Cryptocurrency has essentially reminded us that "a censorship-resistant, permissionless hard money" is a far greater enabler of "the bad guys who would take away our freedom" than it is an enabler of "the little guy trying to secure his own freedom".

This is the bitter lesson every anarchist learns — by tearing down the establishment, you're not creating "actual anarchic freedom" — you're creating a utopia for pimps and thieves. It provides a huge raft of new freedoms for organized crime, being a massive catalyst for money laundering and the like. It provides surprisingly few freedoms for the little guy, since nothing's protecting you from theft by the same mobsters. Seriously — if your BTC wallet gets stolen/exchange gets hacked, you're basically fucked. And it's at its worst in exactly those countries we'd naively think would be helped by some underground currency, because there's nothing to stop the mob from robbing the little guy in a place like Russia. We moved away from gold for the exact same reason.

This is to say nothing of all the scams, ponzi schemes, environmental damage, etc, etc, which are several additional shitshows on top of what I just described.

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Anarchy is always a more powerful tool for the bad guys than it is for the good guys. It's an iron law of history. The bad guys will always capitalize on the inherent power-differential of organized groups versus a disorganized group of individuals. As soon as the good guys try to fight back by banding together —— then they've violated the principles of anarchy. At that point they've simply created a new government, with censorship and granting of permissions.

Le Roi Est Mort, Vive Le Roi.

Or realize Bitcoin just can't be used as money, by design. It couldn't even handle the volume of transactions of a small town, because the miners and developers are not interested in that, and have chosen to keep block sizes small for their own interests.

Miners and exchanges were proponents of big blocks, since that would have centralized power in their hands and reduced decentralization. Bitmain, Coinbase, many others.

This makes sense to anyone with a tech background. You don't want to use censorship-resistant, decentralized currency which is used every day to settle billions to buy coffee. That would be an overkill.

Instead, you use LN which allows to trustlessly instantly transfer small amounts of Bitcoin for extremely low fees.

LN doesn't really work either - it can't really guarantee that funds have been transferred until you close a channel (you commit the transaction on the Bitcoin chain). So, unless you trust the other end of the channel not to fraudulently close the channel, you can't actually consider the transaction settled. And of course, in the case of routes, there has to basically be end-to-end trust for this to work, or someone will be left holding the bag.

It also can't scale the way it's usually promised, in part due to Bitcoin's horribly low transaction rate (you can't open LN channels fast enough, given Bitcoin's transaction rate), in part because of limits on the number of transactions in a live channel.

And in practice, it seems it's highly centralized [0].

0: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062

No, that's not how LN works. If the other party suddenly closes the channel at an old state that is beneficial to them, the funds will get locked for 2 weeks and you will have enough time to publish a transaction with a more recent state, which will reward you with whole balance of the channel [0].

[0] https://blog.bitmex.com/lightning-network-justice/

As that article explains, that only works if the non-closing node notices the problem in time to contest this. And, according to your article, this period is 24h, not 2 weeks.

I'd also note that this seems to make DoS much worse of a problem. If I have a transaction with a node that has gone offline and can't be reached, and I initiate a forced closure, what's to stop the other node from taking all the money in the channel, especially if I am not constantly online and the channel state I can't know for sure if the other node may have made some transactions while I was away?

There are many different cryptos that offer the same attributes without the energy cost. If Bitcoin was created today, no one would even bother to look at it.

Nope, there aren't. Even Ethereum is centralized to the point that it's founders were able to revert the blockchain to rescue their friends funds.