It’s been letting people be their own bank for 15 years. You can send transactions across the globe for pennies in fees which confirm instantly using Bitcoin lightning. The supply has remained capped at 21 million. It’s doing exactly what it said it would do without a single hack or hour of downtime 24/7, 365.
Comment on OpenAI wants to raise 5-7 trillion dollars. Yes, Trillion
hark@lemmy.world 9 months agoIf AI hits a dead end, it’ll still be trotted out as an excuse to keep wages low, as in “if you peasants keep complaining, you can just be replaced with AI!” just like the articles about burger-making robots over a decade ago when people were protesting for a $15/hr minimum wage back then (and still no burger-making robots mass deployed today). Trash still has its uses, just like how bitcoin hasn’t become the “become your own bank” system it was promised to be and is instead used to hide financial fuckery.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
hark@lemmy.world 8 months ago
The lightning network is more centralized. Congrats, you just exchanged the banks for a different set of banks.
makeasnek@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
Except it’s not. Lightning is incredibly decentralized, you can run a full lightning node on a raspberry pi. Look up a graph of lightning network, looks just like any other decentralized system
hark@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Yeah, I’m sure your dinky raspberry pi is processing a meaningful number of transactions.
Gsus4@mander.xyz 9 months ago
That reminds me of a funny story from Encyclopedia Geopolitica where an expert in money laundering describes bitcoin around 2016 as being an el-dorado for financial forensics. It was so good at tracking funds that there was a bitcoin wallet on a terrorism website on the deep web and they could see the donations arrive in real time and catch a pile of 'em. Maybe now they are more cautious and use more mixing layers, but it is still a terrible use case for that if you don’t control transaction entry and exit nodes: the ledger is public and every transaction is traceable.