You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.

Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.

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In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.

Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).

It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.

It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.

Am I missing something? “Like all our services, Proton Wallet is open source so all of our security claims can be checked by the public to enhance security. We have also published the Proton Wallet security model so you can understand how Proton Wallet protects both privacy and security.”

They aren’t an intermediary. It’s a fully self-custody wallet.

It’s a self-custody wallet, they do not control the keys.

Doesn’t answer your question directly, but nostr is working on this. Nostr is an open protocol like ActivityPub (which underlies Mastodon and Lemmy). Its main use is as a twitter clone right now, but it also has a very new reddit clone and can theoretically support videos as well. And you can choose your own algorithm. Here’s all the choices I get from one of their clients, and there’s dozens of nostr clients to choose from. The cool thing is that anybody can make and publish an algorithm and you can subscribe to any algorithm. Your client does all the sorting locally.

Personally very glad to see them roll out this feature. Bitcoin offers pretty decent privacy out of the box, especially with lightning. Like using any technology, using it in a fully private and anonymous way requires some attention to detail. The ability to send/receive BTC from other users knowing only their e-mail address is pretty cool. And the self-custody element is critical.

This is not accurate. Monero offers a very high degree of privacy and anonymity. So does Bitcoin lightning, to a lesser degree. Lightning transactions don’t go on chain and are known only to: sender, recipient, and intermediate nodes, if any.

Fixed

We beat it last time.

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Crypto won’t scale

And yet every year, for 15 years, the transaction capacity has continued to increase. Networking protocols (TCP/IP, SMTP, etc) also didn’t scale to “internet scale” in the first 15 years. They just kept adding new layers to the stack and optimizing it until it did. Just like Bitcoin added Lightning, Taproot, etc to improve scaling.

In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. None of that requires an on-chain transaction, none of it required high fees. It works. It scales. It continues to improve. Lightning has capacity for trillions more transactions because capacity is not tied to chain space.

Also bitcoin isn’t even private and you are basically shouting to the world every time you make a payment.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous. If you make a wallet, nobody knows you own that wallet unless you tell them (or a third party like an exchange), but the balance and transactions on-chain are visible. There are ways to make your transactions more private, like coinjoin, you can have multiple addresses with multiple coins.

With lightning, transactions are opaque except to you and any nodes you route through, because lightning transactions don’t go on chain. This also means nobody knows your current balance. If you make a transaction between two lightning nodes that share a channel, nobody knows that transaction was made outside of those two nodes. Privacy continues to improve, see BOLT 12 for the latest upgrades in this area.

At a high demand time, it could take hours to complete a transaction (if it even went through at all) and with an outrageous fee up to dozens of dollars.

Bitcoin has never been known for time efficient nor competitive fees (except for maybe in the beginning when nobody uses it).

At least you admit people use it. Bitcoin lightning enables transactions in under a second for pennies in fees, it’s been around for 5+ years. Your information is outdated. In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. None of that requires an on-chain transaction, none of it required high fees. It works. It scales. It continues to improve.

I’ve had bitcoin transactions that literally took several days to process. This was also using an average fee.

I use Bitcoin regularly, this has literally never happened to me. If your transaction took days either you accidentally set a super low fee or your wallet was bugged somehow. Generally speaking the only way an “average fee” transaction takes more than a block or two is if you pay an average fee right before a rare massive fee spike, in which case, you can do a “replacement” transaction by upping the fee or just wait. Look up “average Bitcoin transaction fees” if you want to see rarity and size of fee spikes.

A handful of minutes or hours in a high-fee scenario, btw, is still much faster than ACH or international wires. Even if the money appears to move that quickly with traditional banking, full settlement is often measured in days to weeks, ask any vendor whose had a chargeback or anybody whose tried to “withdraw” from their Venmo right after depositing to it. Bitcoin’s main chain and Fedwire (used to settle liquidity between US banks) have equivalent daily transaction capacity.

You can open a lightning channel with a single on-chain transaction. That lightning channel can stay open for years and process trillions of transactions, instantly, for pennies in fees. If you need a transaction done quickly, you shouldn’t be sending it on main chain to begin with.

Long-term the vision is for folks to be using lightning or other L2s for everyday transactions, not main chain. Most Bitcoin transactions by transaction count are already on lightning. Lightning has been out for 5+ years now. It works well and gets better every year.

45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction.

Don’t listen to people who are critical of a thing if they clearly don’t even understand the basics of how it works. On main chain, a Bitcoin transaction typically take up to ten minutes (the time between blocks). It can take longer if you set a super low fee, but you can guarantee your payment goes into the next block by paying an average fee, usually around $0.75. Your wallet does this all automatically.

On lightning where most transactions occur these days (secured by main chain) transactions settle fully in under a second. Do your own research.

Besides, we all know Bitcoin only takes a single rainforest per transaction, it’s been that way since the great rainfork which is ancient history at this point.

Bitcoin lightning is absolutely hilarious. Your solution to Bitcoins problems is - not using Bitcoin. Wow, galaxy brain move.

Bitcoin lightning is Bitcoin. It’s a smart contract on the Bitcoin main chain. You move Bitcoin “into” lightning by sending it to that smart contract, you move it “out of” lightning by having that smart contract close. It inherits the security of Bitcoin main chain while getting the transaction speed of off-chain.

Agree to disagree about the rest. Energy use like carbon footprint is about “where you draw the box”. Off-peak demand is the cheapest power available, and it tends to be renewable. That trend continues to escalate.

I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time

With Bitcoin lightning the confirmation time is under a second and you pay pennies in fees as you don’t make the transaction on the main chain. Even main chain is like $1.50 for a 10 minute confirmation time which for many transactions like an international wire is still a great deal.

The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables at off-peak hours since miners have to chase the cheapest electricity. Remittance services and other funds transfer companies also use energy and human capital to move value around, it’s not free. A single on-chain tx can open a lightning channel which can contain and secure trillions of transactions off-chain. Processing these transactions takes the energy equivalent of sending an e-mail. Users are “taxed for the use of their own dollars” in regular currency as well. Who pays that tax and the amount of that tax varies by context.

It can’t scale

In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It absolutely scales. And there is plenty of more room to grow.

Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity.

Its value also comes from its use as a transactional network and from it’s political neutrality geopolitically speaking. And from the known supply which nobody can manipulate. It’s not purely scarcity.

naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit

And yet mining is still distributed globally. Any person, company, or country with spare energy resources can buy an ASIC and mine. Mining pools have become more centralized, but a lot of work has been done on that in recent years and that trend is reversing as a result.