But instead it turned into a game of "hodl" to get rich.
Scams were openly perpetrated in the forums.
I became completely disillusioned. What exactly does bitcoin offer the world today?
Aside from perhaps gold, bitcoin is the most successful currency in the world not associated with a central bank and state.
It's the most liquid asset that is not issued by a central bank. At any point you can issue a transaction to anyone else in the world, without the possibility of a third party intervention. I've had issues pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked.
Sort of like gold I guess.
I have never figured out "lightning network", their "solution" for payments. (bitcoin payments are so impractical that they have a different, separate system to use for actual payments, that works completely differently.) Seems very convoluted. I need to pay a huge fee just to make a channel so I can receive anything? And there is something about liquidity? I implemented bitcoin stuff and still cannot figure lightning out.
bitcoin is mainly for buying it and looking at a chart.
- It can absolutely blocked by third parties (either the exchange you use or the mining cartels can).
- in practice its liquidity is tied to the liquidity of the ”stablecoins” (USDT and the likes) and as such it's not “the most liquid” since the liquidity of those stablecoins is higher.
It is a highly reliable, global-scale P2P software system, we can analyse, experiment with and learn from.
for the sake of argument, is there any way to introduce monetary policy into crypto currency so as to correct for unwanted inflation/deflation? without compromising on its decentralization promise
What was about it that made you think it might be a good thing? Have those aspects gone now or is the problem that there are new factors that put you off it?
Most importantly, what could be done to get you back onboard with the idea? I'm not really a fan of "Bad thing is bad" and like to think in terms of "This thing has a bad aspect, what could be done to fix it"
To my mind, I was not expecting Bitcoin to increase in value this quickly. Few people probably were. On the other hand if the end point of Bitcoin was to replace money, then I can see how it would have a high value at that endpoint. That presupposes that it reaches that endpoint. The perceived value (barring the mood based fluctuations of speculation) depends on the proportion of people who believe in that outcome and when they think it will occur.
When Bitcoin came out I thought that it was indeed like email for money, and that it would take a similar amount of time for it to be used by people in general. I figured it would be 20 or 30 years before the average person had even heard about it. Turns out I was quite wrong there.
I don't think Bitcoin is particularly impressive as an investment today, the risk when it comes to retaining value is some unknowable but probably quite high. The risk of holding and retaining your balance adds another layer to that. For the value of the mining reward to stay level with an external currency there has to be around a 20% increase per year to keep up with the halving. Exceeding that rate is what lead to the increase in energy expenditure. While it has increased more than that so far, the one rule of exponential growth is that it cannot continue forever.
It might have a few doublings left in it, but it is slowing down and with a risk level where you could probably find a lower risk way to double your money in a similar timeframe. Maybe it hits a million, but when? If it takes long enough you're better off with an index fund.
Bitcoin sits around $100,000 today, that's way higher than its current utility. I feel like the value should represent the aggregate impression of where Bitcoin will be in the long term. I mostly think this is true and bubbles represent the flow and ebb of the faith that has no logical support. I used to think that nobody could sustain the delusion of value when it is not apparent for many years on end. House prices have led me to think that maybe people can pretend that their thing is worth more than it actually is for many years without faltering.
I guess the world is in a funny place now. For even an index fund to be long term stable, some counties have to continue to exist, and people are beginning to have doubts about even that.
I would say that much of the reason for that is because of the perception of the currency that is widely held. It's not much good because people think it's not much good. I bought a few things online years ago with Bitcoin and it worked pretty much the way it should, but most of those places that accepted it stopped . Mostly they stopped due to the public perception.
I do wonder if it has a chance to become useful once it is old enough to not be considered interesting, and the idea of holding something while it increases in value dies.
The now much more diverse mining space is much better than completely centralized in one entity current system.
And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.
Does your mother in law know what fractional reserve banking is? A bank run? Can they explain what happened in the 2008 financial crisis? No? They why would they need to know how Bitcoin works beyond just "trust me, it does"?
That’s what my broker and many others do. They buy a pool of crypto and resell to investors. You don’t get a wallet, you can’t transfer your crypto at all. It just sits there until you sell it. The most distilled Hodl practice ever.
edit: typo
I can tell you down to the day how many bitcoin there will be decades from now.
Can you do the same for any fiat currency for next week?
It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems.
Bitcoin holders as a group are constantly losing money by definition. Some of them cash out at a profit, I suppose.
As this story itself demonstrates, you clearly can't, and it already has the potiential to affect markets: "18.04 million bitcoin sits in dormant accounts. Sizable inactive accounts that wake up after years of dormancy draw investor attention because of the potential market impact if those coins are sold."
It's impossible for you to know if the accounts are dormant intentionally or because the owner has died or lost access - and in the latter case the coins are effectively lost or destroyed in every practical sense. So you can't even say how many usable bitcoins exist at this very moment, and it is even more impossible for you to tell exactly how many accounts will be lost in the future.
So what? if you say "scarcity", that by itself has no value. plenty of things are scarce, but are not valuable, no one wants it.
And anyway, bitcoin is not even scarce. there are thousands of other coins now, anyone can create one, these will / are diluting the $$$ going into btc
I fully agree that Bitcoin did not become what it was originally built for (a currency system for the internet), and as a matter of fact, for very valid reasons:
- custody is really hard, and damn near impossible for most people, including people who like to think of themselves techies and who all end up getting caught with their pants down when exchanges get hacked because they forgot the number one tenet of Bitcoin. Please repeat the mantra after me: Not Your Keys, Not Your coins.
- the 10mn confirm thing is a pain for small, casual transactions
- scalability (it won't and was never designed do what eg VISA can do in terms of TX/second)
- most people are downright horrified when they realize the non-reversibility aspect
- most people don't understand what money actually is and hot it works in the first place, so seeing the advantage of BTC is damn near impossible
- etc...
Bitcoin has simply become something else entirely, a kind of financial instrument that had no equivalent up until now and which has turned out to be profoundly useful to a very large class of people (go ask USA - one of the country with the worse divorce laws on the planet - men in the middle of divorce proceeding for their opinion on the topic of assets that can't be confiscated).
Oh and yes, I already hear the shouts from the back of the room: skirting the law!drug dealers! criminals! cyber-ransoms! Won't you think of the children!. One single word to counter this argument: there is thing called the USD which is used for the exact same thing as all the above "use cases" (and worse, like toppling foreign governments) and has never been considered evil for some reason.
I do understand and feel for folks who looked forward o Bitcoin as a replacement for the dollar, lubricating internet commerce and why they are disappointed. I was one of them and it took me a long time to understand what Bitcoin actually was.
However, if you fall in the category of the disillusioned, please consider: something else will come around to solve the problem of internet currency. It won't be Bitcoin. It maybe layer two stuff, who knows.
But on the other hand, Bitcoin has become something extremely useful (and even without trying to analyze the why, the price is an inescapably clear proof of that).
Its singular properties as a financial instrument make it something that no other thing in tradfi can boast having:
- demonstrable finite supply, and therefore a rather predictable outcome on a long term timeline.
- first mover advantage (aka network effect). Other cryptos might be better and get better all the time technically, might better for the environment, but at this point, displacing BTC in terms of mindset and allocated capital ... good luck
- demonstrated long term hedge against inflation (it's been 15 years, and if you can afford to ignore volatility at the one year scale, it's undeniable). On that topic, I can't NOT post this link:
- transactions are impossible to censor, be it by corps or sovereign entities (for me personally, the number one attractive trait, a basic unbreakable defensive guarantor of individual freedom). This goes from simply giving you a ton of actual leverage in e.g. a divorce, to being able to work your way around tyrannical governments (see the Canadian truckers who got all their bank accounts frozen for daring to disagree with the thugs in charge).
- operates 24/7 trustlessly and outside any jurisdiction
- quasi-instantaneous transmission of value across borders, geographies, distances, etc ...
- pseudonymity and privacy. While not perfect in this regard, you neighbor could be a freaking multi-billionaire and you wouldn't have the first clue.
- you can physically disappear and travel with *ALL* of your wealth at an instant notice.
- it cannot be confiscated short of physically torturing the relevant information out of you. And even then, you can protect yourself by not knowing the full secret to accessing your BTC. And this assume people know you have them.
- etc ... the list is long
The stablecoins you mention are arguably more liquid than Bitcoin, but, except for DAI, they're issued by central-bank-like institutions such as Binance and Coinbase. You're right that they're not officially central banks, but that just means you get all the drawbacks of central banks without the advantages.
The top comment on /r/AskEconomics is:
"The cantillon effect doesn't really exist in any significant capacity. Central banks nowadays announce their actions well ahead of time, that means before the actual expansion of the money supply, people know this expansion will happen, and markets price in that expansion. So there really isn't much benefiting from being "early".
Beyond that there really isn't much empirical evidence on the cantillon effect to exist in any significant capacity."
Since I know little about this topic I'd appreciate HN's view.
This sentiment models a correction to a complaint I first heard with people who tell us everything fell apart since we ended the gold standard. They ignore that we raised all boats rapidly when we didn't pin everything to governments ability to fight gold hoarders for small amounts of gold entering the market. Even gold hoarders are better off in terms of what the market has created to exchange for their gold because that exchange ceased to be limiting on market expansion.
One could say the US economy was exponential both before and after the currency change, but as with Moore's Law, it gets harder to remain exponential if as few as one limiting factor is emerging.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
yeah and you don't even need to change bitcoin - just use a stablecoin over-collateralized by BTC built on the bticoin network. In essence these systems work with $1 of the stablecoin backed by $N dollars (N > 1.6) of the the backing asset (BTC). Then they use a smart contract system of price oracles, liquidations & interest rate curves to balance supply, demand and risk parameters. It's pretty much an over-collateralized lending protocol that issues its own asset that is pegged to $1
This has worked well for the past 11 years with MakerDAO on Ethereum and it's stablecoin DAI. I think at its peak the DAI stablecoin had around $7 billion in circulation and was about 5-10% the size of USDT, now it's about half that. However, high treasury interest rates and low interest in decentralized stablecoins have made more "traditional" stablecoins like USDT, USDC vastly more profitable and successful. In recent times even DAI has been trying to become more like USDC and USDT with treasuries held in intermediaries
https://en.macromicro.me/charts/32355/bitcoin-supply-last-ac...
https://charts.bitbo.io/dormant-coins/
Edit: If I understand correctly around 15% of coins has not moved in even ten years. So more than 20% of all the mined coins up to mid 2015 have not moved since.
Well given that you basically can't spend bitcoin anywhere, it's definitely not a currency.
The fact that the pools haven't intervene until now doesn't change the fact that they can definitely do it, and would if pressured by governments. Economic sanctions using the US dollar weren't a thing until they were.
And you only need to have leverage against 50% of the mining power to make that happen, which is pretty straightforward given how centralized the power structure of bitcoin is (although less centralized than for most crypto, for which the developer has full control).
I didn't sign anything, make any appointments, buy any insurance, walk into any offices, present any identification, or even tell the guy my name. The total time involved was about 20 minutes, but only because I wasn't using Lightning. I had a similarly informal and short, but more argumentative, experience with the previous transaction, at a winery whose owner loudly insisted that he hadn't received the money... until he realized he was checking the wrong phone.
You are so full of shit comparing this to a real estate transaction that I am at a loss for words. You're about as full of shit as the winery guy. He, too, was blathering all sorts of nonsense at me about Bitcoin that showed he didn't have the faintest idea what he was talking about.
The scenario you're talking about is a 51% attack where big mining pools collude to ensure that nobody else can ever mine a block (because it might allow the laundering of tainted coins). That would be a global and extremely obvious disaster for the Bitcoin network, and it would be remedied by whatever measures were necessary to end the attack, possibly including a hard fork or strategic bombing.
Remember that the world's investor class now has 2 trillion dollars tied up in Bitcoin, and they do not want to see it collapse, and such a successful attack would greatly undercut investor confidence in the value of the asset. The Bitcoin crowd has enough pull that they extracted a pardon for Ross Ulbricht and got a friendly SEC head this year. Even before that, when one or another pool would grow to the point where it might be able to mount a 51% attack, it would get hit by DDoS attacks to bring it down.
You're comparing that to a bank declining a credit card transaction because you're in another city.
Governments have been pressuring Bitcoin miners for over 15 years; it's outright illegal in many countries. The hashrate dropped by more than half when the PRC outlawed Bitcoin mining. The effect on the functioning of the network has been pretty much undetectable.
Controversial, I know. However, already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine. There is currently no solution to this problem. In the near future, I imagine that the raw data of your camera will be associated with a token on a blockchain (not bitcoin, but a dedicated high-capacity blockchain). Such a system would allow us to determine that a picture was indeed taken with a physical device, and thus that the events depicted have a bearing in the real world.
My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous. Where everything of value is underpinned by a specialized blockchain. When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain. In virtual reality, every digital product has a specialized blockchain. Every kind of transaction; compute, assets, AI, will all be underpinned by trustless peer to peer systems.
All these specialized blockchains trade security for throughput. My bet is that Bitcoin will act as a security guarantor in our future digital society, where the state of every blockchain is periodically validated on the Bitcoin network. Thus, I bet that every transaction in the future will have an associated Bitcoin cost. Thats why I own a small amount of Bitcoin.
Ok, so then they're not a bitcoin thing then right?
> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." … Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve#Legal_status_o...
See also https://www.atlantafed.org/about/federal-reserve-system/just...
Reality is that you can’t bootstrap trust.
On top of that, up until this point in time, Bitcoin has been the opposite of secure. The entire history of it is filled with people constantly losing money and being scammed with no real recourse.
What about the other thousands of other public blockchains, many of which are extremely similar (DOGE, BCH, LTC, ...)?
> In a world headed toward web 3.0, generative AI content & virtual reality
... Metaverse anytime now.
> there is tremendous value in a trustless and immutable peer to peer system.
Personally, I think there is much more value in trusted systems.
> In fact, I think we NEED it
... because the world didn't work at all prior to 2009?
> and should as a society happily bear the power consumption
In contrast, I think if we were to eliminate Bitcoin and other crypto, we'd save 1% of electricity with very few negative side effects, but a significant reduction in crime, frauds, and scams.
> already we cannot trust that a digital picture is genuine.
Solutions to this problem might well involve digital signatures and hardware enclaves in cameras (installed by trusted centralized camera producers which could publish the public keys of each sold camera once), but I don't see how public blockchains would add any value. The signature of the picture embedded in the picture speaks for itself.
> My bet is that we are headed toward a future where blockchain is ubiquitous.
Gott forbid.
> When you order groceries, the origin of the produce and raw ingredients are all embedded in blockchain.
Apart from the fact that I don't see the benefit of that, the oracle problem makes this impossible, I fear.
See Goharshady, Amir Kafshdar: Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-Parties: Why It Is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain. arXiv:2110.09857, arXiv, 19 Oct. 2021. arXiv.org, http://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857.
I have sent money overseas, fast, cheap, securely, with fiat.
The externalities of the bad US retail banking system are enormous. First we got PayPal with Thiel and Elon, then crypto. :-/
- For the majority of financial transactions you might want to make, fiat is still what you need, because realistically very little IRL uses any L2 solution. Thus, you need a fiat off-ramp... Like an exchange. - Exchanges mandate you identify yourself to them - KYC/AML and all. Governments might not be able to know which wallet is yours, but they sure as hell can and have secure those off-ramps this way.
I've seen plenty of pro-BTC arguments on a technical level about privacy, resilience, independence from central banks, etc. but fundamentally I've never seen anyone able to come up with something that can out "your opponent is the government and no technical project can overcome a legal obstacle".
Most countries/systems have one central bank, even if we assume there are only 2 mining pools and they "control the network", wouldn't a central bank still be more centralized?
Besides, the mining pools don't "own" the network, anyone can participate, which kind of makes the whole "more centralized than a central bank" argument kind of weak.
> What about the other thousands of other public blockchains, many of which are extremely similar (DOGE, BCH, LTC, ...)?
They are simply not as secure and could be attacked by well funded actors. Perhaps in time another blockchain will win out.
>... Metaverse anytime now.
Just curious. Do we disagree about where this (technological progress) is headed, or is it the timeline? I think its quite likely that we will spend more and more time in vitual or augmented reality. For good or ill.
> Personally, I think there is much more value in trusted systems.
I prefer the absence of a central authority. Perhaps im cynical.
> ... because the world didn't work at all prior to 2009?
We dont need crypto right now either. I simply think that the only good outcome of our digital future is a trustless one, and I think blockchain will play a central role there.
> Solutions to this problem might well involve digital signatures and hardware enclaves in cameras (installed by trusted centralized camera producers which could publish the public keys of each sold camera once), but I don't see how public blockchains would add any value. The signature of the picture embedded in the picture speaks for itself.
The value of blockchain is in the absence of a trusted centralized camera producer that can be pressured.
> Apart from the fact that I don't see the benefit of that, the oracle problem makes this impossible, I fear.
The oracle problem is solved in the same way the camera problem is solved. By digital signatures of real world interactions of the machines in the production chain.
I think the world will lean into trustless systems over trusted systems, lets see. That is not to say that I dont think the world would continue to function on trusted systems, I just think it makes dystopian outcomes more likely.
They also serve the network as a form of security bounty, let's say tomorrow we discover a way to break encryption "soon" pepople will be provided with a path to safer addresses but these old addresses, the ones for which a public key is known, act as an incentive to look for such security flaws.
Your personal experience may be different and we are willing to hear it but don't treat it as the final truth. I am pretty sure that it was damn awkward asking.
Here I am in my country where I don't even ask for UPI payments to cash because its sometimes awkward and this guy is loading bitcoin of all things and saying its liquid lmaoo and like if it wasn't awkward.
Saying truth cut you so bad that you had to bad mouth the other person for the sake of it. Grow up at this point, man. This is highly against everything the ethos of hacker-news stands for.
With KYC and other regulations ramping up, how true is this in practice?
I guess you can get some of that benefit with a wallet only you control. But most folks can barely handle using a custodial wallet.
Transactions are also public by default, for better and worse.
It is an investment vehicle, not a functional currency. For most people you can't use it as a currency if you tried.
I mean if somebody accepts precious metals, jewels etc. as payment in lieu of actual money that doesn’t mean those things suddenly become a currency.
That’s the opposite of stability unless you have an entirely static economy with no growth.
Adopting an extremely deflationary asset as a “currency” is one way to get the no growth part I suppose. It certainly wouldn’t be stable.
We’ve (well some, anyway..) learnt that lesson with the gold standard and permanent boom and bust cycles prior to the 1930s. It was anything but stable in the short/medium term.
I am trying to buy a property, and I've been moving money around to prepare for a down payment. It's July 4th weekend. I initiated some moves in the afternoon of July 3. But an ACH transaction in the U.S. takes "1-3 business days." First of all, why "1-3" and not "1" or "3" or "2"? Secondly, why business days? I get paged at night and on the weekend if something breaks at work, but the banking laws or customs say that computers only move my money 9-5 during holidays? Computers are taking non-human-holidays?
I don't get it. If bitcoin won't disrupt this, something else should.
I have been trading it weekly/monthly really simply, and it's a few K a month of profit. So I think it's useless at the moment other than as a scheme to gamble. I think there's a bit of a trust issue.
But the big issue from my point of view is not the actual key attrition rate but the uncertainty of the money supply, because from my point of view, these are the important questions about key attrition:
- If Bitcoin goes to zero, what order of magnitude of money will the investor class lose? 200 trillion dollars, 20 trillion, 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, or 2 billion?
- How much money and power has Bitcoin transferred to its early adopters: 2 trillion, 200 billion, 20 billion, 2 billion, or 200 million?
- How much impact could awakening dormant coins have on the market? If Satoshi, or for that matter Hal Finney's heir or another early participant, started liquidating his early coins, would that be a tenth of the usual daily trading volume? Ten times? A hundred times?
Questions like these are why lolc brought up key attrition in response to ducksinhats saying, "It offers stability and a mathematical escape from very fallible humans controlling monetary systems."
A key attrition rate of 99% or 90% to date would result in very different answers to these questions. But 20% or 50% to date is fairly minor in this context.
You should ask them why they've generated about 58 million millionaires and 2,700 billionaires worldwide. That's some actual "hoarding" you should be concerned about, instead of concern trolling about Bitcoin.
The fact that it wasn't a lot is precisely why this is a good example of Bitcoin being more liquid than real estate. You can't sell US$100 of real estate, not even here in Argentina.
Well, we also use "feet" and "cups" instead of base 10 measurement system.
What "cuts" me is not people uttering uncomfortable truths but people confidently spewing total bullshit with evidently no concern for its truth-value or even verisimilitude. It's even worse when it seems to be motivated by partisan struggle, as in this case. Both confident bullshit and partisan struggle are enormously corrosive to the collective epistemic endeavor.
Well besides common sense.
If you own a deflationary asset/currency which is guaranteed to appreciate as long as the economy is growing (well it wouldn’t if btc became a global currency but that’s another matter) there is no reason for you to invest into anything unless it offers a disproportionately high return (or buy goods/services now if you can delay buying them)
It would just reduce risk tolerance for investors and increase the real cost of borrowing significantly. That’s how deflationary currencies work (we know that based on several hundreds years worth of empirical evidence).
Really? You can’t imagine any process which would take 40x less time than 20 minutes?
Sure bitcoin is more liquid than real estate. That’s rather obvious and not a particularly high bar. It’s not particularly liquid compared to actual money or many other financial instruments though.
Even if you can pay for stuff with bitcoin it’s not a currency until people actually start setting prices based on it.
> liquid enough
I’m sure I could find people who would accept Apple’s stock in lieu of actual money, that wouldn’t make it a currency
Rebutting the grandparent's claim that Bitcoin was no more liquid than real estate was one of the main objectives of my comment. I am glad that you agree that their claim is obviously false, but I think it's unfortunate that you didn't respond to their comment to say so.
I agree that Bitcoin is less liquid than dollars, which is why I was making the exchange, actually. For other financial instruments, it depends on who you are, and whether you have an account with a stockbroker. You can't open an Interactive Brokers trading account with US$100, and it's going to be challenging if you are in Venezuela. You are going to have a hard time finding newsstands that will accept your SPY shares, but they are more liquid than Bitcoin in the sense that, given that IB account, you pay much less to convert them into dollars even if you have to cross the spread, and if you're willing to wait 20 minutes, you have an excellent chance of earning the spread instead of paying it.
But none of that compares for convenience with a guy handing me a US$100 bill.
Issuing a transaction may be easy, but I don't think that's meaningful when people get hit with issues similar to "pulling cash out of banks, or limited sizes available for money orders, or having debt/credit card transactions incorrectly flagged as fraudulent and blocked" on the on and off-ramps.
None of what you said applies to what I have suggested.
Imagine you take out a 30 year mortgage in 2025 with 12 periodic payments of .01 BTC a year.
Imagine offering a 10 year bond that will make quarterly payments of .01 BTC. What is the price of this bond? It is just a meaningless question practically.
There are numerous places and times around the world that you can look at the situation that occurred and see that Bitcoin would have been a boon had it been established at that time.
Future instances will exist like that, and perhaps that's a good enough role for it to exist on it's own. It can be the candle that provides light when the power goes out.
The irony of course that it doesn't work if the power goes out, but that's another degree of infrastructure damage entirely. It might even be sufficient to ensure the power doesn't go out during some crisis.
We're talking about this quote:
> Without an exchange your bitcoin is not a liquid asset, it's even less liquid than most commodity for which there are digital exchange marketplace. You can sell it over the counter, but that makes it an asset comparable to real estate in terms of liquidity.
There is nothing in the tone of this utterance that suggests that it's joking, sarcastic, or hyperbolic; it's a series of apparently serious, sincere, literal claims which simply happen to be completely unrelated to reality.
Its relatively long average block interval (10 minutes) and strictly limited maximum block size limit the total bandwidth requirement for a full node to a few kilobits per second, and you can easily run that on a laptop that consumes a few watts, easily supplied from a relatively inconspicuous solar panel or handheld gasoline generator run at a 1% duty cycle. Blockstream supplies a satellite feed of the blockchain that requires no internet connection, just a groundstation that costs less than a laptop and uses slightly more power.
Outbound bandwidth requirements from the place where the power has gone out are many orders of magnitude smaller. A Bitcoin transaction is a few hundred bytes, so outbound bandwidth requirements for transmitting one transaction at a time are a few bits per second without adding significant delay, and because the transaction is valid indefinitely in the absence of double-spending, potentially down to a small fraction of a bit per second if further delays of hours or days can be tolerated.
Now, it's true that power needs to stay on somewhere for the miners to keep running, and the miners need to be able to transmit their mined blocks to the rest of the network fast enough to avoid many orphaned forks, which requires bursts of somewhat higher bandwidth. But keeping the power on somewhere is much more likely than keeping it on everywhere.
I don't understand LN2 well enough to do this kind of analysis on it, but I'd expect it to be less tolerant of such extreme infrastructure degradation.
> do all sorts of other shit
There's not much shit they can do, without breaking the fundamental cryptographic primitives that make it work. They can't steal money. They can double spend, as above, or they can delay transactions with a probability proportional to their ownership of compute, integrated over a period of time. If they own 80% of the compute, and they really really don't want you to perform a transaction, then they can block it for 10 minutes with 80% chance, 20 minutes with 64% chance, 30 minutes with 51%, an hour with 26%.
Compare that with Visa which has blocked transactions it doesn't like (e.g., porn) for years.
And even this blocking is economically disincentivized. If you want to get a transaction through and the "mafia" don't want it, you can offer a higher transaction fee. Either the "mafia" will have to accept your transaction, or give up the enticing fee to someone else. Transaction processing is a free market.
And compute dominance is something that needs to be maintained indefinitely. Obtaining compute dominance does not guarantee future dominance (unlike with proof of stake systems, which is IMO one reason why proof of work is superior).
"It exists" is correct
"It doesn't exists" is incorrect, exists becomes exist, "it doesn't exist"
the "does" in "doesn't" absorbs subject-verb the conjugation, does is now the verb that needs to agree with the subject, it. Exists returns to it's infinitive (unconjugated) form, exist.
"They arguments doesn’t hold" typo they ought to be the, those or their, not sure what you meant. Since arguments is plural you want don't, not doesn't, alternately "the argument [singular] doesn't hold"
'national ones creates money' subject verb agreement again, either one creates or ones create
"and the are" s/the/they
"bitcoin pools mentioned ahead": ahead doesn't quite apply to comment threads, like on a road you have cars in front (ahead) and in back (behind), but with comments it's above and below, because you scroll up and down, not forward and backward. You could also say aforementioned referring to something mentioned earlier.