The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

They may also owe sales tax! https://support.patreon.com/hc/en-us/articles/360043054911-P...

Which, yikes, no wonder running your own business is such a drag, that feels like double-dipping to me. I didn't owe sales tax when I was freelancing, but it is what it is.

Either way though, it's not any sort of headache, because the dollar is still used as unit of account, and what's owed is the value at the time of transaction: what you owe on $500 delivered in BTC is what you owe on $500, presuming you turn it into cash within a year (IANAL, I recall that goods paid in kind become investments after a year, such that gains are owed if sold at a profit).

The problematic tax situation is when someone buys some Bitcoin, and then wants to spend it, since you have to figure out gains on each transaction and report it correctly, that's a huge hassle. I suspect most people who sincerely try to pay capital gains on Bitcoin purchases get it wrong: if you buy 0.1 BTC at 7K and 0.1 BTC at 45K, then spend $1000 worth at 20K, what capital gains do you owe? Does it depend on which wallet you reached into?

I have no idea and, really, feel like I shouldn't have to have any idea. It's the main thing that keeps me from paying in BTC when a vendor likes that form of payment. I could maybe pay a month's rent with the coin in my cushions, I have it because it tickles my fancy to pay for things with magic internet money, but it's just not worth the paperwork to actually do it.

Lightning reduces the amount of transactions that must be in the ledger, and in consequence the storage requirements can be kept down. The BCH model of just increasing the block size indefinitely is not sustainable.

The idea of the Lightning Network is to allow transactions to exist on a separate layer where in theory transaction fees don't have to exist. & transactions don't have to wait for the next block. This allows for microtransactions etc. There are some blockchain transaction fees involved in creating channels & resolving disputes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk:

> Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting that tends to focus on a "combination of lowlife and high tech",[1] featuring futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cybernetics, juxtaposed with societal collapse or decay.

It's the kind of world that's better to look at than actually inhabit.

We haven’t even started to talk about QE which is actually why the Fed and TARP bailouts (aka investments) ended up being profitable. There are a huge number of losers from 2008 which can’t be seen from a superficial surface view, instead it requires playing out an alternate reality where liquidations were forced, and that is a complex and difficult discussion. Paulson was a brilliant spin doctor and so successful that his fake stories of hundreds of thousands of jobs saved and ATMs that didn’t run out of money is being taken as real history, instead of the evil deceptive game it was to insure all his people continued to dominate global finance. It would take a long discussion to try and explain to you how profoundly unethical and manipulative were the actions they took and the effects those actions still have today in terms of extreme inequality, caused not by capitalism itself, but this crony capitalism.

Bitcoin was born from this reality and highly motivated by it. For a certain generation of finance technologists who had a close view of the inner workings of the system it was obviously rotten and corrupt to the core. The core being fiat.

If you are trying to pretend that by explaining M1 and M3 and the creation of money supply you claim somehow USD is “federated” and not centralized then in my opinion you don’t actually understand what you think you do.

Maybe read up on the Fed window and QE mechanisms and their balance sheet. USD is centralized with Fedwire, OCC, Treasury, Swift, BIS and all their regulatory operations, so they have very good information on most digital dollars in existence and certainly have incredible control over their creation and destruction.

Bitcoin is likely here to stay and in my personal experience most people who hate on it were once believers who bought high then sold low after one of its crashes. they now how a very bitter taste and have decided there is some fundamental flaw with it as an idea, mostly motivated by their own emotions and not logic. the other haters tend to have some deranged love of governments and see it correctly as a challenge to government power so attempt to discredit it, I feel mostly out of anxiety the government isn’t what they think it is and it scares them.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maiden_Lane_Transactions