• Opafi@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    Ah, lightning… The dumbest idea ever to happen to bitcoin.

    Those channels need to be filled with btc before they work. Who can do that? I certainly can’t do that for 6 years in advance. I’m certain my employer can’t do that for all his employees. You know what players can create large lightning channels? Banks! Why on earth would anyone who likes the idea of btc, with its promise of “your keys, your coins” suddenly go back to a banking system where an arbitrary third party service can just lock your funds because they dislike what you spend your money for? Lightning has been 10 years in the making but the idea hasn’t been picked up and I’m certain it never will. Because not only does the current implementation and user experience suck hard but because it literally copies the banking system that btc came to fight, giving users an experience that has literally no advantage at all compared to PayPal or visa. 10 years and even you are still all “would” and “could” in how you describe it.

    If your argument why pow crypto isn’t energy hungry is that you don’t even have to use pow crypto but can just rely on an entirely different tech tacked to it in order to reduce usage of the core tech, fine. I guess it still proves my point. Besides the issue that nobody uses that broken piece of crap, the issue of course remains that there’s still no indication that it’s less energy hungry per transaction than any banking system. Banks are good at one thing, which is managing money. If you think that they’re intentionally wasting terawatthours of energy because of laziness or incompetence you’re mistaken. Distributing it to the users won’t cost less energy and I have no idea where that notion comes from.

    • Null User Object@programming.dev
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      8 months ago

      The channel in my example only needs to be opened with one month’s pay, not 6 years worth. The same initial balance goes repeatedly goes back and forth across the channel as it is paid and spent. But your “superior knowledge” of the subject matter is clearly all you need to make your “informed” decisions, so, whatever. I wish you well.

      • Opafi@feddit.de
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        8 months ago

        The channel in my example only needs to be opened with one month’s pay, not 6 years worth. The same initial balance goes repeatedly goes back and forth across the channel as it is paid and spent.

        You’re assuming that all funds are spent every month. Like, January 31st the balance is 0. That won’t work. I guess you’ll just have to discuss with your employer how much you want to save vs how much you want to spend, just so they can fill the channel properly. Exactly what my employer’s business is. You know what’s great, too, about having a shared escrow with my employer that they put my money in? They know how much I spend. Not what people like. Easy to avoid though: just use a third arbitrator that manages the channel for that scenario. And bam, we’re back with banks and PayPal. Lol, it’s such a dumb system…