MS

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 configurati... ***** 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/196uf6f/daily_crypto_discussion_january_15_2024_gmt0/).

RHINO_HUMP

BUT HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT MS. CLEO NAKAMOTO WHO PREDICTED ALGORAND TO $50???!!! (rip NEO)

zxr7

>microsoftonline.com It's the official MS login domain, but even SEC has their X compromised. Could it be a compromised MS space? /s

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 configurati... ***** 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/1959xub/daily_crypto_discussion_january_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 configurati... ***** 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/194gp3w/daily_crypto_discussion_january_12_2024_gmt0/).

HSuke

As a programmer, you should understand major and minor versioning and how major version often drop support for the previous versions. That's how efficient software works. You don't want to force Windows 11 to support every feature of Windows 95. And that's how Ethereum works. Compared to most blockchains, it's light on technical debt. Bitcoin has 10x more technical debt due to soft forks. You have to create clients that are completely backwards compatible with every older version of Bitcoin. For example, Bitcoin has to support all these types of addresses: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. It would be great if it could automatically upgrade every address to Bech32m and Taproot and no longer recognize older address, but that would be a hard fork. That's technical debt.

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 configurati... ***** 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/192txjj/daily_crypto_discussion_january_10_2024_gmt0/).

catgut65

There is some debt to consider, but then there is the BI value too. Also, the market seems to be pissed that MS is selling 5,000 shares per day for the next ~3.5 months, which will dilute that ratio, but mstr is always buying more BTC with free cash flow, so...DYOR.

Rey_Mezcalero

I can commend the president on taking on MS-13! That has been his greatest gift to improve the quality of life for the average citizen

Jeakjeak

bitcoin chart with some MS paint lines

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 configuratio... ***** 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/1916u6i/daily_crypto_discussion_january_8_2024_gmt0/).

bananabastard

True. But I think the trajectory of BTC is much more predictable than that of MS.

bananabastard

Bill Gates is worth 133 billion, if he hadn't sold so much of his MS stock to diversify, he'd be worth 1.3 trillion.

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 configuratio... ***** 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/190e6q5/daily_crypto_discussion_january_7_2024_gmt0/).

DarthBen_in_Chicago

Anyone also still using MS Money Deluxe Sunset Edition?

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 configuratio... ***** 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/18zlrdt/daily_crypto_discussion_january_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 configuratio... ***** 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/18ys80b/daily_crypto_discussion_january_5_2024_gmt0/).

emyfsh201

I love this man's die-hard stance on Bitcoin! Say what you may about MS, it doesn't change the fact that he understands the potentials that Bitcoin has and that it's here to stay.

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 configuratio... ***** 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/18xyear/daily_crypto_discussion_january_4_2024_gmt0/).

jaymeetee

The fact that MicroStrategy hold a lot of BTC does not lead to the value of BTC plummeting. Of course BTC could plummet despite MS, but right now the signs are all bullish (ETF, Halving, FED pivot, global liquidity increase, TradFi adoption and marketing)

nomorebonks

Price of ICP was at about $5.50 when this ridiculous interaction occurred. Now it's $14.10 because the tech is getting exposure. Every single project in this space does one thing: transactions. That's it. You strip away AWS, Google, MS, akash, flux, holochain, chainlink, etc. and what's left for these chains? One thing: transactions. It's all they do. They don't do AI, or games, or chat apps, or anything. They can't. What's ICP do? Everything fully on-chain. 100% full stack development of all apps on-chain, and on it's own node network not relying on any cloud provider. True tamperproof software living on the blockchain itself. Just no comparison to it. It will be used widely and outside of just the crypto space. It's also the only actual autonomous software to ever exist because the entire protocol is a DAO - either changes pass and get executed by the protocol, or they don't. No one can change it. And the launchpad, the SNS, does the same for any application built on ICP if the dev wants to do it. Software in the hands of the community. It can act as it's own oracle network since it can call out to web2 APIs bypassing LINK for example, and it's the most secure, imo, interoperability platform using chain key technology and secured with threshold ECDSA. And a ton of other stuff. You missed a 3x to here and it's going way, way higher. You didn't do your research.

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 configuratio... ***** 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/18wau1l/daily_crypto_discussion_january_2_2024_gmt0/).

nomorebonks

Every single project in this space does one thing: transactions. That's it. You strip away AWS, Google, MS, akash, flux, holochain, chainlink, etc. and what's left for these chains? One thing: transactions. It's all they do. They don't do AI, or games, or chat apps, or anything. They can't. What's ICP do? Everything fully on-chain. 100% full stack development of all apps on-chain, and on it's own node network not relying on any cloud provider. True tamperproof software living on the blockchain itself. Just no comparison to it. It will be used widely and outside of just the crypto space.

nomorebonks

Take away AWS/Google/MS, Chainlink, flow, flux, holochain, akash and any hosting service for web. What's left you can build on Hedera itself? *Nothing*.

As03

it works for me, just navigate through some MS videos and you'll find the info

foulminion

This guy MS paints.

Salty-Constant-476

You don't. Until they're in your wallet they're about as real as drawing BTC : 25634.93758476 in MS paint.

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 configurat... ***** 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/18sfcdm/daily_crypto_discussion_december_28_2023_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 configurat... ***** 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/18sfcdm/daily_crypto_discussion_december_28_2023_gmt0/).

Buttcoinmodssuck

Thinking about investing in MS if there is a dip after the ETF gets approved

sugar4dapill

MS is green finally!

itsTomHagen

Honest question Why doesn’t BlackRock do what MicroStrategy is doing? Why do they prefer to go through the ETF route. Is it that MS is for private equity? Are BlackRock already doing what MS does?

Medical_Weekend_749

When MS buys, I buy.

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 configurat... ***** 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/18rm941/daily_crypto_discussion_december_27_2023_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 configurat... ***** 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/18q736k/daily_crypto_discussion_december_25_2023_gmt0/).

JamesBondMI6007

No they didn’t, but many banks do run those OS’s on closed intranet environments where they have total control over what can be done with them. That’s very different than utilizing a public blockchain, and why many banks are opting to use closed private blockchain solutions over open public ones. They also largely build and deploy their own custom applications and software. When they do deploy things like MS Office, again it’s heavily customized, locked down, and monitored by the banks OpsSpec/CS teams. They will almost always use private closed blockchain solutions over public ones.

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 configurat... ***** 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/18pil19/daily_crypto_discussion_december_24_2023_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 configurat... ***** 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/18osmh9/daily_crypto_discussion_december_23_2023_gmt0/).

coinfeeds-bot

tldr; Scammers used a wallet draining service called “MS Drainer” to siphon approximately $59 million in crypto from victims over the past nine months. They used Google Ads to target victims with fake versions of popular crypto sites. The scammers exploited the token approval process to transfer crypto from victims to the attacker without their consent. Despite Google's auditing systems, the scammers used regional targeting and page-switching tactics to bypass ad audits, allowing their ads to get through Google’s quality control systems. The developer of MS Drainer employed an unusual marketing strategy, selling the drainer for a flat fee of $1,499.99 and offering additional "modules" for higher prices. This incident highlights the significant problem of wallet drainers in the Web3 ecosystem. *This summary is auto generated by a bot and not meant to replace reading the original article. As always, DYOR.

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 configurat... ***** 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/18o18so/daily_crypto_discussion_december_22_2023_gmt0/).

Ku-no-ku

There's a great Lex Freidman podcast with MS from 2022. Still a good listen if you want someone to convince you to dump your savings into bitcoin.

OmeIetteDuFrornage2

I joined this sub in 2013 because of the "magic internet money" ad that this sub ran, with the shitty MS paint drawing :)

BigTdick07

He also said a spot ETF and FASB rule change are the things that would send Bitcoin to the moon. He hasn’t been wrong yet. MS is a very smart man, if he thinks that’s a possibility, he’s probably right.

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 configurat... ***** 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/18mghll/daily_crypto_discussion_december_20_2023_gmt0/).

Admirable-Style4656

MS is also the longest serving tech CEO in American history

cold_shit6456

what is this + L + ratio + wrong + get a job + unfunny + you fell off + never liked you anyway + cope + ur allergic to gluten + don't care + cringe ur a kid + literally shut the fuck up + galileo did it better + your avi was made in MS Excel + ur bf is kinda ugly + i have more subscribers + owned + ur a toddler + reverse double take back + u sleep in a different bedroom from your wife + get rekt + i said it better + u smell + copy + who asked + dead game + seethe + ur a coward + stay mad + you main yuumi + aired + you drive a fiat 500 + the hood watches xqc now + yo mama + ok + currently listening to rizzle kicks without u. plus ur mind numbingly stupid plus ur voice is ronald mcdonald.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18k48e7/daily_crypto_discussion_december_17_2023_gmt0/).

HarrisonGreen

Because ETH, like BTC, is old tech. ETH has a massive first mover advantage, just like BTC does. But that advantage will not last forever. FB wasn't the first social media network. Nor was MS the first PC OS, or Google the first search engine. High fees, network congestion and usage difficulty are killers to mass adoption. Nobody wants to wait hours and pay $50+ for a transaction, or mess with complicated L2s, when they can just use other chains.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18hv68n/daily_crypto_discussion_december_14_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18ci6to/daily_crypto_discussion_december_7_2023_gmt0/).

mrbluesneeze

"This sub has an abysmal track record of being right" This is the part that was a opinion. You so desperately want people to disagree with you that you are reassuring yourself before people even reply. ​ I did not defend the company, in fact I could not give 2 shits about the company, I told you for what type of investor class it made sense pre ETF to own MS. It makes no sense for anybody here to own MS.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18ayc6h/daily_crypto_discussion_december_5_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18ayc6h/daily_crypto_discussion_december_5_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18a78tx/daily_crypto_discussion_december_4_2023_gmt0/).

moustache4you

I first bought BTC when it was $500 a coin. I watched what happened at its ATH. I kept an eye on it as it bottomed out. I didn't have much liquidity outside of my paycheck. I had a stock portfolio that was being professionally managed at Morgan Stanley, but I started that account right before things went south with the most recent correction. I had invested $55k three years ago and by September it was hovering around $40k. I had really been watching BTC like a hawk at that point and made the decision to liquidate my MS and lump sum it into BTC in early October. TBH, I lump summed in 3 installments so that's sort of a DCA. All in all I averaged in at $28K and continue to DCA a little bit from my paycheck each month. Since then I've recovered all that I lost in my MS account (which I had for 3 years) and am up like 15% I love risk and volatility and its working out. I don't recommend my strategy but it is what's worked for me. Excited for next year!

solomonsatoshi

That does not conflict greatly with the impression I got from the book- point is the real story appears to be far more complex and nuanced than what has been portrayed on social and MS media. Looks like some degree of scapegoating to me.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 the... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/1888bav/monthly_optimists_discussion_december_2023/).

ob81

MS was EXTREMELY early, that is why they can do this. People are picking up on it due the new regulations on how BTC is accounted for on company books. The price is about to rise to reflect the fact that the demand is coming from billions of dollars at once. Someone with billions will be willing to pay millions for 1.

Vegas_42

I'm not sure if every actor creates a blockchain. Actors will more likely use existing and well established chains. It's like MS Windows. Not every company is using an own system in their computers, they use Windows. Or take Android. Not every smartphone producing company is creating an OS. Salesforce, SAP are selling products. A construction company is not developing an excavator. They buy a Cat or komatsu. See what I mean? Ethereum, Solana or Cosmos sell infrastructure. Not everything can be rebuild in the same quality by every actor. They use Well established products.

Difficult-Republic72

$IMGNAI Working Platform AI image generator, beautiful chart, bullish MS intact and loads of social engagement. This might be a low cap 100X gem

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18744v4/daily_crypto_discussion_november_30_2023_gmt0/).

LUKEWHISTLETOOTH

Coinbase isn't about to let people just sign up and transfer control over anything as powerful for the future control of Planet Earth as BTC just cuz they have an old bank account ready to buy. It's like people complaining they can't buy a handgun just because the turned 21 at midnight, or the can't fly an airplane just because they played MS flight simulator. Btc is the biggest tool for shaping the future of human civilization and if ran a company that was gonna sell it, I'd think twice before letting it go myself. Tbh coinbase could have had it all, and Blackrock bested them.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/185hzo1/daily_crypto_discussion_november_28_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/183xbm0/daily_crypto_discussion_november_26_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/182ek1f/daily_crypto_discussion_november_24_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/181nqze/daily_crypto_discussion_november_23_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/18037aj/daily_crypto_discussion_november_21_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17zazjv/daily_crypto_discussion_november_20_2023_gmt0/).

MinimalGravitas

> In both being tech savvy Yea, we're definitely still at the MS DOS stage of adoption. Eventually though users won't need to know anything about cryptographic keypairs, gas fees etc. Onboarding for regular folks will be through account abstraction, as described in detail by Visa: https://usa.visa.com/solutions/crypto/rethink-digital-transactions-with-account-abstraction.html > ETH and BTC sounds like a nightmare for 99% of the population. Yea, but for Ethereum users won't be transacting on L1, they will be on rollups, as has been the plan for over 3 years: https://ethereum-magicians.org/t/a-rollup-centric-ethereum-roadmap/4698 I agree with you on Lightning though, I sold my bitcoin after working out that in order for everyone alive today to open a channel it would take almost a century of completely full Bitcoin blocks, even if no one else used the chain for anything!

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17zazjv/daily_crypto_discussion_november_20_2023_gmt0/).

Smiling_Jack_

For sure. If MS didn't practically own OpenAI I wouldn't even entertain the idea.

Smiling_Jack_

So Microsoft just hired Altman and a bunch of other folks ousted from OpenAI to work for them directly. Did MS just coordinate a coup so they could scoop up the excommunicated talent for themselves? This is like the ruthless MS from back in the day if so. ..and BTC is still range bound.

reversenotation

As a narrative I get it but in practice You need massive infrastructure to do large language model AI like MS and google do

bullett007

Look up Shamir Backups, it could be something you could use instead of 2/3 MS.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17yjvc8/daily_crypto_discussion_november_19_2023_gmt0/).

tf2014s

Not a bad analogy after I thought about it. Most MS Office users use a tiny percentage of MS Office functionalities but think they know it well. I am one of them. Many Bitcoin users understand only a surface level. In practice, they don't need to know. But if you have a degree in Bitcoin, you should understand Bitcoin Whitepaper deeply, follow open-source Bitcoin C++ code, understand the banking system, etc.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17xt27e/daily_crypto_discussion_november_18_2023_gmt0/).

ARROBS12

I'm so sorry man I wanted to say bitcoin. Definitely agree with you. For coding and creating there are way way better Blockchain than BTC. But from my point of view, BTC was created for alternative form of payment and to change this kind of full corrupted centralisation. My apologies to say "crypto" but was morning and forgot to put MS-DOS floppy disk into my brain 🤦

SmoothGoing

What's wrong with the analogy? Office can be in depth. Not many Excel experts out there. And arguably MS Office had a larger impact on the world than bitcoin so far.

Ruzhyo04

ChatGPT has already completely replaced half the internet for me. Google searches, MS paint, and crowdsourcing info from social media are all improved by using AI. It’s even helped me throw together code and I can’t code.

81zi

FLUX and STRAX for me. Basically FLUX is decentralized cloud solution where people own it for far lower costs than on traditional cloud solutions (MS, AWS, google). Whereas Stratis enables to build applied blockchain solutions for enterprise clients and has Microsoft as their partner. I'll add FTM, VRA, DENO and RAY into my bag in the upcoming days. Fantom because of its agressive marketing (formula 1), Verasity because proof of view solution for marketeers, Deno for decentralized social media solutions and Raydium for solana dex, because it offers a great deal of other small scale tokens and people need a lot of RAY to trade them. I'll have a few more on the radar and will invest small sum (50$) into few other small memecoins for pepe-alike situations. I've almost bought SHIB before +100x but decided not to and don't want to make the same mistake again. Well it was not a mistake not to spend money on bullshit, but I guess you have to follow the herd and know what is the most popular thing for then to do. Other than that 75% of my bag is ADA because for me it makes the most sense as a whole. Built by scientists like internet in the early days to provide the most robust framework to build it upon. It just makes sense, but is not the most hyped one, since players like SBF can't manipulate the markets as they did with some other tokens.

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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17t7on0/daily_crypto_discussion_november_12_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17qzopa/daily_crypto_discussion_november_9_2023_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. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17qzopa/daily_crypto_discussion_november_9_2023_gmt0/).

SmoothGoing

It wasn't called core. Connectivity was similar to bittorrent. No spreadsheet of course, more like Access Database if you want MS office reference. No seed word mnemonics then. They didn't come around till 2013. And even today seed words do not sign anything. Private keys for each address are used to sign. Words are not a key or the key. Transactions are usually less than 1 KB but can be larger. Fee is not "built in." It's the difference between inputs and outputs and miner keeps that.

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17ph49v/daily_crypto_discussion_november_7_2023_gmt0/).

lib3rty47

How do these scammers expect to get away with this? Cant MS just trace the build to the dev?

SmoothGoing

Yeah thought the same. Not sure if MS store does any kind of signing, I don't use Windblows or MS anything for more than a decade. Perhaps the "hack" was getting a fake app into the store, maybe using some old stolen cert.

Disavowed_Rogue

Great app screening process you have there MS Store

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17ph49v/daily_crypto_discussion_november_7_2023_gmt0/).

EggLord2000

https://youtu.be/AZqlIkJf0mA?si=MS4EPBu8yWiPTrin Video explaining it. Not for beginners obviously, but once you progress to running your own node and connecting a sparrow wallet to it, the wallet seems like the next step. Is it overkill? Maybe, but it follows the completely trustless nature of Bitcoin. I will probably get this wallet next. Thanks for the recommendation.

jgun83

The point is if MS goes belly up (for whatever unspecified reason), the value of bitcoin remains whatever it is at the time. It doesn't just evaporate with the shareholders getting nothing.

Just1_More

Is there a scenario where the MS-13 gang members get released from their prisons?

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17mhpnc/daily_crypto_discussion_november_3_2023_gmt0/).

knuckle_buster69

I pretty much buy gold, BTC, and scotch...way too much scotch but I have an MS in distillation

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 ... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17lq884/daily_crypto_discussion_november_2_2023_gmt0/).

BuyRackTurk

welcome to maximalism. A few thoughts: * Do not use MS windows, ever, for anything related to windows. Its a privacy hostile system and will steal anything it can from you. Go linux or go broke. * use a 12 word mnemonic, its more secure than 24 despite having less entropy because it has enough, and is twice as easy to memorize. * dont leave loaded hardware wallets around; keep them blank. Every hardware wallet in the world can be opened up and the key extracted, even the ones that tout as "secure element". Only blank ones are safe

turnedtable_

I see this quite often here, Saylor and MS used to hold their key and they had private node and some multisig set up etc. It was in later years they changed it

tinyLEDs

I think it was in one of his shows with that Diamande guy. Can't find which one at the moment. Diamantis? Anyway, not the best interviewer, but as you know MS will ramble his way into something more interesting than the interviewer, when he needs to.

CointestMod

#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by Maleficent_Plankton which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. If this topic is active, submit an entry in r/CointestOfficial and earn Moons if you win. Moon prizes are: 1st - 600, 2nd - 300, 3rd - 150, and Best Analysis - 500. > ####**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 fo... ***** 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. Pros and cons per topic will likely change for every new post. 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/17l7x71/monthly_optimists_discussion_november_2023/).