131–140 of 448 posts
I run a lightning node at a cafe and we receive a few orders a day. Record had been 8 orders in one day.
Interesting. Where is that cafe located?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Micropayments are coming, perhaps using blockchain Blockchain is remarkably ill-suited for micropayments.
Untrue both in general and in particular. Most blockchains are worthless and have nothing in the way of transaction fees or indeed transactions. Doge is perfect for micropayments! This was a fad on reddit back in the day. In particular, well, the title of the article says it all. If you have BTC, and you want to send a few sats and pay basically nothing, Lighting has existed for years and works just fine. Edit: I don…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We use it at a cafe and receive several orders a day with people paying by lightning
Do you have a feel for whether those orders are cryptocurrency workers or normal people who happen to prefer it to a credit card?
Does this imply an admission that Bitcoin itself is not usable as money?
“We can make the blockchain actually work for payments if we take payments off the blockchain.” Sounds about right.
Did you know that fiat doesn't even have a blockchain to withdraw to when you want to exit or switch payment network/provider?[0] Did you know that with fiat, the money supply can be changed arbitrarily?
Those are problems that Bitcoin still solves when you use an off-chain transaction network (at least for the many people who believe those are problems worth solving). Also, it's worth noting that the Lightning network is hardly centralized. It's a bit more centralized than Bitcoin but we're light years away from say, Paypal.
[0] The closest that comes to this is SWIFT, but it's not an open network. Even large payment systems like Paypal aren't connected to it. It's also not censorship resistant and you can't use it p2p.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
for one, the base currency in question is uncensorable. e.g. I for one find it detestable that fruits and nuts sellers in Iran suffer immensely because of US sanctions. The idea that innocent citizens are being made to suffer for their governments policy (especially in more authoritarian countries) is gross. I see it akin to punishing a child for their parents behavior.
But you're taking transactions off of the base currency, so it no longer matters what the properties of the base currency are.
We are scaling BTC like the internet, in layers..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are right and i should not even have mentioned him, because i don't support him (though i wanted to once) and so really have no grounds to complain. I let my annoyance get the better of me and it seems just mean now when i reread it. It also just undermines my skepticism and dislike of the podcasts 2.0 thing, which should have been my main point.
Well, fwiw, imho it's good criticism and skepticism is warranted and I agree with it. But it's early days. I always warn here on HN that we should not throw the baby away with the bathwater, meaning, don't kill (or over-regulate) blockchain before it can grow into something nice (from the monster it is now). Imho these are the seeds of something nice, but it's not there yet. I can feel it coming though, because of th…
We should absolutely throw away the bathwater. There's no baby. I'll say it right out. Cryptocurrency should be completely banned by every country on the planet. They have no purpose that isn't outright fraud and theft. Everything described in Podcasting 2.0 can be done with regular old Web 2.0 technology, and it can be done more efficiently that way too.
Edit to those downvoting: I will gladly retract this entire comment if you can demonstrate a single real, non-fraudulent usage of blockchains. I've been asking this for years and never gotten a straight answer. Everything is always "just around the corner" but every time I look around the corner all I see is more fraud and scams. If you really think there's something salvageable here, then let blockchains live on as a theoretical research project until somebody figures it out. In the meantime, please stop encouraging the general public to put their money into this. It's irresponsible to raise money this way.
“We can make the blockchain actually work for payments if we take payments off the blockchain.” Sounds about right.
I assume the implication is that doing off-chain transactions defeats the purpose of Bitcoin? It does not. Did you know that fiat doesn't even have a blockchain to withdraw to when you want to exit or switch payment network/provider?[0] Did you know that with fiat, the money supply can be changed arbitrarily? Those are problems that Bitcoin still solves when you use an off-chain transaction network (at least for the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You say “less important;” I say “vast majority.” How is this better than Visa or MC?
for one, the base currency in question is uncensorable. e.g. I for one find it detestable that fruits and nuts sellers in Iran suffer immensely because of US sanctions. The idea that innocent citizens are being made to suffer for their governments policy (especially in more authoritarian countries) is gross. I see it akin to punishing a child for their parents behavior.
You will get no argument from me on that
But crypto-"currencies" are actually highly speculative assets (as South Africa declared today [1]). No bro will spend them - the ideology is to HODL for 100k remember [2]? Earnest patron saints like Laszlo Hanyecz bought two papa john’s pizzas in 2010 for what would be worth today roughly $200,000,000 [3]. They wanted a new currency, but today the purpose is speculation. The whole point is not to be the greater fool.
Bitcoin was never meant to be gold, it was meant to be spent. But that hasn't happened.
[1] https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-not-a-currency-south-...
[2] https://www.wealthsimple.com/en-ca/magazine/laser-eyes-crypt...
[3] https://www.the-sun.com/news/2935660/bitcoin-pizza-laszlo-ha...