FaceDeer

The comment you’re responding to linked to a page giving statistics about the Lightning network. The number of channels peaked in 2022 and has been going down ever since then.

This was a really interesting reply, thanks. I’d leave a longer response, but honestly I really need to be asleep right now.

No problem. It’s past my bedtime too, but I’m really pleased that I’m able to discuss this stuff and I’m not getting downvotes or called a shill simply for providing information. It’s always been a big area of fascination for me, the technology is really neat. :)

You can definitely get started for $1000.

Sure, you could set up something that can process blocks. But there’s no way you’d be able to make a profit with something that small. One of the fundamental tenets of cryptocurrency is that it doesn’t rely on anyone acting altruistically, it assumes that everyone involved is in it for the money. It leverages greed to ensure that everyone “follows the rules”, by making it so that if you break those rules you make less money. So I wouldn’t consider a blockchain to be secure if it depended on miners who mined at a loss out of the goodness of their hearts. When people worry about centralization they overlook that Bitcoin has economies of scale that massively favors the bigger mining operations, the dollars-per-hash are much lower for the warehouses full of ASICs next door to a power plant than for the guy with a graphics card in a closet at home.

I did also mention that you could get involved in staking on Ethereum for much less than $120,000, at the cost of depending on third parties to handle the actual validation. You can do that either through staking pools or liquid staking. Essentially, you own a “share” of a single validator’s stake and get a proportionate portion of the validator’s rewards, minus a fee that the validator charges for actually running the validator.

the network can’t hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does.

As of this writing, Ethereum is handling 21.1 transactions per second. Bitcoin is handling 4.9 transactions per second. So purely in layer-1 transactions per second Ethereum’s got 4.3 times the capacity of Bitcoin.

Some of those Ethereum transactions are for running layer-2s, as you mention that greatly expands Ethereum’s capacity. Ethereum is specifically designed to be able to handle layer-2s well, it has features that were added to make them easier to scale. Bitcoin, on the other hand, was never designed for layer-2s and what it does have are hacked-together bodges like Lightning that are going nowhere.

I think most people agree that the two systems compliment each other, they each work well in their niche, but couldn’t do the others’ job.

What “job” does Bitcoin do that Ethereum can’t? And before you say “digital gold”, there are literal gold-backed stabletokens on Ethereum if that’s what suits your fancy.

What do you mean, “test the sturdiness of American alliances?” All this does is destroy the sturdiness of those alliances.

Its technology is obsolete. That doesn’t mean it can’t still dominate the market share.

For example, a case could be made that coal power is obsolete. There are still plenty of coal power plants on the grid. Windows 8 is obsolete, but you’ll find plenty of computers still running it. And so forth. There’s inertia in these things.

And Bitcoin’s current “dominance” is 60%. That’s not exactly an overwhelming position.

So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there’s etherium

You answered your own question.

Ethereum’s not just one token, mind you. There’s an ecosystem on Ethereum with a lot of innovation that’s not directly rooted in Ethereum’s advances. That’s the benefit of supporting smart contracts, it’s a general purpose computer that other stuff can be run on. There are a lot of layer-2 blockchains running on Ethereum, for example Aztec which has Monero-like privacy built into it.

It’s literally “the people with the most money get to make the rules”.

No, it’s not. Ether is not a governance token, Ether holders have no influence over the rules of the blockchain. This is a very common misconception and I can understand why it’s easy to fall into, but consider it this way; when someone puts up a stake they are not buying “influence” over the blockchain, they are giving the blockchain a hostage. They’re putting their money under the control of a contract that will destroy their money if they do anything that contravenes the rules of the blockchain.

So who gets to decide what rules the blockchain runs under? Everyone who uses it. They’re the ones who are generating transactions, and those transactions are cryptographically signed to work on the particular version of the blockchain that they want to use. If they collectively decide to switch to a different version of the blockchain then they collectively change what version of the blockchain their transactions are going to. If the stakers don’t go along with that transition then they’re left holding Ether on a blockchain that nobody is using, which means that Ether is valueless.

This isn’t hypothetical. Ethereum undergoes routine hard forks to upgrade the network, adding new features. Proof-of-stake itself was one such upgrade. There have been subsequent upgrades that did things to the network that the stakers probably weren’t happy with - notably the one that added EIP-1559, a change that causes transaction fees to be burned rather than giving them to the stakers. It was a change that literally took money out of the hands of the stakers. But they went along with it because they had to. They were not in charge.

If anything, it undermines crypto’s greatest strengths, decentralization and equal access.

How easily can you get into Bitcoin mining right now? Regular computer hardware doesn’t cut it, hasn’t cut it for a long time. You need a purpose-built ASIC, a piece of specialist hardware that is only manufactured by a handful of computer hardware companies. You’ll also need extremely cheap electricity, which you won’t be getting out of the wall of your house. You’ll need an industrial power feed, probably located somewhere near a power plant with excess capacity where you can get it particularly cheap.

If you want to set up a solo Ethereum validator, all you need to do is buy ~$120,000 worth of Ether and make a transaction to stake it. You can do that anywhere. No special hardware is needed, no ongoing significant power cost. You do need a reasonably stable internet connection, but it doesn’t have to be a high-speed one. You could probably do it from a cabin in the woods over Starlink. Nobody can stop you. Nobody will even know who you are.

If $120,000 is a bit much for you (it’s still far less than would be required for a Bitcoin mining farm) and you don’t mind a little bit of reliance on third parties, you could buy some liquid staking tokens. Spend as little as you want, they subdivide. Or wait a little while, Ethereum’s devs are mulling a proposal to reduce the minimum stake from 32 Ether to 1 Ether. That’ll reduce the price for setting up a solo validator to $3,683 at today’s price.

Ether has a market cap of $450 billion, and that doesn’t count all the other tokens running on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s been running since 2013. If you call that a “boutique coin” based on “pump-and-dump” then clearly you’ve either got a highly biased or highly ignorant view of cryptocurrency.

If that’s not obsolete, I’m not holding my breath on Bitcoin.

There are technical flaws in Bitcoin that could literally crash it if they aren’t patched out before they become exploitable, as in it’s at zero value and will never recover. That’s not something that can happen to gold.

I literally just said:

Only if Bitcoin remains predominant.

Yes, Bitcoin still uses proof-of-work. That’s because Bitcoin is itself a fossil, its userbase and developers have consciously decided to not adopt new blockchain technologies and remain locked in the current protocol. Other blockchains have continued moving on. Alas, Bitcoin has name recognition and inertia on its side, which will keep it around for a long time. But at some point I expect its obsolescence will catch up with it and overcome that inertia.

Only if Bitcoin remains predominant. The rest of the ecosystem largely moved on to proof-of-stake validation years ago, which doesn’t require significant amounts of energy expenditure.

Don’t conflate my passtime wiþ some manifesto of demands.

Your bio literally ends with:

Join ðe resistance.

Let the Republicans get on the record protecting pedophiles first.

So you’re demanding payment in the form of free AI models instead of cash.

The only thing you’re likely doing is reminding the AI-in-training “ah yes, those characters have a ‘th’ sound to them.” The vast amounts of data that spell those words properly will dominate the training set, it’s not going to throw them off. Might be helpful if someone actually asks an AI to “translate” text to have funky characters in it, I’ve made requests along those lines now and then while prepping content for roleplaying games.

I figured that was a likely reason. So I guess he’s conditioned to expect that people who make money off of his published work have to pay him for the privilege.

Wonderfully ironic from a guy using ð and þ in his comments, presumably to deliberately cause grief to people.

It’s at http://127.0.0.1:5001/. It’s my sex box, though. And her name is Sony.

This is why I only confess my crimes to my local LLM.

I just want it for the memes.

Oh, there’s a competition? I’m curious what the high score will be.

A short-sighted self-sabotaging strategy. How appropriate to the subject at hand.

For folks who are lamenting that the Canada/US relationship has cratered because Trump was reelected, this is something that’s been an ongoing problem since 1982. Canada has been on the “abused” side of this relationship for a long time, it’s just sighed and endured it until now.