Both sides of this arguments are oversimplifications to the point of being meaningless.
Specifically: L2 like lightning, settlements on sidechains, and other things I won't go into here.
The long and short of it is that it's incredibly hard to quantify and compare and I am yet to see an attempt that gives any meaningful insight.
If Bitcoins proof-of-work and the consequences it has becomes a net loss or net win in terms of climate is a very open question. I would love to see more analysis of it but it's really not obvious either way.
Lighting is dead on arrival, and can not possibly scale. It will never amount to anything. It is relying on people finding solutions to routing problems that nobody even knows how to begin tackling.
As someone who has been following the development closely and run nodes for years; you are very, very wrong.
Adoption has been extremely slow and the two main implementations (lnd and lightningd) are far from complete and feature-compatible, even if development velocity is actually very high in both.
There are serious efforts in development to improve on all the current problems, and relatively seamless interoperability and liquidity bridges with L2 networks on other chains like Ethereum is IMO the coming key to make it happen for real.
In practice it should not be necessary for a retail user to run or maintain their own always-on node(s) in order to get the benefits in a secure way - but much of the required plumbing is still in heavy development.
It's OK that it takes time. Maybe it's another 5-10 years until you will be able to appreciate it - I think it's shorter than that but time will tell.
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TLDR lightning hasn't fully arrived yet and it will continue to happen gradually
There is no way to implement routing in lightning. Literally nobody knows how to do it. It is a studied problem, and nobody has a solution. Nobody knows where to start looking for a solution.
It doesn't matter how much is fixed or tweaked in the code, it won't help. We don't know how to solve routing in Lightning. It's just not a tractable problem.
Thanks. This I'm somewhat familiar with, it's a theoretical fundamental issue in any decentralized and distributed routing network so applies for any interesting L2 solution.
In practice this needn't be an issue:
* Most nodes will rebalance, open and closed channels based on neighbour uptime and reliability
* In practice the LN network is expected to have a little but of a hub-and-spokes topology. So in practice you will almost always have a couple of well-known highly connected peers along your route
So it's a fundamental issue that will become a reality in worst-case scenarios but something that can be mitigated.
As one of the comments noted, we're somehow able to do this for TCP and TOR.
You linking to the /btc subreddit makes me think nothing anyone says or any developments will ever convince you (correct me if I'm wrong). In that case, I think your efforts are better spent in focusing on bringing value to the efforts you do believe in rather than telling others they're bound to fail.
100% this. I work at a merchant that accepts Bitcoin for payment, and 90+% of our volume comes in over lightning (a layer 2 solution built on top of Bitcoin).
These layer 2 solutions lead to centralization and make some nodes more important than others. The fact that most cryptocurrency enthusiasts tend to brush this under the carpet shows that it's more about getting rich than some ideological fight against the banks. Cryptocurrency developers are slowly but surely reinventing the banking system, just less efficient and less regulated.
Then there's the question of whether a deflationary currency can even work in the first place.
I don't think that Bitcoin or any other crypto asset needs to become the main currency of any country. They can live as tertiary assets with valuable properties, that can facilitate trade or act as collateral for certain contracts, without being declared a currency in any geographical jurisdiction.
EDIT: according to a chart here [0], 1 "raw" Bitcoin transaction is equivalent to 400k Visa transactions. That's 5 orders of magnitude. Unless Lightning handles 99.999% of all Bitcoin transactions, the Bitcoin network will be unbelievably wasteful.
What’s the real difference between a layer on top of BTC (effectively a new currency backed by BTC) and an existing currency backed by traditional things like gold and international treaties?
