You can make as many Bitcoin addresses as you want. You can look up an addresses balance but not a wallet’s balance. It’s not as clear as you’re making it sound.

Bitcoin over Lightning is much, much more opaque, and it’s where the majority of Bitcoin transactions are now occurring. You can’t look up somebody’s balance. The only people who know about the transaction are you, the recipient, and any intermediary nodes used to forward the transaction. Privacy is continuing to improve on lightning and main chain.

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In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. In that same time period, Bitcoin main chain did around 20-40k. Most transactions are on lightning by number of transactions. Maybe not by total value moved, but lightning is pretty opaque and grants additional privacy, so it’s hard to measure for that reason.

Lightning continues to grow and get upgrades (look up BOLT12 if you are curious about the latest upgrades which bring additional privacy enhancements).

It’s open source, and it’s fully self-custody which are two important features. Having a wallet directly integrated into the e-mail client is nice, being able to send payments to other users just knowing their e-mail address instead of their public key is pretty cool. It does automatic address rotation to preserve privacy. Wish it supported lightning for cheaper/faster transactions and additional privacy but hopefully that feature comes in time.

It’s a self-custody wallet and open source. It’s regular main-chain BTC but it does automatic address rotation. Unfortunately it doesn’t support lightning, which is where the majority of Bitcoin transactions occur. Lightning offers significantly increased privacy, sub-second transactions and fees measuring in pennies.

Am I missing something? “Like all our services, Proton Wallet is open source so all of our security claims can be checked by the public to enhance security. We have also published the Proton Wallet security model so you can understand how Proton Wallet protects both privacy and security.”

They aren’t an intermediary. It’s a fully self-custody wallet.

It’s a self-custody wallet, they do not control the keys.

Doesn’t answer your question directly, but nostr is working on this. Nostr is an open protocol like ActivityPub (which underlies Mastodon and Lemmy). Its main use is as a twitter clone right now, but it also has a very new reddit clone and can theoretically support videos as well. And you can choose your own algorithm. Here’s all the choices I get from one of their clients, and there’s dozens of nostr clients to choose from. The cool thing is that anybody can make and publish an algorithm and you can subscribe to any algorithm. Your client does all the sorting locally.

Personally very glad to see them roll out this feature. Bitcoin offers pretty decent privacy out of the box, especially with lightning. Like using any technology, using it in a fully private and anonymous way requires some attention to detail. The ability to send/receive BTC from other users knowing only their e-mail address is pretty cool. And the self-custody element is critical.

This is not accurate. Monero offers a very high degree of privacy and anonymity. So does Bitcoin lightning, to a lesser degree. Lightning transactions don’t go on chain and are known only to: sender, recipient, and intermediate nodes, if any.

Fixed

We beat it last time.

First they came for the custodial wallets

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Chat control was beat. This can be too. Contact your MEP, let them know this issue is important to you: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Crypto won’t scale

And yet every year, for 15 years, the transaction capacity has continued to increase. Networking protocols (TCP/IP, SMTP, etc) also didn’t scale to “internet scale” in the first 15 years. They just kept adding new layers to the stack and optimizing it until it did. Just like Bitcoin added Lightning, Taproot, etc to improve scaling.

In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. None of that requires an on-chain transaction, none of it required high fees. It works. It scales. It continues to improve. Lightning has capacity for trillions more transactions because capacity is not tied to chain space.

Also bitcoin isn’t even private and you are basically shouting to the world every time you make a payment.

Bitcoin is pseudonymous. If you make a wallet, nobody knows you own that wallet unless you tell them (or a third party like an exchange), but the balance and transactions on-chain are visible. There are ways to make your transactions more private, like coinjoin, you can have multiple addresses with multiple coins.

With lightning, transactions are opaque except to you and any nodes you route through, because lightning transactions don’t go on chain. This also means nobody knows your current balance. If you make a transaction between two lightning nodes that share a channel, nobody knows that transaction was made outside of those two nodes. Privacy continues to improve, see BOLT 12 for the latest upgrades in this area.

Bitcoin has been hacked so many times it isn’t even funny anymore, it’s just sad, including a $300 million hack just a few days ago.

Bitcoin has never been hacked. Nobody has ever been able to print money the protocol doesn’t allow nor spend money without the appropriate private key. People have had their Bitcoin stolen, which is like getting your wallet stolen IRL, but we don’t say ‘The USD got hacked’ or ‘The USD is insecure’ just because that happened.

And hour of downtime? Bitcoin has also had that numerous times, where you haven’t been able to process exchanges at all for hours and hours.

That’s not downtime, that’s congestion. It never stopped processing transactions. If you paid a high fee, you would go through immediately. And that’s happened rarely and doesn’t effect lightning transactions which are the ones you use if speed is a priority.

At a high demand time, it could take hours to complete a transaction (if it even went through at all) and with an outrageous fee up to dozens of dollars.

Bitcoin has never been known for time efficient nor competitive fees (except for maybe in the beginning when nobody uses it).

At least you admit people use it. Bitcoin lightning enables transactions in under a second for pennies in fees, it’s been around for 5+ years. Your information is outdated. In the last two months, Nostr users alone (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 2.6 million tips (individual transactions) over Bitcoin lightning. None of that requires an on-chain transaction, none of it required high fees. It works. It scales. It continues to improve.