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A comment on Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index. Parent comment

Re:Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index by arcticbull on Wednesday February 10, 2021 @09:53PM (#26097714)
The number of lightning transactions and channels rounds to zero, so in a way, I did include them. Same number of channels, about half the capacity per channel, same quantity of locked up value (about 1000BTC total) and the same number of users since 2019. [1]

Of course it's not a solution to scaling, because it requires one on-chain transaction to open, one to close, and if an intermediate node happens to go down your funds are locked. It's garbage. Vastly overcomplicated garbage.

By the way to just open a single channel for everyone on earth today and close it will take about 70 years, so right around the year 3000 if you (very optimistically) factor in births and deaths. And about $265 billion dollars at current fee rates - $18.99 as quoted today. Elon better pony up! This of course assumes the blockchain isn't used for anything else in the interim.

How small can the transactions be if a channel open/close costs almost $40?

The only L2 solutions that scale are permissioned, centralized and/or trustful. Because that's how you scale. And you can back those with anything as none of the guarantees of the underlying asset are conferred to these L2 networks simply because they notionally operate on top of Bitcoin for net settlement and the (soon to be unlawful) non-custodial wallet.

[1] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index by rspeele on Thursday February 11, 2021 @02:25AM (#26099123)
> By the way to just open a single channel for everyone on earth today and close it will take about 70 years, so right around the year 3000 if you (very optimistically) factor in births and deaths. And about $265 billion dollars at current fee rates - $18.99 as quoted today. Elon better pony up! This of course assumes the blockchain isn't used for anything else in the interim.

LOL. Nice. I like it even better than my other favorite example, that issuing a paycheck in Bitcoin to the 125 million full time employees in the US would take about a year to process.

[ Parent | on HN ]