this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2025
369 points (98.7% liked)
Technology
73503 readers
5443 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Eh. Bitcoin mining alone accounts for about 0.7% of 2024 global CO₂ emissions annually, with 40% of that mining happening in US and Canada. 130.50 Mt is nothing to sneeze at.
Far too little and too late.
I literally just said:
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.
I think it's early to call Bitcoin obsolete, it is still after all the dominant cryptocurrency by every measure.
So which systems do you see as offering real utility or innovation? Obviously there's etherium, and it has its own issues, but what else out there do you think is really more than a just gimmick or a scheme?
Its technology is obsolete.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For example, a case could be made that coal power is obsolete.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 Windows 8 is obsolete, but you'll find plenty of computers still running it.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.
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.
Yes, Etherium is very cool and it can do a whole bunch of really cool things! But on the other hand, it can't replace Bitcoin. It's too heavy, transactions are too large, the network can't hope to handle the number transactions per minute that Bitcoin does. 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.
So yeah, I don't see Etherium replacing Bitcoin. Perhaps a layer-2 could, but I have yet to see any that offer the kind of tangible improvements that would really make it stand out.
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.
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.
A lot of bitcoin transactions are opening lightning channels so second layer is working there too
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.
Number of channels is decreasing, but the money in each channel increased. In BTC terms the money decreased, but in real terms the money increased.
Real terms being 2022 dollar value
No it hasn't. Again, according to that link I provided, the total capacity of Lightning peaked in December 2024. These are not the graphs of a growing layer 2, it's been stagnant for many years.
Bitcoin simply wasn't designed for this sort of application, and Bitcoin's foundation layer is absolutely frozen due to the ideology of its users and developers so I don't expect the situation will improve. If you want to do a layer 2 then why not use a blockchain that's specifically designed to support it? If you use Ethereum you can even use token-wrapped Bitcoin as your medium of exchange. There's $14.4 billion dollars worth of WBTC on Ethereum available for exchange, as opposed to the $440 million worth in Lightning channels.
If bitcoin is worth more, you need to move fewer bitcoins to achieve the same result. If there USD value moved in lightning never increases then I would agree it's a failure
I was specifically speaking in USD terms, take a look at the page I linked above. It has graphs with both USD and Bitcoin on them. In Bitcoin terms Lightning's capacity peaked in early 2023. In dollar terms it was December 2024. The line is squiggly and has a general long-term upward trend overall on the net dollar capacity, but it really doesn't look very impressive compared to Ethereum's layer-2 architecture. And that's the only line where I see a long-term rise, the rest have been stagnant or declining for years.
I stand by my overall view that Bitcoin's technology is simply obsolete. It doesn't do anything, it just sits there being valuable because it's valuable. I don't think that's going to endure forever.
Sure. But they're relegated to the realm of highly sketchy pre-mining schemes and pump-and-dump market gambits. There's no serious third party mining community for these boutique coins.
We still have people digging yellow rocks out of the ground and shoving them in big vaults to store fiscal value.
If that's not obsolete, I'm not holding my breath on Bitcoin.
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.
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.
Ah, yes. The fine folks that gave us NFTs.
No pump and dumps to be found over there
Is that what the person you replied to claimed?