Replying to Avatar geodesic

There are ~8B people in the world today. These people need better money. Lightning is the solution, right?

On a good day, Bitcoin chain can process 10 transactions every second. Every one of those 8Billion people is going to need at least one lightning channel. That means 8 Billion channel creation transactions need to happen to onboard the global population. At 10 TPS, it will take Bitcoin chain over 25 years to process 8 Billion transactions. Thats just the people today. That doesn't account for the new users that will be born in the next 25 years 🙈. That's if Bitcoin doesn't process any other transactions other than lightning channel openings... much less channel closing or other normal BTC activity.

Tl;dr: it would take 25+ years to get everyone a lightning wallet, if Bitcoin paused and only processed new lightning wallets for the next 25 years.

Doesn't this mean Lightning won't work as global money? What am I missing? Do we just give up and let people use custodial Bitcoin banks instead of owning their wallet keys? I have so many questions.

#plebchain #grownostr
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geodesic 2y ago

Well I can answer that one.

I assume you know Bitcoin doesn't scale, but just to set the baseline for the discussion: Bitcoin can at most handle 10 TPS continuously. Global commerce settles ~50,000 TPS all day every day. If Bitcoin is going to be the digital money, we need an L2 to enable that sort of scale.

So why not lightning? Tl;dr: Bitcoin can't even handle the TPS necessary to on-board global population into Lightning. At best you get 'lightning banks' like we already see with WalletOfSatoshi handling 95%+ of all Zaps... but I give more detail here:

nostr:nevent1qqst88c4nj3yqax9swjgr6gnnum20m26e069apka6pkn5d7n5qnclcgpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfdupzp2fctaw2cl6gv45jkfyn4zzqs2mnsengyd72lsemuzp9kkxwm6nwqvzqqqqqqyalfl85

Basically, if an L2 doesn't scale Bitcoin, Bitcoin will never become money and humans will remain slaves to the banks.

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Plebâš¡ 2y ago

You need LN bro. I can't zap you for the insight you shared

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geodesic 2y ago

One of these days I'll spin up another server... one day, lol