Even completely disregarding Bitcoin acting as an economic battery that may improve the economics of renewable projects, which could accelerate the installation of intermittent sources of electricity, we don’t see a long-term problem related to Bitcoin’s electricity consumption.

另外比特币还能用清洁能源，还能用那些不好用的间歇性能源，并且把它们变成钱。哎呀，又唠回去了，这么一点点电，毛毛雨啦，咱能别唠了嘛。比特币这辈子都不会影响你造你那点电。

If it’s a bubble, it dies and consumes nothing. If it’s digital gold, it’s more efficient and will emit much less than the asset it disrupts. And if it’s really successful, it’s because of demand from truly value creating applications that define our future and should be worth the electricity.

唠了一圈，总结一下。比特币要是气泡，它就会归0，没人用也不会有耗电。 比特币要是数字黄金，那它比黄金效率更高，对环境更友好。比特币要是实现 终极进化，那咱这点电真是用对地方了。

Fine, but how will it scale? （比特币怎么把交易量做大？）

It is true that the Bitcoin mainchain cannot process the number of transactions that we depend on in modern society on its mainchain. But that’s because Satoshi Nakamoto’s design didn’t trade censorship resistance and security for scalability. So scalability has to be solved by making slight tradeoffs.

咱们现在这个社会的交易量有点大破天，比特币的交易吞吐量现在还有点吃不消。为了高度的去中心化和抗审查，比特币当初设计的时候牺牲了一些可扩展性。人在屋檐下不得不低头，为了比特币神教发展壮大（扩大交易吞吐量），有时候也得适当低头。

Bitcoin doesn’t compromise. To ensure it’s open and secure, resistant to censorship and retroactive edits, it’s decentralized. But that’s a major drawback for scalability: Keeping one central spreadsheet up to date is obviously more efficient than having numerous copies that all must be updated. A Bitcoin transaction takes about ten minutes to be confirmed and the design capacity is about seven transactions per second. Hardly sufficient to deal with today’s transaction volumes.

比特币的骨头还是很硬的。为了保证安全性和去中心化，以及链上的交易数据不被篡改，咱给每个矿工的电脑上都安装了一个完整的账本。谁造假了，咱拿出其它人的账本一对照，分分钟揪出这大尾巴狼。不过这个特点吧也有个大问题，就是每笔交易都相当于要发一个群邮件，每个人的账本都得更新一遍。所以交易量大了就可能宕机。目前每笔比特币交易大约需要10分钟的网络确认时间，整个比特币网络设计的处理能力是每秒处理7笔交易。跟需求比起来，感觉就是苍蝇喂老虎，肉也算是个肉，解决不了核心需求。

But when I heard Jack Maller’s talk about the Lightning layer I had another Rosselini moment. The Lightning Network is built on top of Bitcoin to make it scale. Transactions are done in bilateral channels that connect in a network and each channel is anchored to Bitcoin’s mainchain with a single transaction. Lightning transactions complete in milliseconds and can process millions per second with hardly any use of electricity. It therefore leverages Bitcoin’s security while increasing speed and reducing cost to levels not achievable by legacy payment rails. (责任编辑：admin)