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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

It's designed to be actively anti-efficient. The more efficient tech is deployed the less efficient Bitcoin gets. It's already atrocious, and it's going to get more-so, on purpose. What it's designed to replace is using more energy (maybe) because it serves like 3 orders of magnitude more customers, value and transaction volume. A single BTC payment takes 826kWh of energy. Now, a MacBook Pro uses at most 85W, so for a single payment on Bitcoin network you could run your laptop for almost 10,000 hours -- or your house for a WEEK. That's stunning, and only going up (again, intentionally).

Visa OTOH is around 41Wh per transaction, or 20,000x more efficient.

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You’ve ignored second-layer technologies.

There need be only one decentralized, immutable ledger to handle all transactions, the store of value and registration of assets for the entire planet.

While we’re comparing Apples and Oranges, credit cards don’t confirm payments for weeks and there are significant fees associated with accepting transactions, apart from that risk for the merchant.

Nope, I haven't. The anti-efficiency element applies to core Bitcoin no matter what you run on top of it. If you keep to the maximum 7tx/sec that's what you'll encounter. I can't imagine a world where no matter what you're running L2 that the system won't hit that incredibly low limit.

Second layer technologies, in the form of exchanges, aren't blockchain at all. They're just varying degrees of fly-by-night bookkeeping and/or settlement. They require blockchain tokens as much as they require the dollar - not at all.

There's no viable L2 technology right now that anyone is using (especially LN) yet, so it's too early to speculate. If I recall correctly it takes a traditional transaction to open a channel, and we're still capped at 7 per second. If there's 7.5 billion people on earth and we want to establish a channel for each of them, well, buckle up, we'll be here melting the Earth for 1.071 BILLION seconds, or 34 years. Just to open channels. Then another 34 years to close them. Here's a mathematical proof of the LN issues [1].

Hand-waving and pretending there's a path or some solution today means we're not even talking about objective reality anymore.

[1] https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

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