• raktheundead
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    fedilink
    11 year ago

    The Lightning Network can only do the much-vaunted transactions-per-second number that it claims in theory; in practice, the number is a lot lower and even once you get past the onboarding stage takes something in the order of a couple of magnitudes of times the energy cost of a Visa transaction. Even the Lightning Network developers admit that for the LN to work as advertised even in theory, with a given case of two channels a year (naïve, when considering the only way to actually consolidate a LN transaction is to close a channel) for 7 billion people, block sizes on the Bitcoin network would have to be increased to 133 MB.

    So this is basically a bunch of chancers selling a Heath Robinson machine built onto another, much worse Heath Robinson machine with no practical way to scale to the numbers they want.