[rspeele]

> The energy costs of a block are not in relation with the amount of transactions in it. Just because you have two numbers, doesn‘t mean you should divide them.

Right, they are unrelated. The energy costs are driven by how much Bitcoin is valued, so the more Bitcoin succeeds, the higher the energy costs go. The transaction rate does not increase, it stays around 400K/day, enough for everybody in Russia to make one transaction a year. Or for another example, for every business in the US to make 5 transactions a year. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

The solution to Bitcoin's extremely low capacity for transactions is for it to be only actually traded on-chain by the largest institutions, like gold moving between vaults in the old days of metal-backed currencies. But in that world, most companies and certainly most individuals would trade using layers upon layers of complex systems built on top of Bitcoin, not Bitcoin itself. Very likely those layers will involve some form of centralization. So what's the point of all this elegance?

[ballofrubber]

Also I might add that the probability that the layers that people will use will be open source is very high. This inherently makes it more accessible to everyone.

If we look at the Lightning Network (a 2nd layer solution), there are 3 mainstream solutions, all open source.

On top of that you can have something like chaumian ecash, which is even more privacy preserving and cheaper.

Yes, we will need layers on top of Bitcoin, but thats a good thing. The base layer needs to be expensive (small blocks) in order to keep the cost of running a node as low as it is now (<$100)

[ballofrubber]

Because the base layer can be audited and not meddled with by third parties.

Everyone can build their own layers on top. There is no permission needed.

It's the peoples money.