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1. This is a very incomplete picture of the Lightning Network. Node fees aren't set in stone, operators can charge whatever they want (and if you want to have a profitable node, you're going to have to charge more than the base rate). At best I can find stats online saying that the median base fee for a node is around 1 sat[0]. I can't find anything indicating anything better than that, or that fees would be locked to that amount. And again, this is all kind of a pointless debate because:

A) The Lightning Network only avoids fees by grouping transactions, and large long-lived channels that group tons of transactions tend to be discouraged by most privacy advocates I see online. It's recommended to use multiple short-lived channels at which point you are dealing with blockchain fees again. By the by, blockchain fees are not usually under $1 by any metric I can find[1]. The fees that I'm seeing here are pretty bad unless you're spending a lot of money, which... generally reflects the usage of bitcoin as an asset people sit on rather than spend.

B) Even if Lightning Network was great and good privacy and not vulnerable to closed channels or other attacks because of being off-chain, it's also tiny and unprofitable, and it's not where the majority of cryptocurrency is happening. Dig a bit further into the stats I linked above, the entire network capacity of Lightning Network is $159 million. That's... not enough for a financial system. But it's OK, because it'll scale, right? Except no, because when we dig into it deeper, it's often unprofitable to run nodes, and the network right now is being operated on some levels as a volunteer effort to keep transaction fees low.

So even if we take the premise that Lightning Network is totally private and secure, which it's not, it's still not really being used that much in comparison to other financial systems, which brings us back to the original question, by what measure is this a competitive currency with traditional fiat? It doesn't have the usage numbers or capacity to back that claim up.

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2. Lots to unpack here. Coinbase is still one of the most popular traders in this space even after multiple complaints about seizing funds, and Monero solves zero of those problems because the problem is the exchange itself, not the coin. Coinbase is still one of the most popular traders despite the fact that it's literally withheld funds and stolen people's money before, which means the one thing cryptocurrency was designed to do it's not even doing, people can still have their money seized. That other exchanges exist means very little to me if the average/median user is still interacting with a centralized exchange. Again, Monero doesn't really solve that problem.

Coinbase is not a government agency and can do whatever it wants with your data. Bear in mind that some of the biggest investors into the cryptocurrency space are people like Jack Dorsey and companies like Paypal. I find it very hard to believe that there's not going to be commercial corporate monitoring of people's transactions given the history of everything else the investors have ever created.

Finally, the "Bitcoin is more secure" argument seems very hard to back up to me. I think all you really need to do is look at the NFT space to see that scams/attacks are a lot more common than cryptocurrency advocates like to pretend. And remember that when your money gets stolen you either rely on a centralized authority to get it back, or you don't get it back. For the average user, this is a decrease in security.

I'm no fan of credit cards, but credit card transactions can be reversed as a security measure to prevent fraud. The average user wants to be able to get their money back if someone scams them, because scams/phishing/etc are just as much of a threat as anything else. Additionally, we have to go back to the point that the average user of cryptocurrency is holding funds in internet-connected wallets, and people do sometimes hack into Coinbase accounts and empty people's wallets. There are ways to prevent that, but I care about the average user's experience.

I don't know how anyone looking at the overall cryptocurrency space could say that cryptocurrency in its current form solves these hacking problems, or that leaking keys isn't a serious risk. There are entire classes of malware designed around stealing wallet keys.

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3. Those aren't really the right numbers to use, let's break down the actual numbers in more detail.

Roughly 3/4 Americans (approximately 244 million people) play video games[2], compared to roughly 60 million Americans who own cryptocurrency[3], about a quarter of the size. This is just in America, which actually is a bit biased in cryptocurrency's favor because Americans are disproportionately using more cryptocurrency than other countries like China. More broadly, it is hard to estimate the number of worldwide gamers, but quick search puts that number at around 2.7 billion people[4], which is a significantly larger number than 300+ million.

However, it actually gets worse. When you look more closely at that first link, you find out that the median amount of money in a crypto wallet in the US is a little less than $200. So most of these people are not actively using cryptocurrency, they have a tiny investment and they're sitting on it. This does not an active financial system make, it's actually kind of hard to argue that cryptocurrencies are providing these people with a service other than that they're just kind of sitting on a tiny amount of money. This is the equivalent of a gamer only owns 3-4 AAA games. Not someone that only plays 4 games, someone who owns as their entire investment into the market less than $200 worth of hardware/software. So it becomes kind of difficult to argue that 60 million Americans are using crypto, when in reality a lot of them just invested once or twice and now are passively sitting on those funds while they actively play Fornite and Halo.

But what would happen if you compared the entire crypto market worldwide to just the number of active Steam numbers? Well, your energy argument would completely fall apart.

If you try to compare the power-consumption stats between those two spaces, limiting gamers to the number of active Steam accounts, I guarantee that cryptocurrency is not going to win that comparison. The only way you're going to get comparable numbers for power usage is if you compare cryptocurrency to worldwide gaming trends. So either you compare a 300M group of people with a 150M group and find out that cryptocurrencies use way more power than the ~150M active gamers on Steam, or you compare the full worldwide trends and grapple with the fact that you're using the same amount of power to service a market (generously) 10% of the size of the gaming market.

And we go back to the original question. Is it a double standard to complain that two markets, one of which is 10-11% the size of the other in terms of the customers it services, are using the same amount of energy? Of course not, of course a market that's servicing 300M people should not be using the same amount of power as a market servicing 2.7B people.

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[0]: https://1ml.com/statistics#baseFee

[1]: https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...

[2]: https://www.npd.com/news/press-releases/2020/more-people-are...

[3]: https://www.finder.com/how-many-people-own-cryptocurrency

[4]: https://financesonline.com/number-of-gamers-worldwide/