• JimmyMcGill@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    So by your definition the current banking system is equally flawed because bank transfer aren’t enough (Bitcoin main layer) and a second, faster and more scalable option on top of that is needed, I.e. for example Visa (Lightning Network).

    Also exploding problem is a rather flawed or better incorrect way of comparing it. For example the current banking system also took its time to ramp up and I assume the 28 months you mention are for the entire US population (because there’s no source) and not all of that population has a bank account, which is a problem with the current system. So it isn’t “fair” to present bitcoin as infeasible to solve a problem that the current system hasn’t yet solved with its decades of existence.

    Regarding those difficulties about the LN, I’m not the person you replied to but it’s still very much in development so it’s normal to have issues. Google it and you will find the same for the whatever system you think is the best atm. Heck some of those problems are there by design. But I will have a look at those links you shared.

    • raktheundead@fedia.io
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      7 months ago

      The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.

      So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.