Not any more so than other forms of energy consumption. If anything, Bitcoin incentivizes the use of clean renewable energy. https://niccarter.info/topics/
Nope, but the value of the educational takeaways from the report are not contingent upon me providing evidence of this specific attack. You are welcome to be skeptical.
You're free to believe that I (the author) made up this story. I'm not a fiction writer; the Bitcoin security space is exciting enough without needing to waste time making stories up.
I'll note that we have seen several folks report being victims of similar attacks since we published this article.
Ha! Another empty prediction that we'll happily call you out on once it expires. Remember when you predicted that Bitcoin would completely cease to exist by the end of 2019? https://twitter.com/lopp/status/1211707215620530176
Indeed; the market has clearly chosen to prefer optimizing for low cost of full system validation (running a full node) over lost cost of transacting (cheap block space.)
False. You're referring to an adversarial situation where your payment channel counterparty tries to close the channel using an old state that gives them more of the money in the channel than they should own. The duration during which you can then post a breach remedy transaction to deprive them of ALL the channel value is configurable when you update the channel state, but the default is 1 week. Eventually the expectation is that you'll even be able to outsource this operation to third parties to monitor the blockchain on your behalf and post the breach remedy transaction if needed.
Nonsense. Multiple teams are developing Lightning Network implementations and anyone who desires to commit capital to operate a Lightning node can do so without asking permission from anyone.
Fraud protection is referring to protection against double spending and protection against chargebacks - it's not the same type of consumer protection that folks are used to with credit cards. However, it's worth noting that this type of consumer protection /is/ possible and can be built on top of the system using reputation and escrow services.
This was a highly contrived test - an interesting point to note is that they don't talk about how long it would take new nodes to perform an initial sync if there were weeks / months / years worth of gigablocks in the chain.
Some people proselytized it, sure. And they're generally the folks who are upset with the current situation and have switched to various altcoins that will suffer from the same scalability issues if they ever become particularly popular.
The pull request was brigaded by folks from /r/btc who were not interested in positively contributing to the discussion; they just wanted to waste our time rehashing the past 3 years of scaling debate.