Still doesn't beat nostr imo.
Bluesky:
Nostr:
Those fossil fuel plants are the problem, the problem is not that somebody is willing to buy that electricity. Those fossil fuel plants probably only even still exist because of subsidies of fossil fuels. Renewables are cheaper, have been for quite some time, it's just a matter of getting enough capital to build out their deployment in the first place and fight existing subsidies for fossil fuels.
That is a governance and policy problem, not a Bitcoin problem. Bitcoin finds the cheapest energy it can, which tends to come from renewables. So does every other energy-intensive industry on earth. Bitcoin is not unique in this aspect, but what does make it unique is the ability to rapidly turn on/off use of electricity according to current electric rates, unlike say a cement plant or factory.
Proof of Stake at the end of the day is just saying “instead of joining a mining pool and paying my electricity and hardware to do a lot of wasteful work, I’ll instead pick another entity to do the mining for me and give me a share of the profits”. Proof of Stake is still Proof of Work,
It's literally not this. Proof-of-stake is basically saying "I'm allowed to author the next block because some math formula says a coin I hold is eligible to do this, and here's a signature proving I own the coin". It's not proof-of-work, it's proof-of-ownership.
Solana is incredibly centralized compared to BTC. The higher the TPS on your base layer the harder it is to meet the hardware requirements to run a full node. Scaling in layers is the solution.
Eth's L2s are a confusing mess. They offer a variety of degrees of security and decentralization, some of them, like Polygon, are a network run with only 15 validators, yikes! And many of them are secured by a single bridge. There have been plenty of notable bridge hacks, it is not fun when your currency gets depegged.
Expensive is relative. It's expensive to send a $5 transaction and pay $1 in fees. However, you can move a million dollars in value and pay that same $1 in fees. That $1 in fees can also open a lightning channel which can contain essentially infinite transactions within it. For small transactions, Lightning transactions settle in under a second for fees measured in pennies.
Compared to a bank wire, western union, or other remittance services, $1 is an absolute steal.
This requires multiple transactions on the blockchain
It literally requires one to open and one to close, so like $1 most of the time in fees. If you have a custodial wallet, it requires zero. You can keep a channel open forever. Within that channel, you can have essentially infinite transactions between you and any other party and you can use the channel to route payments to anybody on lightning network. All those transactions settle within a second and have fees measured in pennies. A channel doesn't need to be opened for every baby being born, babies don't use money. Seriously though, there are additional improvements coming down the pipe (like channel factories) which enable you to use one on-chain tx to make hundreds of channels. People do not understand the scale lightning works at.
The amount that both sides put in “escrow” is the max payment imbalance that a channel can accept
All of this is abstracted away for you as a user, you don't have to worry about it, especially for custodial wallets. Most people earn and spend roughly the same amount each month, so liquidity isn't anything they ever need to think about. There are also automated ways to rent inbound liquidity which are incredibly cheap, that can be done with self-custody wallets.
Say, you want to use a channel to buy a car for $20k, then you need a channel that both you and the other guy have put in $20k in bitcoin.
Wrong. If you want to buy a car for $20k, you have to put $20k into lightning. The other guy doesn't have to put in anything aside from the $1 in on-chain tx fees to be on the lightning network in the first place, which he doesn't even pay if he has a custodial wallet. Then you send that 20k to the guy with the car. Now you can receive up to 20k in payments in that channel. Not that you would spend $20k via lightning, if you are buying a car and moving that much money, use main chain.
If some calamity happens, these funds are lost in nirvana.
Calamity doesn't happen, funds don't get lost. Custodial wallets literally never encounter this, it's all handled by your custodian. Non-custodial wallets also rarely encounter this, all the incentives are lined up to make "force closes" (which is what I assume you are referring to) rare. And of those force closes, the only risk is that your counterparty publishes an old version of the channel. You have like five days to correct and publish your more recent version to claim your funds. And if they tried to cheat you out of your funds, you get your funds and they pay a penalty. Given that watchtowers are basically automated, this never happens. Your funds from one of your channels might be stuck on-chain for a few days at worst, this is not a nightmare scenario. Banks and traditional payment processors have random holds all the time, especially when dealing with anything international. The difference is, the funds in lightning are always yours because you have the key. There is no scenario where when properly used, you lose funds in lightning.
Somebody more knowledgeable than me about Eth can detail that, it's gotten a lot more complicated in the past few years. But suffice to say a clear economic policy does exist, but it burns coins and/or mints them according to several changing variables within the eth ecosystem, for example, gas fees. But the rules are all out there, written in protocol, for anybody to follow and build around, otherwise the whole system would fail to even operate as a blockchain.
I was just answering your post to basically that Vitalik or whoever doesn't just have a money printer they can unilaterally turn on.
I'm just using the lemmy.ml web interface, which does.
BTC's protocol has gotten steady, incremental improvements for 15 years without a single hour of downtime. Lightning was deployed a few years ago and continues to grow each year and get easier to use and deploy. Migration to quantum-resistant algorithms is in the interest of all parties who use the system including miners, banks, hedge funds, developers, users, etc. It's a very easy problem compared to other questions they faced around blocksize, taproot, etc.
Quantum computing is not a threat at all tbh. Computers that can crack public key encryption are "20 years away" and require some fundemental shifts in our ability to control physics. And that's the lab production version, not one available on the open market.
Quantum-resistant algorithms already exist and continue to be refined. Things will get migrated long before they become a realistic threat.
The problem with green energy is that it produces on its own schedule, divorced of when people actually want electricity. Bitcoin miners are "buyers of last resort". They have to compete with every other miner on the planet, they don't buy electric at peak usage hours (which is when you fire up the non-renewables to meet demand). If anybody else was there to buy that electricity, Bitcoin miners don't. They can only afford the cheapest electricity and electricity which has nowhere else to go.
Bitcoin mining is part of the green revolution. By always having a buyer of last resort, it makes it easier to invest in renewable infrastructure knowing that somebody will always buy the power even if demand isn't ordinarily there to meet supply. It allows you to build your grid out to be almost entirely renewables. It's a form of energy storage. And it means when regular people buy power, it's cheaper, because they don't have to make up for that time period when electricity was being produced but there was nobody to buy it. Regular people don't have to subsidize the cost of a solar panel farm that is only useful for a few hours a day when demand is at the peak and otherwise produces energy there is no use for.
Nostr is it's own fediverse with a bunch of apps (including the popular twitter clone also confusingly called Nostr) which interact with each other. Mastodon, lemmy, etc all use ActivityPub, just like Nostr apps use Nostr. Non-twitter-clone apps for nostr including livestreaming, video sharing, etc.