makeasnek

Agreed. I'm glad to see both protocols growing. By "win" I mean: become the most popular twitter replacement.

This is exactly why I won’t use Nostr. What you’re describing here isn’t ideal for many folk that are part of marginalised groups. When each individual has to individually block every bigot only after being exposed to their bigotry, then the vulnerable folk don’t hang around. This is doubly the case when there is nothing stopping the bigots from just creating another account after burning their first one.

In Nostr, each relay can set its own policies. Relays can and do establish policies for acceptable behaviours. If you want a strict content policy, connect to relays with strict policies. You won't have to individually block any users or relays/instances. This is essentially the same as mastodon. The difference with nostr is that you normally connect to multiple relays, so a single relay, where your identity is tied to, cannot block you from following who you want and seeing whatever content you choose. Let's say Relay A blocks a user you want to follow. No problem, you are connected to relay B and C that don't. And, of course, if for some reason you only want to connect to a single relay, you can.

This is also something that activitypub communities do better, because they are communities not relays.

"Hope our commmunity of users donate" didn't work out well for the previous iteration of P2P discussion spaces: forums. The fact is, hosting online discussion forums gets costly quickly, especially if you want them to be reliable. Hell, even IRC servers which serve only text can get expensive to host. I'm not saying there's no way to convince users to donate to valuable instances, just saying that as a general strategy for FOSS it hasn't worked particularly well.

Add nostr to your list of platforms to try. It's basically mastodon except:

• Your identity is not tied to your instance. So if your instance closes, you don't lose your followers, DMs, etc
• Your instance can't block you from following anybody else, same in the other direction
• DMs are encrypted, your instance admin can't read them

Nostr is its own protocol, it doesn't talk natively with mastodon/lemmy/kbin/etc. But it is a federated protocol, so in addition to a twitter clone it has a YouTube clone and other kinds of platforms on it, and they can all talk to each other.

I use nostr and mastodon. IMO Nostr is going to win. It does everything mastodon does but without tying identity to an instance, I think that is really important.

• If you have a custodial wallet: Literally nothing, the wallet handles everything. You don't even need to know what a channel is.
• If you have a self-custody wallet: Install it on your phone and make sure you can connect to the internet once every 5 days. You don't have to open the wallet, some background service does everything automatically. Most wallets have built-in automatic watchtowers, so you don't ever need to connect to the internet and somebody else watches the channel for you.

The attacks you can do in lightning are very limited. Basically the only one you can do is force close a channel and broadcast an old state on-chain. But your other party in the channel can correct you by publishing the more recent state. They have several days to do this. If you tried to cheat this way, not only do you not get the coins you wanted, but there is a penalty as well. You lose money. So nobody ever does it.

There's about 200M USD currently locked up in lightning contracts. If you think you can hack lighting, have at it. The best hackers in the world have tried, they have all failed.

https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity

You're right. We can spend more than we make forever. There will be no consequences to such a fiscal plan. Don't listen to Jerome Powell, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

I put a lot of effort into it

The problem isn't that Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. The problem is that people never consider that energy use in context. Yet any headline about Bitcoin and energy never provides that context, because they are essentially hit pieces designed to elicit anger and clicks. Instead, we have to ask: What does that energy get us? How does that energy use compare to the energy used by other systems which perform the same function? A car which gets 10 miles per gallon would have been a fantastic use of energy in 1953, but today it is seen as wasteful. It does the same underlying thing, but the context matters.

Historically, our currencies have been based on incredibly inequitably distributed resources: precious metals and stable governance. Bitcoin is based on energy, which is the most equitably distributed resource on the planet. It literally falls from the sky, it runs through every river and every gust of wind and is found in the earth's crust as uranium. Sometimes we get energy from unsustainable places, it sucks that any industry (including Bitcoin) uses it. That is a policy and governance problem, not a problem of our monetary system. You should know that Bitcion miners flock to renewable energy sources and over-provisioned grids. Why? Because they need the cheapest energy possible, which tends to come from renewables. Bitcoin miners are "buyers of last resort", if there was anybody else to buy that energy, they would have bought it, and miners would have been outbid, because miners can't afford to pay high energy prices as they must compete with every other miner on the planet. This is why Bitcoin mines typically don't operate during peak demand hours, which is where most fossil fuels are used. Bitcoin, as "buyers of last resort" can be a part of the green revolution, they make it easier for governments to invest in and over-provision renewable infrastructure, and they make that green energy cheaper for everybody else by ensuring that at least someone will buy it during times of low demand. The problem with renewables is that they produce all day whereas people only actually want energy a few times a day.

Energy use is critical for the security of the Bitcoin network. While schemes that don't use energy have been proposed, they all suffer from some serious trade-offs that make them unsuitable if we are going to build a global reserve currency, including a tendency to cause centralization and to reward the system's richest participants. If a way is found to avoid using energy while still providing the same level of security and decentralization, Bitcoin is absolutely capable of upgrading its own network to use that new way.

First, let's look at what Bitcoin does in exchange for that energy: Bitcoin is an economic network that can be accessed by anybody with a cellphone and a halfway reliable internet connection including the billions of people, with a B, who are "unbanked" because they lack access to stable banking infrastructure. It enables anybody (with Bitcoin lightning) to send money internationally in under a second for pennies in fees. Having a settlement time for transactions of basically zero means that in an economy money can move faster. That means increased efficiency for any industry including the banking industry. It also offers us a way to opt out of an unsustainable inflationary currency environment, that is valuable to people as well. Constantly increasing the supply of money robs the money of value, it hurts the lower and middle classes the most. Bank runs happen, and banks are "too big to fail", so we have to bail them out, which is how the 99% end up paying for the investment risks of the 1%, the system is deeply flawed. But there is no solution to the bailout problem, if our entire economy will collapse if we don't do the bailout, we have to do the bailout, right?

Second, let's look at how much energy that takes. Bitcoin currently does this with less than 1% of global electricity usage. Even if it doesn't replace banking entirely, even if it only replaces remittance services (think PayPal, Western Union, etc). Think of every Western Union kiosk, branch, etc in the entire globe. Think of their lights, their servers, their call centers. How much energy is that? How much energy is used by SWIFT? PayPal? When you start adding these up, you find that we use well over this amount of electricity on remittance services. And we're not just waiting electricity and earth's resources, we're wasting the most valuable assets of all: time and human capital. We don't need people manually sending bank wires like it's 1910. We can have those people doing more valuable jobs.

Bitcoin's market cap is around 850 billion right now. That is bigger than the entire GDP of Sweden or Israel or Vietnam, it's in the top 25 countries by GDP. It transfers trillions of dollars of transactions every year. The average trend, year on year, is wider adoption and growth. It solves real problems and people recognize it and use it for that purpose. That's why big banks, hedge funds, and others invest in it.

There is also the wider discussion to be had about predicating our economies on currencies which grow to infinity and how that may not be a sustainable strategy on a planet with non-infinite resources. A currency which is constantly losing value incentivizes people to spend even if they don't actually need anything, because the currency is going to become worthless given enough time. This means more production is paid for than we actually need. More resources get used up. A deflationary currency, on the other hand, incentivizes the opposite. In a deflationary economic system, somebody producing a good or service must do more to make you want to buy it. In that environment, might products be more reliable? More repairable? Might they be built more sustainably? One can only speculate, but I personally feel positive about the knock-on effects of moving off an inflationary currency system.

Nano has alwas has a computational part associated with transactions. It once was used to prioritize transactions. Nano has evolved to a different prioritization scheme. That computational part will be phased out.

We'll see. It had to be "phased in" in the first place for a reason. Either you limit chain space and charge for it, or your chain grows an infinite size. There is no way around that problem.

And how would you have cheap transactions without those middlemen, if operating your own channels requires transactions on layer 1?

Because once a channel is opened, you can have essentially infinite transactions within it. So there is not a 1:1 relationship between channel opening/closing costs (layer 1) and transaction relaying costs (lightning). You need the layer 1 underneath to provide the security for the lightning transactions. Without layer 1, if somebody you are transacting with doesn't follow the rules, you have no way to enforce the rules. Incentives are setup in such a way that it's incredible rare you ever need to to go L1 to get that enforcement, since the deck is stacked against anybody who tries to break the rules.