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Not exactly. You can transact with one of: * All three private keys. * Any two private keys plus all three xpubs. This is because each private key can derive its corresponding xpub. Putting the xpubs on metal is overkill. Just print out a sheet of paper with each backup that includes all the information to reconstruct the wallet. The paper should include the xpub of each key, the derivation path of each key, the address type of the wallet (e.g. P2WSH) and the starting address index (probably 0). The last two pieces of information you could guess and check, but since you're already printing out copies you might as well make it as easy as possible for your future self who is restoring from a backup and include every relevant detail about the wallet. It's also completely acceptable storing your wallet metadata and xpubs digitally. You're risking privacy, not necessarily security. But if you care about privacy (which you should), you can take some extra precautions like: * Use a dumb printer without internet access or make sure your printer is on a strictly-firewalled network. * If you choose to store a digital copy of xpubs and metadata, encrypt it with an offline password manager or gpg or something. Of course never, under any circumstance, enter a private key into a general purpose computing device. It's only safe to store the xpubs and metadata digitally.
Address types which digest the public key (P2PKH, P2SH, P2WPKH, P2WSH) should be safe. Legacy P2PK and newest P2TR taproot addresses are probably not (less?) secure against it because they do not do that. Hashing algorithms are expected to be harder to break by QC than ECDSA. I will not speak without using words like "probably" and "should" because we're talking about stuff that were never done in practice. People theorize what quantum computers will or will not be able to break and with how many qbits. For now they broke no encryptions whatsoever. Whatever bitcoin amount you have is so far in the list of priorities that you should really not think about it. Even when they start breaking bitcoin (surely after every other system which runs this world), they will first cash out juicy 50BTC block rewards from blocks mined by satoshi, or those heavily-reused addresses with thousands of BTC on them.
You'll need 3 private keys and the 4th xpub to create the correct wallet, and the correct parameters e.g. if it's P2WSH. If you have a "descriptor" it's even better. Here's a link showing how to create a 2 of 2 with sparrow. You just choose 3 of 4, and add 3 private keys with "new or import" then the 4th as "watch only". When you see the correct balance, you can create a send transaction to your own wallet. [https://orange.surf/sparrow-multi-party-multi-sig/](https://orange.surf/sparrow-multi-party-multi-sig/)
Putting "Fact" in your title doesn't make your misconceptions true. If you do a little more research into ECDSA, SHA-256, P2PKH, P2SH, P2WPKH and P2WSH you'll understand why your prediction is wrong.
Over the years, Bitcoin [addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Invoice_address) have matured/advanced through a few generations. The earliest were pay-to-public-key (P2PK), followed very quickly by pay-to-public-key-hash (P2PKH, often called "legacy" today). P2PKH addresses always start with a "1". Then came pay-to-script-hash (P2SH), recognizable by an address starting with a "3". Later came pay-to-witness-public-key-hash (P2WPKH) and pay-to-witness-script-hash (P2WSH) addresses which begin with "bc1q", and still later Taproot (P2TR) addresses starting with "bc1p". Your friend's wallet recognizes legacy P2PKH addresses but not P2SH addresses. His keys are still good and his coins are still safe; he just needs a more versatile wallet.
From the linked article: > The **most common** derivation paths used in Bitcoin are: Emphasis mine. But even if those are the only options, bc1address from m/84'/0'/0' derivation path can be P2WPKH, P2WSH, or P2TR.
AFAIK the border about what's exactly considered standard/non-standard is a bit blurry. There is no BIP that exactly specifies what is and what isn't, so everybody might have slightly different definitions of it. In general though, any of the following can almost certainly be considered standard: 1. Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) 2. Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) 3. Pay-to-Witness-Public-Key-Hash (P2WPKH) 4. Pay-to-Witness-Script-Hash (P2WSH) 5. Multi-Signature (Multisig) While the following can be indications of non standard transactions: 1. Uses a custom script (really any custom script that isn't commonly used, not limited to special OP Codes) 2. Unusual size (Lots of outputs (dusting), lots of inputs) 3. Anything using Timelocks 4. OP-Return with big custom data Then again - blurry subject.
Create a P2SH or P2WSH with a 5 years nlocktime
# I build tool convert Bitcoin P2PKH to P2WPKH, P2WSH, or P2SH-P2WSH Address Online [https://toolifytoday.com/bitcoin-p2pkh](https://toolifytoday.com/bitcoin-p2pkh)
Now we seem to be going around in circles. First, I should correct an earlier mistake in my thinking (and perhaps in my writing). It's possible to offer less than 1 sat/vbyte in fees for a transaction; it's not practical with modern common tooling. Technically the fees are computed by the difference between the sums off all inputs to a transaction (existing UTXOs) and the sums of all its outputs (newly created UTXOs). Thus it's possible to construct a transaction offering just a single satoshi in fees. Such a transaction might not propagate through the P2P network and may be rejected from the mempool of any, perhaps even all mining nodes. Also you'd have to use custom software (command line tools) or rather obscure features (which might be available in any given wallet) to create such a transaction. In general I was corrected in arguing 1 sat/vbyte is the minimum reasonable fee rate to offer. The smallest viable transactions (a single input with two outputs -- for a recipient and change) is about 200 bytes (it's hard to be more precise, but 191 I think is the smallest: [https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/75124/12171](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/75124/12171); the detail involve how the UTXOs you're using as inputs to your transaction were addressed -- P2WSH (pay to witness script hash) is the most economical). At today's rates we're getting about 16 sats per penny (USD), so 15¢ are the minimum readily available fees for a transaction today. UTXOs of under 546 sats are treated as "dust" (too small to usefully use in any transaction) by most wallets. There is no incentive to handling "more precise transactions" on the main Bitcoin blockchain. It is simply not the case that "but we can change anything we want if the idea is popular enough." The analogy of Bitcoin "dust" to physical gold dust is useful here. It's simply not economically feasible to recover and use gold dust; the technology simply doesn't exist to do so at any scale where the value of the gold yielded exceeds the costs of employing the process. That's how it goes for satoshis near the "dust limit." The cost of including such UTXOs exceeds the fee rates for processing any transaction including it. It simply won't happen at any economically significant scale. This is entirely orthogonal to the price of satoshis in any fiat terms. It's purely a function of the transaction sizes (in bytes) and the costs of storing and replicating the ledger of those transactions (the blockchain).
Create a cltv address with the desired date/block. You will not be able to move funds until the given date. You can create a witness or non witness one (P2WSH or P2SH). [Coinbin](https://coinb.in/#newTimeLocked) can help you with this
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ek9tak/daily_crypto_discussion_august_5_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ek9tak/daily_crypto_discussion_august_5_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eip7mm/daily_crypto_discussion_august_3_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ehvtto/daily_crypto_discussion_august_2_2024_gmt0/).
* "1..." addresses are P2PKH scripts (pay to pubkey hash), they can only be used for single-key spendability * "3..." addresses are P2SH scripts (pay to script hash), they can be used for arbitrary scripts (by encoding the hash of the real script in the address, and then revealing the real script at spending time) * "bc1q..." addresses are either P2WPKH scripts (if 42 characters long), the segwit analogue of P2PKH, or P2WSH (if 62 characters long), the segwit analogue of P2SH. * "bc1p..." addresses are P2TR scripts (pay to taproot), which can be used for both single-key or arbitrary scripts.
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eg8v5g/daily_crypto_discussion_july_31_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eff1f0/daily_crypto_discussion_july_30_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eellzp/daily_crypto_discussion_july_29_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ed2tsy/daily_crypto_discussion_july_27_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1eca0ez/daily_crypto_discussion_july_26_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1ean7k5/daily_crypto_discussion_july_24_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e53wx6/daily_crypto_discussion_july_17_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e3guoc/daily_crypto_discussion_july_15_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e2omc5/daily_crypto_discussion_july_14_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1e1wjb6/daily_crypto_discussion_july_13_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dyo925/daily_crypto_discussion_july_9_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dwcc8l/daily_crypto_discussion_july_6_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dut3vs/daily_crypto_discussion_july_4_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration t... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dt81li/daily_crypto_discussion_july_2_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dq60jy/daily_crypto_discussion_june_28_2024_gmt0/).
> I tried to follow a tutorial on recovering with Electrum, however, once I entered the words it showed empty wallets and that was not the case. (it certainly wasn’t a lot of money but it was definitely not none) When you recover an existing seed (= set of 12 or 24 words), Electrum should give you three options at some point, called something like "P2WSH" or "Native Segwit" or some similar abbreviations/names. Make sure you've tried all three when recovering. Also, what does "2 sets of 12 recovery words" mean? Usually a recovery phrase is either 12 or 24 words long. The way you phrase it is a bit unclear if it was two different wallets with each 12 words recovery phrase, or one wallet with 24 words long recovery phrase. This is important to understand when recovering. From what it sounds like I would guess your dad had one single wallet, so it would mean it's a 24 words recovery phrase. Make sure you recover accordingly.
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1doksdb/daily_crypto_discussion_june_26_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dnsd9e/daily_crypto_discussion_june_25_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dm97fg/daily_crypto_discussion_june_23_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dkqdgb/daily_crypto_discussion_june_21_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dkqdgb/daily_crypto_discussion_june_21_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dj5fdm/daily_crypto_discussion_june_19_2024_gmt0/).
#Bitcoin Con-Arguments Below is an argument written by a deleted user which won 1st place in the Bitcoin Con-Arguments topic for a prior [Cointest](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_policy) round. > ####**Intro** > > Overall, Bitcoin's conservative blockchain has failed to keep up technologically with other blockchains. Bitcoin is currently #1 not due to better design, but because it had a first-mover advantage. But how long will that hold? > > Bitcoin is a gateway cryptocurrency. Many crypto enthusiasts often started out with Bitcoin and then branched out. Once you've had a taste of newer, faster networks that offer delectable DeFi dApps and smart contracts, it's hard to go back to slow, boring old Bitcoin. > > ####**Bitcoin doesn't excel at anything** > > **Poor Medium of Exchange** > > Bitcoin is much too slow. It has a max throughput of **3-4 TPS** that takes **30-60 minutes for probabilistic finality**. It used to have a max throughput of 7 TPS, but that has gradually fallen over the years after exchanges started using batch transactions. It's much too slow to be used for point-of-sales merchant transactions. No one is ever going to want to **wait 30-60+ minutes** at a cash register for a transaction to go through. Block times average 10 minutes, but they are very variable. 14% of blocks take longer than 20 minutes, and 5% are longer than 30 minutes [[Source](https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/25293/probablity-distribution-of-mining/43592#43592)], causing stress for those waiting for confirmation. And if there's congestion, some transactions can get stuck in the mempool for hours or days. > > It's orders of magnitude slower than newer networks like Polygon PoS or Algorand, which can [process 4000+ TPS with sub-4s of deterministic finality](https://developer.algorand.org/docs/get-started/basics/why_algorand/), with transaction fees well under a penny. > > Even TradFi now has payment systems like Africa's M-Pesa, UK's Faster Payments, Australia's NPP, the US's upcoming FedNow, and Clearinghouse's RTP, which provide **near-instant** payments and peer-to-peer transactions **without fees**. > > **Unstable Store of Value** > > Bitcoin is too volatile to be considered a stable Store of Value. It lost up to 80% of its purchasing-power during previous bear markets. It's also NOT a good stock market hedge since it often moves with the stock market. > > **Lacks smart contracts and DeFi** > > Bitcoin doesn't support DeFi smart contracts with its very basic Bitcoin Script. There are smart contract protocols that use Bitcoin like Stacks, but they are very disconnected from Bitcoin. > > ####**Difficult to achieve widespread global adoption** > > At 4 TPS, Bitcoin can only make ~345K transactions/day. There are ~8B people in the world today. If Bitcoin grows to the size of 1% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 230 days. **If Bitcoin usage grows to 10% of the population, each person can make an average of 1 on-chain transaction every 6.3 years.** To achieve 10% world adoption, everyone would need to solely be using centralized exchanges and not interacting directly with the blockchain itself. > > ####**Issues with the Lightning Network** > > **Not even the Lightning Network could save Bitcoin** because opening and closing a channel requires 2 on-chain transactions. Whenever the directional capacity of a channel is exceeded, it will need to be rebalanced, or be closed and re-opened. You can't expect people to store months of funds on a single channel. Half of the US is living paycheck to paycheck and would unlikely be able to keep channels open for long periods. If even 1% of the world used the Lightning Network and opens/closes their channels twice a year, the Bitcoin Network would become completely congested. > > **Not a true Layer 2** > > Similar to Plasma channels, **the Lightning network is not considered a true Layer 2 because it lacks global state.** There are many nodes that are not connected to the rest of the network, and onion routing issues can cause nodes to be disconnected from the rest of the network. **Channels only work if everyone's online.** If you're offline, others can force-close your channel, leading to a 1-week wait time where the channel's funds are locked and inaccessible. > > **Meant for small transactions** > > Lightning is optimal for small transactions. The larger your transaction, the higher the fees you have to pay to route it through the network. As of March 2023, the [average channel capacity](https://1ml.com/statistics) is only 0.07 BTC, and the average node capacity is only 0.33 BTC. It's not uncommon for a large 1-BTC transaction to cost $2-10 in fees to route through multiple nodes in the Lightning Network due to limited channel capacity, which can make it more expensive than L1 Bitcoin fees. Also, the total value stored on public Lightning channels account for under [0.02% of Bitcoin's total locked value](https://1ml.com/). > > **Partially-centralized, low-security layer** > > Most people just connect to centralized nodes in a spoke-hub network topology to gain access to high-capacity nodes. Even though [average capacity is getting bigger](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity), the [number of public channels has been on the decline since 2021](https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels), meaning that Lightning is becoming more centralized. > > **Channels require rebalancing** > > One of the biggest problems with opening channels is that they **start out with zero incoming liquidity**. Anyone who opens a channel starts out with a metaphorical "full cup of water". They can't receive any more water until they first empty the cup a little. And they can only receive additional water equivalent to the amount they removed. Similarly, people who open new channels to the Lightning network need to find a way to spend their Sats safely so that they can have incoming liquidity. Merchants and Lightning node providers often have a lack of incoming-liquidity while consumers who only spend usually run out of outbound liquidity. > > There are ways to rebalance your channel capacity, but it usually costs money to pay for a service to provide that liquidity, and it can be as expensive as a $1 fee per $1000 of liquidity. > > ####**The disadvantage of soft forks** > > The major downside of Soft forks is that they require new versions of the software to maintain backwards-compatibility with older versions, which leads to **technical debt**. This significantly slows down the adoption of new updates, which now often take 3-6 years to gain the majority. > > Due to its soft forks, the Bitcoin network has to maintain a mismatch of all sorts of different address formats: P2PK, P2PKH, P2SH, P2MS, P2WPKH, Nested P2WPKH, P2PKH, P2WSH, and P2TR. At the start of January 2023, [only 1% of transactions were using Taproot-compatible addresses](https://transactionfee.info/charts/inputs-types-by-count/) while 65% were still using inefficient legacy addresses from before 2017. > > **Almost no one is using addresses newer than the 2021 update because none of the major CEXs support them**. Most exchanges (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken) [don't support Bech32m addresses](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bech32_adoption#Exchanges), which means they still can't send to Segwit v1 and Taproot addresses, despite that it was [an update from 2021](https://bitcoin.org/en/releases/0.21.1/). > > In comparison, networks that hard fork for protocol updates don't have these incompatibility issues between versions. Everyone is working on the same version, which allows for consistency. > > ####**Extremely inefficient and wasteful** > > To protect against Sybil and 51% attacks, Bitcoin's PoW consensus achieves greater security through greater **redundancy**. Out of a million miners, only one of them is producing the actual block while the rest of them are just wasting energy and electric waste. Full nodes also hold redundant copies of the blockchain ledger, leading to wasted storage. > > In 2022, each block cost roughly $150-250K in energy to mine, which is equivalent to $80-120 of fees per transaction. The total Bitcoin network energy consumption of ~150 TWh/yr is equivalent to [**18-24 US nuclear power plants**](https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/5-fast-facts-about-nuclear-energy). Another way of looking at this is that Bitcoin consumes about as much energy as all data centers globally [[Source](https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally)]. > > In comparison, other distributed consensus methods such as BFT are [10^7 x more efficient for energy use](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12599-020-00656-x). There is a silver lining: the energy waste (and security) will slowly decrease with each block subsidy halving, at the cost of decreased security. > > ####**Mining Pool Centralization** > > **The top 3 mining pools own 66% of the network hash rate** [[Source](https://btc.com/stats/pool)]. Individual miners have no financial incentive to run full nodes, so it's rare for them to be auditing their pool operators and won't notice attacks until it's too late. > > This could be fixed with **Stratum v2**, but that's not available yet. And we don't even know if mining pools will enable the configuration ... ***** Would you like to learn more? [Click here](/r/CointestOfficial/comments/100p7u8/top_coins_bitcoin_conarguments_january_2023/) to be taken to the original topic-thread for this argument or you can scan through the [Cointest Archive](/r/CointestOfficial/wiki/cointest_archive#wiki_Bitcoin) to find arguments on this topic in other rounds. Since this is a con-argument, what could be a better time to promote the Skeptics Discussion thread? You can find the latest thread [here](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1dicy5c/daily_crypto_discussion_june_18_2024_gmt0/).