Oh yes, it is also feels so good that the richer have priority on transactions because they can pay exorbitant fees while you sometimes need to wait more than a month for a transaction to be confirmed.

I had to make a transaction to a private tracker and I don't want to go through it never again.

The only crypto that is kind if useful is Monero and that's because it is really private and anonymous. The problem with private and anonymous is that is ends up becoming a tool for crime.

I really like Talers approach with protecting the buyer not the seller. From a mass surveillance and advertising perspective they only see half the picture which makes the deep surveillance hard. Also it keeps businesses honest and supports rule of law.

I see this comment every now and then, and it always forgets the cost of the transaction, confirmation time

With Bitcoin lightning the confirmation time is under a second and you pay pennies in fees as you don't make the transaction on the main chain. Even main chain is like $1.50 for a 10 minute confirmation time which for many transactions like an international wire is still a great deal.

The energy cost is extraordinary, and the end user is taxed for the use of their own dollars.

The energy cost to maintain the base chain is <1% of global energy use, mostly from renewables at off-peak hours since miners have to chase the cheapest electricity. Remittance services and other funds transfer companies also use energy and human capital to move value around, it's not free. A single on-chain tx can open a lightning channel which can contain and secure trillions of transactions off-chain. Processing these transactions takes the energy equivalent of sending an e-mail. Users are "taxed for the use of their own dollars" in regular currency as well. Who pays that tax and the amount of that tax varies by context.

It can't scale

In the last two months alone, Nostr users (decentralized twitter clone like Mastodon) sent each other 3 million tips over Bitcoin lightning. It absolutely scales. And there is plenty of more room to grow.

Its value only increases because it manufactures its own scarcity.

Its value also comes from its use as a transactional network and from it's political neutrality geopolitically speaking. And from the known supply which nobody can manipulate. It's not purely scarcity.

naturally moves toward centralization since mining becomes too large an activity for the individual to reap any benefit

And yet mining is still distributed globally. Any person, company, or country with spare energy resources can buy an ASIC and mine. Mining pools have become more centralized, but a lot of work has been done on that in recent years and that trend is reversing as a result.

This is why Taler was created. It is a payment system not a payment form

45 minutes to process a transaction and requires the burning down of several rainforests per transaction.

Don't listen to people who are critical of a thing if they clearly don't even understand the basics of how it works. On main chain, a Bitcoin transaction typically take up to ten minutes (the time between blocks). It can take longer if you set a super low fee, but you can guarantee your payment goes into the next block by paying an average fee, usually around $0.75. Your wallet does this all automatically.

On lightning where most transactions occur these days (secured by main chain) transactions settle fully in under a second. Do your own research.

Besides, we all know Bitcoin only takes a single rainforest per transaction, it's been that way since the great rainfork which is ancient history at this point.

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.

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.