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by forum_ghost 1453 days ago
An open and permission-less global monetary network that does not exclude anyone at all, is about as valuable to you as malformed viagra emails?

4 billion people today live under less than ideal circumstances.

Spending a fraction of a percent of global electricity is absolutely worth it. It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get.

Nigeria alone has 34+ million users. Just one country.

What, they are all scammers to you?

1 comments

> It provides those 4 billion people with access to the financial services that they would otherwise never get.

It demonstrably does not, and with its transaction rate limitations, it cannot.

are you open to new information?

1. Nigeria has 30 MILLION people that use it. Most of the usage is for cross-border transactions. 2. transaction rate limitations only apply to the settlement layer. retail does not need to use it, only very large transactions that need high settlement guarantees.

Lightning network has essentially unlimited tps, currently has close to 1 million (!!) live nodes, and even sub-penny transactions are perfectly viable because fees are even tinier or can be even nil.

Live LN stats: https://1ml.com/

If you truly do care about lives of 4 billion people on the planet, you should at least internalize these basic facts, as you are simply repeating misinformation: tps are low, no traction. it is simply not true.

> 1. Nigeria has 30 MILLION people that use it (crypto)

30 or 34 m users out of 206m isn't the whole market, not close.

> Most of the usage is for cross-border transactions

And why mostly "cross-border transactions" ? Could it be that NIBSS has the domestic market:

https://nairametrics.com/2017/09/26/why-the-m-pesa-miracle-h...

https://nibss-plc.com.ng/

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/nigeria-inter-bank-s...

So, the huge Nigerian domestic market has a SEPA-like product for domestic transfers. It's not a bitcoin thing.

Do you think that this success (and the success of EU SEPA) won't be noticed in Africa?

https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/november-2021/new-...

1) You claimed it provided services for 4 billion people. 30 million != 4 billion.

2) Lightning requires BTC transactions to establish channels and for funding, no? While the TPS when funds are on lightning may be impressive, in order for 4 billion people to set up and fund lightning channels, at 7 TPS the bitcoin chain is going to take ~18 years to process that.

3) Are these 30 million people in Nigeria using BTC on the main chain? Are they using lightning? Or are they using one or more custodial, centralised wallet services/exchanges?

(I see 'sidecar channels' are a thing which may help onboarding speed, skipping the bitcoin blockchain entirely, but it all sounds hideously complex, with a bunch of fees in different places to a variety of service providers. It really all points to a failure in the L1 solution)