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Each Bitcoin transaction uses 4,200 gallons of water — enough to fill a swimming pool — and could potentially cause freshwater shortages (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not even a mention of lightning? I have no idea if it works as I’ve been hearing both yes and no for several years, but writing such an article without mentioning what at least theoretically would be the solution just seems bad.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Last I saw Lightning was pretty much DOA, it's been around for many years and almost nobody's using it. At the time I was checking there was an order of magnitude more activity transferring Bitcoin on Ethereum using WBTC tokens than using Lightning on Bitcoin itself.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Yeah I made a bitcoin payment recently and I was very suprised to learn that my wallet (CakeWallet) doesn't support Lightning payments at all. So I had to do it the old way.

Very weird because bitcoin advocates always pushed it as the holy grail. But I guess bitcoin as an actual payment method is just really too niche for it to take off.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I recall back when Lightning was first come up with thinking how incredibly hacky a solution it was, full of awkward workarounds for the limitations of Bitcoin's blockchain. A few small changes to the blockchain would have made it so much simpler and more robust, but at that point Bitcoin's immutability had become such a fundamentalist religion that any such changes were absolutely rejected. They wouldn't even fiddle with the block size, let alone consider expanding its scripting capabilities.

Then Ethereum came along with the exact opposite philosophy, it's willing to continue making changes to the foundation layer with the overall goal of making Ethereum more functional for diverse applications. Ever since then it's just been a slow transition of everything useful moving over to Ethereum and Bitcoin becoming ever more insular and obsolete by comparison.

It seems like I haven't thought about Bitcoin in years. When this article came up it took me a moment to shift the mental gears and go "oh yeah, that. I guess it's still around."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

See, that's another "no", but then I read just as convincing "yes" posts, and I just don't care enough to make my own research, so I have Schrödinger's lightning network ;)

But any way, it would have to be mentioned in a serious sticker.