Porn has driven improvements in a bunch of tech: adoption of higher-speed broadband and payment systems being two of them.

If paid sites started accepting bitcoin, it would definitely spur wider adoption.

One problem with bitcoin is requiring too much energy use, but anyways it is independent from the "computer payment file" which can be used with multiple methods of payment. (Computer payment file is also intended to solve some other problems involved with computer payment, including various types of cheating that the merchant might do.)

> problem with bitcoin is requiring too much energy use

How much energy is the "right" amount?

How does that compare to the amount of energy used for paper and coin?

Can any amount be more than the "right" amount as long as the cost of the energy is willing borne by the entities conducting the transaction?

ETH (for example) at least sets a reasonable lower level of what's possible. BTC is just wasteful by comparison.

There's a reason that ETH is barely hanging in there and will never catch up to Bitcoin. I doubt it will survive the next decade.

Barely hanging there? With the second largest market cap and 5th trade volume (for the coin itself, higher for the network)?

It is easy to save energy when you are OK with a lower level of decentralization. I could probably run a payment processor on my computer alone that handles 100k transactions per second.

The proof of stake idea is like a ponzi scheme

How much energy is consumed to back the value of USD?

On top of that, how many people die each year due to the American War Machine that can only exist due to the US Dollar and the Fed's ability to print money and pass off the debt to the future generations?

I happen to know a guy who has invested a lot in solar parks. He’s deeply unhappy about that investment because the electricity prices are often zero or negative when the sun is up and he’s underwater on that investment.

I also know a guy who recently installed a dummy load in a thermal power plant which they switch on when they can’t give the power to the network due to overcapacity, as they can’t just switch off the plant willy nilly.

The point is, in a grid with lots of renewables in it not only there’s a lot of stray energy that can be captured, but a flexible load that can be switched on/off in milliseconds is actually hugely valuable if we’re to have stable grids.

It's an unfortunate mathematical requirement to create trust in a hostile/trustless reality. Just like how it's inefficient but necessary to spend money on defense in a world with potentially hostile foreign powers, we need to spend energy to ensure no parties can compromise the blockchain. There's no way around it (no, PoS is flawed).

Too bad Bitcoin is a piss poor medium of exchange unless you're ransoming personal data or stealing pensions from old ladies.

Steam tried BTC and it didn't work.

Hell the whole reason why Steam got big is how FRICTIONLESS it made buying videogames.

Still people will go a long way for their porn fix so who knows?

It didn't work at the time at the time before the bans and before many improvements in crypto. It's a different landscape today. Maybe they'll retry.

It’s funny because lightning recreates this article’s problem

Genuinely curious, how so?

Lightning channels are centralized entities with their own fee structures

They can be opened peer to peer, or hop between other channels, similar to dns routing

They are prefunded with a certain quantity of bitcoin that dictates the size of bitcoin that can move in that route at once - although smaller denominations can go through in rapid succession this just means more fees levied

All of this incentivizes a larger channel to be created by a well funded party, which can be coaxed into censoring transactions because they are a payment processor or institutional service. Likely an incumbent such as Visa joining the lightning network as a victim of LN’s own success.

There are some mitigations built in and actively developed. We are 8 years deep into Lightning.

Right, yeah, but isn’t the network large enough by now where a transaction would be routed around the censoring nodes regardless? Much like how there are censoring miners on the mainnet, but the censored transactions still go through due to not everyone doing the censoring?

Yes, they can route around. I think the number of people needing to open channels to deal with this, undermines the utility and scaling point of the Lightning network if it ever takes off. L1 will be so bogged down with channels opening and closing.

The difference is that becoming a larger channel is not gatekept by regulation, and not at all necessary. Creating small channels between two parties, e.g. for subscriptions, is viable. Though not as convenient, it is at least more convenient than getting blacklisted by Visa.

yes, but this circumvents the egalitarian nature

lighting channels are expensive to open and close

as it stands, there already isn't enough block space for “mass adoption” users to all have their own single lightning channel

let alone several

lightning in its ultimate form will always be a hosted solution

and those with the acumen and willingness to pay to open and close channels (or perhaps use the L1 bitcoin) will be a separate class of people

It’s telling you’re being downvoted. But yeah, for one, Bitcoin does actually fix this.

Sure, but it also brings a whole lot of other problems along with it. Personally, cryptocurrencies are a nonstarter for me because of them, but if it's an acceptable solution for others, then more power to them.

What problems does Bitcoin bring along?

(Because this is a textual medium, I need to state explicitly that I don’t ask that in an adversial way, just want to have a conversation!)

Non reversibility of transactions by an outside arbiter in the event you get scammed.

This is a feature for most crypto enthusiasts and a nightmare for anyone who is not capable of properly maintaining software systems or basic security

The trade-off is different, sure. Much like the trade-offs between using a gasoline vs an electric car are different. But it doesn’t mean it’s not a solution to sidestep private corporations needing to serve as global content gatekeepers.

Your question was

> What problems does Bitcoin bring along?

Not “is this tradeoff worth it?”

For a class of non technical people having the bank or credit card company in this case help them reverse charges when they’ve been scammed, and they are at risk of being scammed for a significant chunk of their resources.

I get why crypto enthusiasts like the irreversibility but the inability to understand why someone would want a protected system with an arbiter over it feels like the same energy I get from engineers who can’t fathom why anyone would choose the walled garden that comes with Apple products despite ample evidence for their popularity with the average joe

This is also a property of cash transactions.

You could reimplement the traditional censorable banking system on top of bitcoin, where users never touch the asset, and instead interact with tokens/promises of money and transactions were reversible. Reversibility is not an inherent property of the medium of value it’s the property of the trustful model we’ve layered on top.

The difference is that normal people have access to uncensorable digital payment rails if they are motivated and accept the associated risks (the same they accept when performing cash transactions)

This is also true for debit/cash, basically all payment methods throughout history except for credit cards.

This is also not entirely true, to a minor extent law enforcement and the legal system can provide redress for scams. It helps to only do business with registered entities so you can at least take them to court/small claims.

credit cards make it relatively easy to get a chargeback, few questions asked. They will do the trouble of blacklisting the merchant instead of battling with the consumer. That's very much not the case with crypto.

> This is also true for debit/cash, basically all payment methods throughout history except for credit cards.

Of course it is, since credit cards are a recent innovation if you are analyzing across historical time frames.

And even so, do you see most people preferring to pay in cash nowadays? Or debit card even? I’m not sure on debit vs cc usage rates but I’d for sure be surprised if cash was in use at a higher rate than cc

1. availability. Be it from strongarming or lack of popularity, most places don't take BTC

2. stability. Crypto is basically a meme stock and it's a mess trying to store currency within it. It's a full time job tracking its worth.

I think these are both self-fufilling prophecies

Sure I can recognize that:

"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]

I don't have an answer on how to address that, though. You need to have a very strong stance early on to prevent witchery so your communtiy adjusts accordingly. But decentralization, by its nature, has no way to moderate behavior outside of the core design of the tech.

Banking is sadly one of those few aspects where you need some centralization, in my eyes. That's why finance is regulated the hardest in any given society. You need trust above all else to keep and use a digital currency.

[0] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...

whats the witchcraft in this case?

if you don't mind keeping your currency in one of the most volatile tenders out there, sure.