If bitcoin mining is used as a demand response tool (such as is the case here), it is actually the other way around: bitcoin mining would drive electricity costs down in the long run, not up. The reason being that it would make renewable energy plants more profitable by avoiding curtailment, making a higher mix of RE viable in the process. And since the marginal cost of production of RE is the lowest (zero), that will drive costs down for everyone.

That would imply that the person I have a channel open with is flooding me. Highly unlikely and most probably not in his best interest either.

As for whether you use Tor or not, that depends on the level of privacy you want probably, but is not a requirement for not having a public IP address. You can run a LN node from behind a NAT without port forwarding or tunneling. Most mobile phones will probably be in such a situation. Only problem is that other people will not be able to find your node directly. You can still open channels to theirs though.

You'd be surprised about how the number of democrats and progressives embracing bitcoin is growing right now. That narrative that Bitcoin is somehow linked to right-wing or fascist politics is retarded, specially in the light of the fact that among the countries with the highest percentage of the population using Bitcoin are countries like Venezuela, Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria, Ukraine, etc...

Genuine question: How do you DDoS someone without a public IP adres?

There is no such thing as a free meal. There will always be _some_ fees. These might be very low (fraction of a cent in many cases), but putting liquidity into lightning channels has costs, and people tend to want to get some compensation for using that liquidity. In the case of Cash app, I guess they are absorbing that fee for now, in order to get more people to use it. Fees on Strike are also very low AFAIK. The difference between the two is that Strike uses the lightning network both for USD (or other fiat) and BTC transactions. Cash.app uses their own banking services for fiat-to-fiat AFAIK.

So are bitcoin nodes... the idea is that you run your own. At least I do, so I really don't need to trust anyone. Now tell me again where I am lying?

1BTC will always be 1BTC. If you keep the balance in BTC, but want to have a future balance in USD (to name an example), you will be subject to the exchange rate at that moment. If you want to avoid that, you'd need to convert into the currency you are interested in at the moment you receive the amount. This is no different than dealing with any two different currencies, except that BTC/USD is a lot more volatile than (for example) EUR/USD. Btw, Strike has a neat product that lets you use the lightning network for fiat to fiat transactions, avoiding this problem altogether. So maybe they have a solution for your end of the payment processing?

The Lightning Network is a so called "layer-2" payment protocol on top of the bitcoin blockchain. It is comparable to fiat payment processors such as Visa or PayPal, in that these batch many payments together before they settle via banks using fed-wire as the settlement layer weeks later, which would be analog to settling on the bitcoin blockchain (via opening and closing LN channels). The same way you don't need the finality of fed-wire for buying coffee, you also don't need the brutal nuclear-war security of a bitcoin on-chain transaction for every coffee or grocery-store visit you do. While Visa, the banks and fed-wire are centralized, controlled, permissioned, censorable and yes able to "roll things back", Bitcoin and LN are decentralized, uncensorable and permission-less. While there may be bugs in LN's infancy, since it is barely 4 years old, the system is working, and - without needing to grift - working quite well nowadays actually.

Of course it is irrelevant (still).
Like I said, you cannot expect it to go from 0 to world reserve currency overnight and in a straight line. This will take many more years.
Now look at a price chart with logarithmic price scale, zoom all the way out (I suggest the BLX ticker on TradingView for that), and tell me in which direction it is going?
Bitcoin is only 12 years into this journey, and it is still on track to its goal. Whether it will get there or not in the end, is the big question, but for now it is still right on track. It could even drop to 15k in the coming months, and still the overall trend would be intact. I don't think that will happen by the way, but who knows?

You simply cannot expect to go from 0 to world reserve currency overnight and without a LOT of volatility. You have to be a bit more patient ;-) Suggestion: Look at a logarithmic price scale and zoom out from 2011 to today. You will see where things are really going.

Or maybe at some point you will ask yourself why it is that this thing has a value of over US$600 billion at an age of only 12 years, and start to learn about what is probably the most important invention of this century. In the 90ies, many people thought the internet was a fad and email nothing more than a glorified fax machine. Such complicated technological innovations are very hard to understand because they are like nothing else that exists. I can already predict the next step of your journey (if you are brave enough to take it): You will soon dismiss Bitcoin because there must be a better alternative, right? If you continue learning however, you'll discover that this is not the case. Then you will probably start learning about Austrian School of economics and some macroeconomy and game theory. Then you will realize that Bitcoin is not a rabbit hole, but a giant fractal of rabbit holes. Have fun on your journey... again, if you are brave enough to take it ;-)

I think I must have missed that. Can you tell me where in the whitepaper it says so?
If you mean that Bitcoin's mission is to replace all fiat currencies in the world, replacing inflationary currency with a disinflationary (or deflationary depending on your definition of choice) hard money, so humanity gets used again to having a lower time-preference and is more incentivised to save money before spending it instead of taking on debt after debt... then you might be right.
But then it hasn't failed, but it is right on track to getting there. Keep in mind that before one Bitcoin isn't worth 5-10 million US$, we are still pretty early. Give it some more time. Until now it is behaving exactly as expected if it was to one day succeed in that mission.

I think you don't get what I am saying.
All blockchains (PoW, PoS, etc... does not matter) cannot scale on-chain. A blockchain is O(n) scalable, and that is pretty bad. It is completely impossible to have all monetary transactions in the world on-chain. But to think it should, is missing the point entirely.

The purpose of Bitcoin never was to replace existing transaction networks, nor traditional banks. If you read a bit about what Satoshi Nakamoto did and where he came from (being a Cypherpunk and adept Austrian School follower), you'd know that. The breakthrough invention of Bitcoin is digital scarcity, not a payment network.
Every-day payments can be routed off-chain by second layer solutions such as PayPal, Visa, traditional banks or the Lightning Network if you like a decentralized and anonymous solution.

What's important is that the underlying money (Bitcoin) cannot be controlled by central banks and is perfectly scarce... it has all the properties a good hard money must have for the first time in human history. And that of course is incredibly valuable. If you are not capable of seeing that, I can't help you.
Needless to say, not only the market disagrees with you, but also the likes of Elon Musk, Paul Tudor Jones, Stanley Druckenmiller, Michael Saylor, and a quickly growing list of investors, CEO's, hedge funds, etc....

Not rarity. Scarcity. Scarce is something that you have but cannot make more of. Nor beany babies nor tulips are scarce. Bitcoin OTOH is the the only really scarce thing in the universe, besides time. Gold is not scarce either in the long run. We just don't have the required technology to acquire more of it more easily yet, so for now it is still a good store of value. Its industrial and ornamental use really have very little to do with that.

Ok. You win. Happy?