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Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

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Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#92
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this work? The only instances of people attempting to use LN I've witnessed ended in failure.

Everyone using Bitcoin in El Salvador is using lightning network for the most part.

They definitely aren't. They're using Chivo which is a centralized custodial wallet solution. Transfers are just updates to their MySQL store - as they should be. Chivo only uses Strike's private LN nodes nobody else is allowed to peer with when facilitating an international transfer -- between two of Maller's own accounts.

Chivo is not crypto. And that's what most folks there are being forced to use by the local dictator. It's centralized, trusted, censorable and entirely antithetical to the Satoshi white paper.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#93
I don't have a recommendation - I just want to make you aware of a major issue other stores have...

> We do not intend to convert to traditional currency unless needed.

This is a big risk due to cash flows. Most stores operate on a margin on merchandise that is under 10%, with a turnover on goods averaging months.

If a currency fluctuates in value more than ~10% over several months, this can easily drive an otherwise healthy business into cash flow driven bankruptcy.

Selling 100% of your goods, and then not being able to replenish that stock because the crypto you held has dropped more than 10% over a 6 month period is a disaster waiting to happen.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#94
post #19

Amazing how their is a currency who's been rising for 10 years that you actually have to 'solve' for how to spend it.

At least this one has a use case. Ever go on /r/cryptocurrency or some of the even more bonkers subs? Someone will post a new coin and half the comments look like bots and shills loving the tech and the use cases. They never actually state what the use case is, of course.

> Someone will post a new coin and half the comments look like bots and shills loving the tech and the use cases

Oh yeah, cryptocurrency classic - just look at the outcome of this thread, basically no solid solution backed up by majority of responders, almost every response links to different shiny landing page with plenty of buzzwords.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#96
post #7

For best experience, be sure to accept Bitcoin with Lightning Network. I'm not sure about industry standard, but BTCPay Server[0] and OpenNode[1] seem to be the most popular ones. BTCPay Server is open-source and self-hosted. [0] https://btcpayserver.org [1] https://www.opennode.com

Does this work? The only instances of people attempting to use LN I've witnessed ended in failure.

I've been using it for years - early on I ran into some routing issues for larger payments, but within the past year, it's gotten boring and mostly just "works".

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#97
post #64
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's not a currency. Gold has existed forever but you won't find point of sale systems with good support for gold coins either.

"Bitcoin: A peer to peer electronic cash system" is not a currency. That's some mental gymnastics.

That’s the uncomfortable facts to the aspirational blather. It’s a poor enough medium of exchange that people go off-chain even when they do take payments with it, it’s an unreliable store of value subject to wild price fluctuations, and if you think anyone in their right mind would use it as a unit of account imagine a mortgage debt denominated in bitcoin and the possibility of owing 10x what the house is worth if the coin goes up.

1 of the 3 economic roles of “money” is partially fulfilled. If that’s still a currency, so is the Confederate dollar.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#98
post #19

Amazing how their is a currency who's been rising for 10 years that you actually have to 'solve' for how to spend it.

Bitcoin is a failure. It promised privacy, low fees, decentralization, lack of censorship and sanctions. We ended up with a transparent centralized expensive block chain whose tokens are not fungible. It's just a memecoin now. It just happens to be the biggest memecoin on the market. It's the one everyone knows about.

Bitcoin's biggest success was proving that a cryptocurrency could exist and have utility. In that, it's inspired the creation of many successors which are superior.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#99
For context, I've accepted ~$400k (Eth, USDT, USDC) in payments for physical assets.

A few important questions here:

- What currencies do your customers hold?

– At what price points are you transacting?

– What are you selling?

– How much of this process are you looking to automate?

– Estimated monthly trx volume?

Presumably you are not interested in exposure to price volatility (since you're not holding as an investment) so your holdings should be denominated in USDC and custodied, earning a yield through BlockFi or Nexo.

I'll keep an eye out for your answer in the comments.

Re: Ask HN: Practically accepting cryptocurrency for businesses without middlemen?

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin may be largely used as a store of value like gold, but that's not what it was designed for. It's designed to be a currency.

I'm not arguing one way or the other about Bitcoin, but just pointing something out in general: "designed to be" doesn't mean it actually is. Engineers can design things however they want, but that doesn't mean it always holds up.

Sure, but the OP saying “bitcoin isn’t a currency” isn’t accurate. It’s a currency that happens to be popular as a store of value.

It was designed to be a currency, and so for it to be good at that design, it should do currency things well, like broad support from point of sale systems.

The fact that gold doesn’t have broad support from POS systems is irrelevant to its intended purpose in that context, of being a store of value.

Their analogy doesn’t work because they’re comparing what bitcoin was designed to do, with what gold isn’t designed to do.

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