The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#181

Post by waoush » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #137

teekert wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's not still early days. Bitcoin was created 13 years ago, it was useless for payments back then and it's still useless for payments now. Every direction that anyone takes it will be in the direction of some kind of pure money-making thing, usually in the form of a ponzi or pyramid scheme. This has happened over and over again for 13 years. There's simply no one else interested in building on this because everyone…

(note: I didn't downvote, but have been working with blockchain and thought I would answer since you haven't gotten any yet)

https://www.hyperledger.org/learn/case-studies

Hyperledger is a set of open-source distributed ledger related technologies, the most well-known being Fabric, which is a framework for creating blockchain networks.

The most interesting cases are S&P Global and Walmart, who use it to keep track of data for various auditing purposes. The idea is that since data on a blockchain can't be modified on a whim without that change being observed, it protects the integrity of the data being stored. Basically it is being treated as a sort of database.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#182

Post by Centmo » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:29 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #177

Centmo wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 1.5-3.5% credit card processing fee for starters. Also, you can't use a CC to send money peer-to-peer globally at near-zero cost.

> The 1.5-3.5% credit card processing fee for starters. Compared to... 1 dollar, no, 15 dollars, no, 5 dollars, no, 65 dollars, no, ... transaction fees for Bitcoin.

How much are Lightning transaction fees?

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#183

Post by toolz » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:31 PM UTC

Imnimo wrote: post #170

toolz wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't stopped them or anyone else, people have been using bitcoin to bypass censorship for years.

Then why are they still "suffering immensely" if they can already use bitcoin to bypass the sanctions?

There are people bypassing sanctions with bitcoin that aren't suffering as much because of it.

As for why everyone isn't using bitcoin to bypass? Good question.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#184

Post by dmitriid » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:32 PM UTC

shudza wrote: post #50

arcticbull wrote: post #9

Lightning is a solution that does not do what it says on the tin. It requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel, which at current block size limits requires about 75 years for everyone on earth to have one, and somewhere in the trillion dollar range in fees and the entire outstanding block reward. Factor in quadratic routing complexity, and even if you did onboard everyone it wouldn't work anyways. This is as…

Some interesting points. IMHO, LN is far from THE solution. But it will help merchant adoption, more than end-user though. The fact is, most people would/will probably use custodial LN wallets, which is against some "crypto" postulates, and comes down to well known MySQL argument. The difference is MySQL on Bitcoin vs MySQL on USD (Paypal). As we will see in the coming months, fiat itself is a lot like a MySQL. So I…

> But it will help merchant adoption, more than end-user though.

So, merchants will adopt it but users won't? So why would merchants want to adopt it?

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#185

Post by meowkit » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:33 PM UTC

lairv wrote: post #107

wanderingbort wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer or accountant here but I think it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event. Until then, you have deposited some value in a number of lightening network nodes and have been negotiating a set of pairwise IOUs with them for later. DeFi/staking has a similar problem and I believe waiting until gains and losses are realized will be the way it goes down. For now, make…

> it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event wouldn't that be an easy way to bypass taxes ? make all your transactions off-chain and just withdraw once a year ?

No. Its a settlement layer.

I do 1000 streaming transactions on a channel. When the channel is closed (withdrawn back to the L1 chain, or settled - offchain is the wrong term here Lightning is an L2 "channel"), the transactions are summarized and you can tax that summary event.

It's a linear sum of taxes. Of course there are scenarios that complicates things like variable sales tax rates based on transaction type/location/good, but that's an extended conversation.

If you really want tax enforcement, governments should be looking to develop CBDC integration on the merchant side with bridge support for major crypto currencies. Given Intuit's iron grip on tax lobbying I don't have much hope for innovate tax schemes though.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#186

Post by throwaway6977 » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

toolz wrote: post #158

TradingPlaces wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Evading laws is the killer app of Bitcoin.” You will get no argument from me on that

It was illegal to protect jews from being enslaved and murdered not too long ago. Evading the law is exactly why it's important and it is the ethically superior position to support tools that enable people to bypass unethical laws.

You'd think people reading HACKER news would be less pro-establishment in their arguments.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#187

Post by adamrezich » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

Grumbledour wrote: post #63

teekert wrote: post #5

A cool use of the Lightning network is the podcast 2.0 initative. Currently, as I listen to podcasts, I stream back satoshis (sats), value for value (I use Castamatic on iOS, fountain.fm is also an option on Android). You can also send messages with sats attached, called “boosts”. Creators can transparantly split the sats they receive over various goals (i.e. FOSS projects [opensats], or guests on shows). There are n…

I really dislike this whole initiative and much prefer the patreon model. One reason of course might be that i am listening to Jupiter Broadcast and Chris pushes this stuff hard, really annoying me with the constant talk about lightning and especially the boosts, which seem to take over half the show, because somehow he seems not to realize that the problem he has in getting regular supporters is the insane price he…

why should content creators have to go through a centralized website like Patreon in order to get value from their consumers, giving Patreon a cut in the process? sure it's (for now) more straightforward for end-users, but as a content creator you're locking yourself into the Patreon Platform, you're building (at least some subset of) your content and your business around it being specifically "Patreon content". I'm generally wary of anything cryptocurrency but Podcasting 2.0 seems like an absolutely solid use-case of Bitcoin and Lightning—anything that helps to prevent centralized platform lock-in for content creators should be applauded!

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#188

Post by olalonde » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:38 PM UTC

dmitriid wrote: post #178

olalonde wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- decentralised: why is this good? Imagine a world where the web is controlled by a single entity, say Facebook. They get to decide who is allowed to create a website. They get to decide how much it cost. If they're not happy with the site's content, they can take it offline. Do you believe that would be a better world to live in? - trustless: I trust the companies I use, it works That's because there's usually no al…

> you may find that it is less risky or costly. Many people chose e2e encrypted messengers because they don't trust a third party with their private messages Private messages are not money. Example: you ordered some goods and those arrived in bad shape. What's your recourse in the trustless world?

There are some semi-trustless systems that work with escrows [0]. But realistically, an arbitration system does indeed require a trusted party.

There is no trustless world, just a world where trustless is an option and where "trustful" systems can be built on trustless foundations.

[0] Those systems give some guarantees about the trusted party (e.g. that they can't just run with the money).

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#189

Post by dmitriid » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #188

dmitriid wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you may find that it is less risky or costly. Many people chose e2e encrypted messengers because they don't trust a third party with their private messages Private messages are not money. Example: you ordered some goods and those arrived in bad shape. What's your recourse in the trustless world?

There are some semi-trustless systems that work with escrows [0]. But realistically, an arbitration system does indeed require a trusted party. There is no trustless world, just a world where trustless is an option and where "trustful" systems can be built on trustless foundations. [0] Those systems give some guarantees about the trusted party (e.g. that they can't just run with the money).

> where the "trustful" systems are built on trustless foundations.

You cannot build trust on a trustless foundation. As, again, the crypto world is busy rediscovering.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#190

Post by preseinger » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #60

TekMol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle the tax implications of streaming sats? As far as I know, every payment with Bitcoin triggers a taxable event? Do you record a gazillion log entrys "Paid $0.0000145 for listening podcasts, Paid $0.000142 for listening podcasts ...", crunch all the numbers and then at the end of the year put that gigantic list into your tax declaration?

I'm of the opinion that the rules are behind the law when it comes to BTC. I am deeply uninterested in being anywhere near the legal case that challenges this! But currency exchange for 'ordinary purposes' is not taxed, if my company bought some Euros to pay for foreign goods and the Euro rallied against the dollar before the purchase, no tax is owed. Well, BTC is legal tender in El Salvador, and there's no rule that…

Bitcoin is generally considered a security, not a currency.