What's your estimate on how many people can have self sovereign lightning channels on bitcoin? Mine is less than 1 billion. So even if the entirety of the baby boomer generation didn't use lightning, (half billion globally) we will still have to prune the global user base. So how are the 6 billion others supposed to use lightning?

i honestly dont understand your point

What does strike do for lightning?

You've got a point, but would you agree there is a process by which the monetary tech with the best properties in a given context tends to win out over time.

(I have personally come to think of "money" as the singular abstract information system that coordinates work and not any one tech, fwiw, and gold, USD, Bitcoin as "monetary tech." That's my mental model, anyway.)

To your point, though, the proof of the pudding is in the taste and the context isn't simple. And sometimes particular incentive dilemma will keep us trapped in a bad local minima.

Magnitude is all you need to know.

You have 2 problems.

1 if the government can win the mining with current hardware and energy by an order of magnitude in the best case scenario. And the concentration is probably increasing. You can't have decentralization.

2 you are in the timeline where bitcoin exists and is several orders of magnitude bigger. You don't even have the option of coopting government power like the way mining is getting integrated into power grid stsblization.

That's not true at all. Money absolutely converges and cultures who use the weaker form either adapt or die

You can have bounded areas where someone with a monopoly on force can dictate a currency for limited amounts of time. But all trade outside of that requires a trustless asset.

You can save in anything you want. Save in fish.

Just dont expect your purchasing power to exist for long. Also don't expect you exist for too long

Aggregate CPU Power: Datacenters vs. End-User Devices

When considering the aggregate CPU power of datacenters versus end-user devices in the U.S., the disparity is striking. Here’s a breakdown of the aggregated computational power of both setups.

Aggregate Power of Datacenters

Total CPU Count:

A typical large datacenter can house thousands to tens of thousands of servers. Assuming an average of 16 CPU cores per server, this can translate to hundreds of thousands to millions of CPU cores.

Performance Estimation:

If we estimate a conservative average of 10 teraflops per server, a datacenter with 10,000 servers could achieve:

10,000 servers × 10 teraflops/server = 100,000 teraflops (or 100 petaflops).

Higher Scale Examples:

Major cloud providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud can aggregate even greater power, reaching 1 exaflop (1,000 petaflops) or more through optimized hardware and workload distribution.

Aggregate Power of End-User Devices

Total CPU Count:

There are approximately 300 million personal computers (desktops and laptops) in the U.S. Assuming an average of 4 CPU cores per device, this results in about 1.2 billion CPU cores.

Performance Estimation:

If we take an average performance of around 500 gigaflops per device, the aggregate computational power would be:

300 million devices × 500 gigaflops/device = 150,000 teraflops (or 150 petaflops).

Summary of Aggregate CPU Power

Datacenters: 100 to 1,000+ petaflops (potentially reaching exaflops)

End-User Devices: 150 petaflops

This aggregate comparison clearly illustrates that datacenters collectively provide an order of magnitude more computational power than all end-user devices combined. The architecture and capabilities of datacenters offer substantial advantages for large-scale processing needs, whereas end-user devices serve general consumer purposes.

Chatgpt

You don't use fiat as money. You use it as a currency. No one saves in it.

In the us you save in harder assets like the 500 or real estate

You're confusing it because were in this 50 ish year abberation where the functions of money are split

If the government contributes hash to Bitcoin, that’s good. If they wanna fork Bitcoin and update the code it doesn’t update my node.

You can claim any thing you want about monetary policy. The purchasing power of the hardest money always wins. You're arguing against physics

You do have a pretty good idea of the imbalance. Just look at the collective mag 7 has and it's already more than the power than everyone else combined.

Well you got half the problem right. It might have been ok with an immutable (argurable) monetary policy if bitcoin didnt exist but you're in a competitive landscape. Your value is being debased by the emission so you'll end up poorer than just saving in bitcoin.

Again if CPU power weren't already centralized your argument isn't wrong. The alternative uses changes the economic incentives of mining. So other uses has already centralized it.

Governmental attacks are easier for attacking general computing systems

because they already control so much of it.

I

I haven’t but I’m thinking of using monero as a simple way to unkyc my coins.

Gonna start calling you Professor Hanshan the way you out here educating 🫡

I signed and donated - why are Bitcoiners not all over this ????? nostr:note1m8u9q3vc47cuqdagqq7zgj87jnw2vw9l0fqyjqaax07f49w67wts8xtfuz

> monero doesn’t need a layer 2

I am going to assume you mean this only in the context of privacy? The only reason monero and many other L1s can claim to “not need a layer 2” is because they haven’t had to scale and decide about the trade off between size and throughput. As far as I know monero doesn’t solve this and so it would eventually need an L2 anyway

This makes sense.

The problem is that CPU power can be used for other uses (is general) and is already heavily centralized. Miners don't have to make a large capital expenditure that force them into mining to recoup their investment.

The node problem is ledger size Monero's system expands with use so its harder to keep a full node (cost of ssd, bandwidth latency)

If you believe tail emissions good monetary policy and expanding money is good just keep using the dollar. Expands all you want

Assuming ecash delivers it's privacy promises, I'd rather use it like a small cash wallet than deal with Monero. Monero was an absolute miserable pain in the ass to actually use back when I gave it a go. It took me a very short time to realize it probably wouldn't end up being meaningfully adopted. At this point, I feel better off just using the various Bitcoin tools. Youre never going to fit it all into a single layer. Maybe things have improved UX wise, but it would have to be a massive improvement for me to deal with it again. I'm curious how many people are actually using it like I am Bitcoin today. I see all the puritanical arguing on here, but I mean actually using products where you can have your fiat check land as Bitcoin and spend it using on chain, Lightning, or ecash. Or using something like Bill pay from Strike, gift cards bought with sats, etc for fiat bills. How big is that ecosystem in comparison now?

Fuck it, you just made me bullish on Monero.

Guess I’ll spin a Monero node instead of LN.

Eh trump being pro bitcoin or not doesn't change the structural need for a hard currency to replace fiat. Tether can't change that ... Though I guess its a round about way to move some of the backing into bitcoin.

This is why I still don't see how Montero can be an alternative. Tail emissions is just slow debasement.

difficulty of running nodes, not to mention general CPU usage for minjng seems to preclude decentralization

if you do this purely, without ever looking at the USD valuation of those sats, then it's a true Bitcoin standard.

but if we're always dividing the USD valuation of a thing, by the USD valuation of those stats, then it's not really a Bitcoin standard.

its still a fiat standard.

I'm not saying don't do it. definitely, trade in sats as much as possible.

I'm just saying don't fool yourself into thinking that you're off a Fiat standard.

but we need is communities that can get self-sufficient to the point where they can price their needs directly in sats without looking US dollars.

I recently sold a guitar for coin. We agreed on the price, in sats, a couple days before we met up. There was no back and forth trying to triangulate the BTC:USD rate at the exact moment we made the trade 🤷‍♂️