https://democrats.org/news/project-2025-is-undeniably-a-trump-driven-operation/

2 https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-project-2025-truth-social-rcna160774

3. https://www.heritage.org/impact/trump-administration-embraces-heritage-foundation-policy-recommendations

4. https://www.heritage.org/impact/heritage-analysis-trump-administrations-first-year-draws-high-profile-attention

5. https://popular.info/p/what-trump-doesnt-want-you-to-know

Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.

Bitcoin lightning is Bitcoin. It's a smart contract on the Bitcoin main chain. You move Bitcoin "into" lightning by sending it to that smart contract, you move it "out of" lightning by having that smart contract close. It inherits the security of Bitcoin main chain while getting the transaction speed of off-chain.

Agree to disagree about the rest. Energy use like carbon footprint is about "where you draw the box". Off-peak demand is the cheapest power available, and it tends to be renewable. That trend continues to escalate.

<1% of global energy use to process billions of value transfer every year. Lightning transactions have the energy usage equivalent of an e-mail since they don't go on chain. Main chain, via lightning and other L2 solutions, can process and secure trillions of transactions per year.

I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time

With Bitcoin lightning the confirmation time is under a second and you pay pennies in fees as you don't make the transaction on the main chain. Even main chain is like $1.50 for a 10 minute confirmation time which for many transactions like an international wire is still a great deal.

The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables at off-peak hours since miners have to chase the cheapest electricity. Remittance services and other funds transfer companies also use energy and human capital to move value around, it's not free. A single on-chain tx can open a lightning channel which can contain and secure trillions of transactions off-chain. Processing these transactions takes the energy equivalent of sending an e-mail. Users are "taxed for the use of their own dollars" in regular currency as well. Who pays that tax and the amount of that tax varies by context.

It can't scale

In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It absolutely scales. And there is plenty of more room to grow.

Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity.

Its value also comes from its use as a transactional network and from it's political neutrality geopolitically speaking. And from the known supply which nobody can manipulate. It's not purely scarcity.

naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit

And yet mining is still distributed globally. Any person, company, or country with spare energy resources can buy an ASIC and mine. Mining pools have become more centralized, but a lot of work has been done on that in recent years and that trend is reversing as a result.

Scaling block size is not a long-term scalability solution. Bitcoin Cash forked from Bitcoin to double the block size. Then they doubled it again. They continued this and it's now 16x Bitcoin's block size and there are calls to double it again because "fees are too high". Increased block size=increased resources to run a node. It's why most of Ethereum's nodes are hosted in one of three corporate datacenters. Very dangerous for decentralization.

All of humanity's transactions shouldn't be stored on the ledger, permanently, forever. That is a waste of resources and totally madness. L2s are the solution, they use the main chain for security but store transaction data off-chain. They also inherently increase privacy. Bitcoin has lightning and (soon) Ark. Lightning is secure, mature technology and it works without sacrificing decentralization. In the last two months alone, it has been used by Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone similar to mastodon) to send over three million tips in the last two months. None of those tips were on the Bitcoin ledger because none of them need to be.

Bitcoin wasn't down. Hasn't had a single hour of downtime or hack since it started 15 years ago in 2008. No bank holidays. Clear and transparent supply, 100% open source code. Not run by any single government, corporate board, or CEO. Sends money across the globe in under a second for pennies in fees, all you need is a phone. Powerful stuff.