[throw10920]

> including not ripping through half a percent of the electricity generated in the world.

Lightning network consumes half of the energy on the planet?

Because L402 pretty clearly states that it uses Lightning and not plain Bitcoin. Using the power consumption of all Bitcoin would be deceptive and dishonest.

[Hizonner]

Lighting is built on Bitcoin. Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain. In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol.

And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.

[throw10920]

> Lighting is built on Bitcoin

So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.

> Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain

...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that powers L402 consumes 0.5% of the world's energy.

> In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol.

What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.

> And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner income: transaction fees plus total block rewards. Rewards still dominate. Driving the transaction volume up is at best not going to reduce them, but the bigger issue is giving the Bitcoin chain a reason to exist.

I don't see any problems with any of this.

[Hizonner]

> So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.

You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.

> What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.

Bitcoin can do, charitably, six TPS, and there is massive community resistance to changing that.

It takes a minimum of two on-chain transactions to be able to use Lightning: one to get the Bitcoin to fund a channel (it is not legitimate to assume many people already have Bitcoin, because they don't), and a second to actually open the channel. In reality, anybody who used Lightning on a regular basis would also do multiple other on-chain transactions, to change the funding level, eventually to close the channel, probably to have multiple channels, and occasionally to lock in balances when counterparties misbehaved or were suspected of misbehaving.

But let's pretend it's just two. That means that, even if Lightning uses the entire capacity of the Bitcoin block chain, freezing out all other transactions. it can create at most three channels per second, worldwide.

According to Wikipedia, the New York Times has 9.9 million online subscribers. It would take 3.3 million seconds, (917 hours, 38 days) to onboard all the subscribers of that one Web site, if the Bitcoin chain were doing nothing else. And the fees would of course spike through the roof if that actually happened.

Now suppose this thing caught on to the level of, say, Instagram, which supposedly has 2.4 billion user accounts. I picked Instagram as an example of a "middling" platform, before I looked at any user numbers from any service. Let's be nice to you and say that people have three Instagram accounts apiece (they don't), but for some inexplicable reason each of them would only have one Lightning channel. Let's further say that only half of them would join "the micropayments system" (micropayments have no prayer of working if there are more than one or two systems with significant use). That's 400 million channels. Creating them would take 1543 days, or over four years, of the full capacity of the Bitcoin chain.

And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.

This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.

[throw10920]

> You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin.

Irrelevant to the fact that you used intentionally misleading language to massively overstate the potential energy/climate impact of using L402 built on Lightning.

> I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.

An intentionally unrealistic expectation. You know very well that just because a person is "technical" doesn't mean that they have a base level of understanding of every single technical system in existence, and you exploited that to mislead readers.

> And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.

This, and all of the above, are arguments about the scalability of Bitcoin. Not the power consumption or climate impact. You've convinced me that Lightning is fundamentally not a scalable technology, but you've provided zero evidence that it'll have any significant climate impact, much less that the impact is meaningful relative to the provided value of having a distributed micropayment system that replaces the brainrot that is ads.

> This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.

Another intentionally unrealistic expectation. I have a decent understanding of Bitcoin, but no prior knowledge of Lightning, nor knowledge of transaction throughput limits or power consumption. This is not "slightest idea" knowledge, this is details that most people will not know.

[snapplebobapple]

no, it's just that there is a subset of environmentalists that are totally unhinged and think they know better than everyone what should and shouldn't get an energy allotment. Rather than calmly advocating for raising the carbon tax until the externalities present in carbon emission are priced (and seeing what uses are actually cut in the face of proper pricing), they take to any social media they can to complain about a specific use of energy they don't like. I am just happy it has been kept to Karen level virtue signalling online and hasn't yet converted to [insert favorite authoritarian from history here] levels of repression on the populace because the thing that has made the last few hundred years of massive progress work is recognizing we are too dumb to make those decisions and letting individuals pursue their own ideas and spectacularly succeed (but mostly fail).

[Hizonner]

Goodness, child. What I suggested was that people shouldn't voluntarily support a stupid and wasteful project like Bitcoin (especially when, again, there are alternatives that are superior in every way including carbon).

YOU are the only one talking about coercion. Perhaps that says something about your mindset.

But OK. It turns out I'm not opposed to what you suggest. By all means, let's go ahead and raise carbon taxes high enough to drive emissions down low enough that we all parboil at least a bit later in the game. That should happen regardless of Bitcoin. We can start by raising them above their current median worldwide level of (checks notes) zero. This will, of course, involve overcoming the political obstacles that have kept them from catching on, but sure, great.

I haven't run any numbers, but I'm guessing that any meaningfully effective carbon tax is going to be higher than the Bitcoin block rewards you could get from the electricity the carbon represents... and that such a tax would drive the price of electricity in general up enough that Bitcoin fees would put even Lighting out of reach of most users.

In a sane, functioning market, that would kill Bitcoin, since there are cheaper and more effective alternatives. But I imagine it'd still stick around the way it always has, as a speculative vehicle for would-be rent seekers. Seems like there's no greatest fool out there in the Bitcoin market.

[throw10920]

> Goodness, child.

> Perhaps that says something about your mindset.

This is extremely inappropriate for HN and clearly against the guidelines. Please don't do it.