BFT

HSuke

Anyone who has taken a college-level cryptography course or studied IT SEC or IT Networking should know what a nonce is. It's common in programming too. The Bitcoin Whitepaper doesn't mention BFT because that's a specific type of Sybil resistance, and Bitcoin provides Sybil resistance with PoW, not with a variation of BFT consensus. Forget the average person. Even the average person on rCC wouldn't recognize most of these, but the average EthFinance member should recognize most.

HSuke

This article even gets some of the definitions incorrect and doesn't define them accurately enough **Better definions of these terms** 1. **Rollups** - Rollups are a specific type of Layer 2+ scaling solution where transactions are executed off-chain outside of L1 and posted to L1 where consensus is reached. If the full rollup data (can be compressed) is not posted to L1 (e.g. only the hash is posted), it's not a full rollup, and is usually called a Validium. 1. **Byzantine Fault Tolerance** - Resilience to the Byzantine Generals problem, which is a problem of reaching consensus when actors don't necessarily have to be honest. This article is incorrect that Bitcoin solve BFT. Bitcoin actually works around BFT by using PoW. 1. **Nonce** - A one-time use data. Can be used for so many use cases, e.g. as a counter for transactions, as padding, for providing randomization for encryption. These definitions it got right: 1. **Blobs** - Literally just any chunk of binary data. In crypto, it often refers specifically to temporary EIP-4844 storage on Ethereum used for rollups and other data-availability use cases. 1. **Proto-danksharding** - It's just the name for EIP-4844, which introduces blobs to Ethereum. 1. **DVT** — Distributed validator technology - Not a popular term. It does this by splitting the private key used to secure a validator across many computers. 1. **Dynamic Resharding** - Not a popular term. Similar to horizontal scaling. It's basically when a system automatically adjust/scales the number of shards depending on load.

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ek9tak/daily_crypto_discussion_august_5_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ek9tak/daily_crypto_discussion_august_5_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eip7mm/daily_crypto_discussion_august_3_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ehvtto/daily_crypto_discussion_august_2_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eg8v5g/daily_crypto_discussion_july_31_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eff1f0/daily_crypto_discussion_july_30_2024_gmt0/).

dilacerated

https://docs.casper.network/#:\~:text=The%20network%20is%20a%20permissionless,Tolerant%20(BFT)%20consensus%20protocols. The network is a permissionless, decentralized, public blockchain. The network's consensus protocol is called Highway, and it has several benefits over classic Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Uh, huh.

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eellzp/daily_crypto_discussion_july_29_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ed2tsy/daily_crypto_discussion_july_27_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eca0ez/daily_crypto_discussion_july_26_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ean7k5/daily_crypto_discussion_july_24_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e53wx6/daily_crypto_discussion_july_17_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e3guoc/daily_crypto_discussion_july_15_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e2omc5/daily_crypto_discussion_july_14_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e1wjb6/daily_crypto_discussion_july_13_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dyo925/daily_crypto_discussion_july_9_2024_gmt0/).

HSuke

That's why Paxos BFT and the BFT family of decentralizes and distributed database were invented. Or DoD private cloud on M365 and AWS. Entirely hosted by DoD for DoD on a private network that never touches the public Internet.

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dwcc8l/daily_crypto_discussion_july_6_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dut3vs/daily_crypto_discussion_july_4_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1du0klg/daily_crypto_discussion_july_3_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1du0klg/daily_crypto_discussion_july_3_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dt81li/daily_crypto_discussion_july_2_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dq60jy/daily_crypto_discussion_june_28_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1doksdb/daily_crypto_discussion_june_26_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dnsd9e/daily_crypto_discussion_june_25_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dm97fg/daily_crypto_discussion_june_23_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dkqdgb/daily_crypto_discussion_june_21_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dkqdgb/daily_crypto_discussion_june_21_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Hedera Con-Arguments Below is a Hedera con-argument written by a deleted user. > Hedera Hashgraph is Delware Limited Liability Company. > > **It's also a Directed Acyclic Graph DLT that uses a leaderless asynchronous BFT algorithm with virtual voting.** This is the same as Fantom, which is also a a Directed Acyclic Graph DLT that uses a leaderless asynchronous BFT algorithm with virtual elections. The main difference between the two is that Hedera is governed by a permissioned Council of 26 (up to 39) while Fantom is mostly decentralized. > > Hedera has [3-5 second deterministic finality](https://hedera.com/hbar), which is noticeably slower than Fantom's 2-second finality, but is still very fast. > > Hedera was launched in 2019 as a centralized DLT targeting institutional and enterprise companies. It is not meant for the retail sector and has almost no DeFi activity. > > ##Semi-Centralized Proof-of-Authority DLT > > - Hedera uses **Proof-of-Authority** (PoA). It has [semi-centralized governance](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/core-concepts/hashgraph-consensus-algorithms) controlled by the 26 (up to 39) members of the governing council, made up of [publicly-known companies](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet/mainnet-nodes), and the 7 board of directors. The council each control their own permissioned validator used for consensus. > - New members of the [council are approved by majority vote](https://files.hedera.com/Hedera_COUNCIL-OVERVIEW_2022_JUNE.pdf), and existing ones may be removed by 2/3 vote. Council members can serve 3-9 years consecutively before they have to take a 3-year break. > - There are barely any public details about the staking power of any of the nodes. There is also a Nothing-at-Stake issue because there is no slashing or economic punishments. They may get kicked kicked off the council for misbehaving, but there's no economic disincentive. > - The code was proprietary software that no one was allowed to fork, and it was closed source up until 2022. > - Its nodes have extremely [high enterprise-level requirements](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet/mainnet-nodes/node-requirements). 5 TB NVMe drives, a $10K NVIDIA Telsa V100 GPU, a 1 Gbps sustained network, Google Cloud Compute Engine VM. These specs are so high that they completely outclass Solana validator requirements. > - Every node has a dedicated GCP IP address, making Google Cloud Platform a possible a single point failure for outages. > > Hedera is designed to be controlled by a conglomerate. Hedera supporters truly believe that is still considered decentralized because they do not believe it's likely publicly-known companies will collude and misbehave. I do not think that design fits well with the crypto community, but acknolwedge that there is a niche community that embraces Proof-of-Authority. > > ##Untrustworthy documentation > > * Much of Hedera's documentation isn't based on the current state of Hedera Hashgraph, but on its ideal state. > * It says it has [a fully decentralized governing body](https://hedera.com/prescription)", which is misleading since they use a 26-member pre-authorized Governing Council. > * It calls itself a "[proof-of-stake public distributed ledger](https://hedera.com/learning/hedera-hashgraph/what-is-hedera-hashgraph)", but it's actually controlled by the governing council and uses Proof-of-Authority. The public hasn't been able to stake (other than the questionable "proxy staking") on it since Hedera's launch 3 years ago. > * For comparison, VeChain is more decentralized than Hedera Hashgraph with its 101 authority nodes and [publicly-available data on their nodes](https://vechainstats.com/authority-nodes/). But at least VeChain is honest about being Proof-of-Authority and even calls itself a [compromise between centralization and decentralization](https://docs.vechain.org/thor/learn/proof-of-authority.html) in their documentation. > * **Real Throughput**: 10K TPS is extremely misleading because it doesn't take into account EVM smart contracts. It published those metrics in 2019, when the smart contact throughput [was 10 TPS](https://ercwl.medium.com/hedera-hashgraph-time-for-some-fud-9e6653c11525), and that was the throughput for Hedera up until Smart Contracts 2.0 released in early 2022. > * Unfortunately, there are no good real estimations for max throughput because Hedera lacks dApps and is a ghost town. It's not congested and regularly sees 5-30 TPS without dApps, so it doesn't get pushed to its limits. With the introduction of Hedera Token Service, Hedera has now somewhat caught up to the misleading documentation it had for 3 years. HTS has an upper limit of 10K TPS, but not everything is going to use it, and [smart contract transactions are throttled at 350 TPS](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet). Some actions, like TopicCreate and AccountCreate transactions on Hedera are down to 2-5 TPS. We don't know what a real performance is going to look like until Hedera builds up its DeFi presence. What we do know is that it's going to be well below 10K TPS and that it was dishonest with throughput documentation prior this year. > > > ##Horrible Tokenomics > > - There is 38% expected supply inflation in 2022, 50% inflation in 2023, and a [whopping 83% inflation in 2024](https://messari.io/asset/hedera-hashgraph/profile/supply-schedule). I'm very skeptical that the retail sector investing in Hedera is aware of how quickly the circulating supply is increasing and has priced that in. > - Only 42% of the supply has currently been released, guaranteeing high inflation for years down the line > - Hedera very likely passes the Howey Test and would be considered a security asset. It is controlled by a council of 26 companies with a large investment of staked HBAR. Holders of HBAR have an expectation of profit derived from the work of Hedera Hashgraph. > - Nearly [50% of the supply](https://messari.io/asset/hedera-hashgraph/profile/supply-schedule) has gone to employees and the foundation. The majority of the rest (40%) is going to the Hedera Treasury. > - The tokenomics a lot like a giant cash grab ICO that will have years of high inflation. That's extremely scary for a retail investor. > - The 50B token maximum should not be trusted at all and likely will not hold. Those validator nodes that control governance are not cheap and will not run themselves freely once the supply limit is reached. By putting an arbitrarily-high supply, they've simply pushed governance change for tokenomics to be dealt with in the future. > > ##Other > > - DeFi is practically non-existent on Hedera, not surprising since it was built centralized. According to both DefiLlama and DappRadar, Hedera has only one notable DeFi project: Stader. Hedera's [total DeFi TVL of $40M](https://defillama.com/chain/Hedera) is less than 1000x smaller than [Ethereum's](https://defillama.com/chains) and 25x smaller than the nearly-identical Fantom's, which has over 100 DeFi projects on it. > - Hedera uses a [predictable fee schedule](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet/fees). Token transfers are very cheap at $0.0001. Smart contracts gas fees are considerably more expensive at $0.05 to $1. That's actually really expensive for a 25-node centralized service, but the high fees aren't too surprising because it uses EVM, which is known to be inefficient. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_hedera) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Hedera Pro-Arguments Below is a Hedera pro-argument written by a deleted user. > Hedera Hashgraph is Delware Limited Liability Company. > > **It's also a Directed Acyclic Graph DLT that uses a leaderless asynchronous BFT algorithm with virtual voting.** Hedera is governed by a permissioned council of 26 (up to 39) companies. It was launched in 2019 as a centralized DLT targeting institutional and enterprise companies. It is not meant for the retail sector and has almost no DeFi activity. > > I had to dig pretty hard to find Pros arguments for Hedera. > > **High performance** > > - Hedera has [3-5 second deterministic finality](https://hedera.com/hbar), which is very fast. > - Hedera [was a 10 TPS smart contract network](https://ercwl.medium.com/hedera-hashgraph-time-for-some-fud-9e6653c11525), but that changed after Smart Contracts 2.0 and Hedera Token Service were released in early 2022. Its network is currently not congested and regularly sees 5-30 TPS without dApps, so it doesn't get pushed to its limits. HTS has an upper limit of 10K TPS with [smart contract transactions throttled at 350 TPS](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet). Theoretically, that is very fast, but keep in mind that we don't have any real metrics of what Hedera's network would look like under full DeFi load. > - Hedera uses a [predictable fee schedule](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet/fees). Token transfers are very cheap at $0.0001. Smart contracts gas fees are considerably more expensive at $0.05 to $1 depending on the contract, but that's still cheaper than Ethereum (as long as the Hedera network is being subsidized by high inflation). > - Hedera has [extremely low energy consumption](https://hedera.com/blog/power-transition-blockchain-sustainability-hedera-hashgraph), using up ~1% of the energy consumption of the average US household. > > **Strong niche following** > > - Hedera is a **Proof-of-Authority** (PoA) network. It has [semi-centralized governance](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/core-concepts/hashgraph-consensus-algorithms) controlled by the 26 (up to 39) members of the governing council, made up of [publicly-known companies](https://docs.hedera.com/guides/mainnet/mainnet-nodes), and the 7 board of directors. The council members each control their own permissioned validator used for consensus. > - The concept of being controlled by a conglomerate of tech companies clashes with the cypherpunk movement. **However, Hedera supporters truly believe that this is the ideal decentralized network because they believe a > consortium of publicly-known companies will never collude and misbehave, risking damage to reputation.** There aren't many PoA networks of this design, so it barely has any direct competitors. It has cornered this niche market. After visiting the Hedera sub, it is evident that they truly love their network and will defend it to the bone. ***** Would you like to learn more? Check out the [Cointest archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_hedera) to find submissions for other topics.

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dj5fdm/daily_crypto_discussion_june_19_2024_gmt0/).

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x).