I don't think banning it is that implausible. The energy costs of transferring it are not trivial, making small transfers impractical. That cost also makes it politically interesting to suppress it.
The metric of energy per transaction doesn't actually make sense, because there can be almost unlimited number of layer 2 transactions, whether they're on Lightning Network[0] or something else. Most Bitcoin transactions happen already on Lightning Network. Also, the energy used in mining is mostly independent from the number of on-chain transactions.
The energy is not used to append new transactions, but to keep the complete transaction history objectively immutable, i.e. the network is designed to defend digital property rights with energy.
I've been out of the btc loop since around 2016 but I remember a lot of people were very negative about lightning network back then. The main contentions were that it was not actually trustless and it would create a semi-centralized hierarchy of third parties rather than being p2p, leading to big bank-like actors that could veto your transactions.
Has this changed significantly? Just asking because you seem knowledgable
I think most of that talk was just speculation coming from the Bitcoin Cash camp. It's open and permissionless network so it's always possible to route around bad actors, for example if someone tries to censor transactions. Transactions are onion routed anonymously so individual nodes don't see where the transactions originally come from and where they are going.
LN is trustless when you run your own node. When using a third-party node you have to trust the wallet/node provider to some extent.
Thanks. Yeah a lot of what the BCH people were saying at the time made sense to me, the fact that BCH flopped notwithstanding. I'm always suspicious of attempts to transact crypto in a way that isn't "on-chain" because it just intuitively seems like a way for our existing financial/legal power structures to undermine the ultimate authority of the blockchain. I'll have to do some reading on how LN actually works in current year, onion routing sounds like a great idea assuming that, unlike tor, it would be cost-prohibitive for one actor to just run 80% of the nodes and deanonymize you.
