spiorf

> Couldn't we run the methane through one of those electric generators used in farming for cows' feces ?

You get back the co2 and the energy you expended to make methane in the first place.

Because it cuts economic incentive to produce ineffective (but safe) drugs on purpose.

https://lnbig.com/#/ for example, or just search for "How to get inbound liquidity on LN"

You have a wrong understanding of how LN works. You are conflating inbound and outbound liquidity. To receive 1 btc a merchant does not have to open a 1 btc channel. Another node has to open a channel with him. He can buy 1 btc of incoming liquidity for a few cents. Some nodes offer incoming liquidity for free (it costs them almost nothing to keep their btc in a channel for a while).

And your super simple setup is completely isolated from the rest of the economic world. It wouldn't even work with cash because every merchant would need to manage a cash reserve in every store, manage transfers of cash back and forth, and the associated risk. It would be expensive and inflexible.

> Why is no one pointing out that, in order to receive bitcoins on the Lightning Network (LN), you need to lock bitcoins in a payment channel?

Because it is false. To receive bitcoins on the LN you need to have a node. Other parties can open a channel with you to send you money.

> lock up bitcoins in a payment channel which can only send bitcoins to that given merchant

This is again false. The consumer can pay anyone on LN. The nodes you call "gateways" are just regular nodes, some with more funding than others. You can choose to run a regular node and keep it online and use it to route payments for other, or you can use a light wallet that opens a private channel and uses channel hints to route payments through his private channel to the network.

Bitcoins "locked" in a channel are not locked at all, You can send them to whoever you can route to on LN, or get it back to a regular on-chain wallet. And nowadays a well connected node reaches every other node.

> the gateway needs to know how many bitcoins the merchant will receive

No, the gateway needs to manage cash flow like every other money-transacting entity. There just needs to be enough capacity, like you need enough cash in a cash register. You do not need to know in advance the sum. And you can replenish and empty channels with one on-chain tx, so no need to close and re-open channels.

> the gateway needs to borrow this amount of bitcoins in the market and lock it up in a payment channel between it and the merchant.

You got it wrong.

First, gateways (that are just regular nodes, some running on raspberri pis) are already online, and with funding (https://1ml.com/). Those are already denominated in btc, so price do not affects funding capability.

Second, replace "gateway" with "the LN network". A gateway has some funding and locks it up in some channel to the LN network (meaning some other nodes)

Third, those bitcoins are not really locked for anything, but let's keep using this word.

So the "gateway" can be anyone with some bitcoins he might want to spend on LN (or not).

Its price was $19,650 only for a brief moment. Why pick that particular moment for the range instead of the minimum and maximum as per "range" definition?

In every jurisdiction of the planet. At the same time, otherwise it just gets more profitable elsewhere.

What about the hypotesis that a global shared ledger under no-one's control with thermodynamical guarantee of immutability actually has some value?

A 50% hashrate dump right after a difficulty adjustment would result in the next epoch running at half-speed for 4 weeks.

Network would keep going, but if would not be "just fine".

Energy is the only physical thing you can put into the internet, and is the price to pay for having noone in control of this new permissionless fixed-supply global currency.

Think about how global resources are allocated on large scale, and how much control on this allocation have those who control the global money supply.

What would happen if there was a way to have a leveled playing field?

Tulip mania lasted a few months. Bitcoin is 12 years old going strong. I think that this could settle the argument for good.

Who prints new money?

Who and how issues the new money? how do you decentralize that? Otherwise you have a central bank and a database is more efficient.

So the manufacturer must have the private keys copied onto every device, so that key must be present and cleartext on every production line.

And at the same time it must prevent leaking of such key.

Not to mention that leaking of such key could happen from the hardware too.

It has never been about "cryptos" and "blockchains". It's about bitcoin being a form of ethereal gold you can teleport and memorize. VC funding and ROI are irrelevant.

Or the Ultimate guide: educate yourself on what is money, where it does come from, what is the best store of value and then decide for yourself.

How is that different than stock/commodities/forex markets?

Block reward is now 6.25 btc, and fees reward is about 1.5 btc.

Every 4 years block reward halves, so in the next two halving block reward will be much less than fee reward, making it more and more irrelevant.

The 2140 is the date where it reaches 0, but it will be completely irrelevant in 12 years (3 more halving cycles).

You are wrong. > 50% of mining can only censor transaction.

Changing the fixed cap would break consensus, so it can only be done with an overwhelming majority not only of miners, but also users, exchanges and merchants. (otherwise miners would mine an empty chain).

Countermeasures:

* Move coins to cold storage wallet.

* Memorize seed phrase.

* Destroy written copies.

* Walk casually through checks at airport or frontier as a tourist, carrying nothing but chlothes.

* Do whatever you want to do with your money.

You can choose to leave your country for good taking your wealth with you against your government laws, if things get really bad.

For the casual observer, yes.

For a "professional" miner, price swings are irrelevant. The same quantity of bitcoin is mined independently of the price. Bitcoins mined in March are worth the same of bitcoin mined today even if price is 10x now. And in March the same hardware mined more bitcoins than now.

Big miners are datacenter sized now, and such things are not built during a bull run.

I was suggesting the opposite.

The splinter fractured and has his own little splinter too now!

But it's wrong.

It's like making car efficiency relatable by saying that a car can go 180km/h using 5 airbags.

Yes it is. You can have empty block or full block and energy expended is the same.

Cap is irrelevant in this context.

It's still wrong a wrong comparison. Bitcoin network's energy is expended for securing the block.

It means that to revert a 1 hour-old transaction, an attacker would have to consume double the energy the whole bitcoin network expended in that hour.

More energy expended == more security.

Number of TX is totally irrelevant.

Rarely industrial process can switch on and off randomly and still scale revenue linearly.

The capital expenditure argument makes sense when mining is the primary business. Using old and otherwise unprofitable (but cheap) hardware makes sense where there is intermittent excess energy.

That assumption is wrong. Take it as a single data point about the reliability of their peer review process. EDIT: I really mean that is a single data point. A usually reputable publisher can make mistake sometimes.

Ignore the millions of 1-ton chunks of metal that move 1 person slower than a bike on average. It's the bitcoin network's fault.

It's a mistake to assume energy source composition too. I would guess that a majority of mining is renewable right now (mining is a perfect sink of intermittent excess energy, and because its profitability is related to energy cost, renewables win). More so in the future.