[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.