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The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

papers.ssrn.com

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Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#281

Post by olalonde »

cortesoft wrote: post #251
olalonde wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know the steps involved in opening a bank account (hint: many people can't), accepting online payments using a bank account (hint: hope you have deep pockets), using a bank for sending interbank/international payments (hint: might need to collect a page worth of information from your recipient. second hint: their bank might refuse to receive the payment), etc. Bonus steps: do all the a…

You can set up a stripe account to accept payments very easily. You can buy a prepaid Visa with cash in just a few minutes.

> You can set up a stripe account to accept payments very easily.

Doesn't it require having a U.S. corporation? That's a few hundred dollars off the bat. It also requires you to provide evidence that you are within the types of businesses they authorize. I also suppose it requires having a bank account. Opening a business bank account does not take a few minutes and it can be close to impossible for certain categories of businesses. Multiply that by 10 if you are not a citizen/resident. I also don't believe Stripe allows sending money. Furthermore, receiving payments on Stripe effectively takes a week due to the waiting period. Finally, if Stripe decides to freeze or terminate your account, you are f'ed.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#282

Post by freeAgent »

max51 wrote: post #159
once_inc wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument usually comes down to the "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash" quote from the title. I'd like to point out that the word "cash" is used differently in the cyberpunk community from before 2008. BCH and BSV both interpret it as "money used for every transaction" and thus advocate bigger blocks, while cypherpunks back in the day used it for "permissionless value tokens" (my phrasing here).

The people using the intro of the whitepaper to justify BCH are also conveniently ignoring half the paper and pretends that entire technical sections are irrelevant and should be ignored. Ironically, trying to prove which chain is the "real" bitcoin by interpreting word from the introduction of the paper goes directly against the almost everything that is written in the rest of the paper.

It's absolutely not true that "the people using the intro of the whitepaper to justify BCH" ignore half the paper and pretend that entire technical sections are irrelevant and should be ignored. Please clarify.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#283

Post by shudza »

dmitriid wrote: post #184
shudza wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Users will use "custodial LN". Which you could argue is not LN, but MySQL, L3, whatever, but merchants will still get their payments on L2

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#285

Post by smoldesu »

teekert wrote: post #274
tablespoon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm consistently surprised by HN's lack of vision in this area. The idea of a Network State / Internet-native economy is a cyberpunk dream, and crypto enables that. How so? Isn't the "cyberpunk dream" a dystopia?

Not for me. This issue in particular seems to polarize our community.

"our community" is one that wouldn't know how to get to the bowling lanes if Uber went down. Hell, half of us probably wouldn't know how to get work done if Slack or Github has an afternoon outage. There's not a person on this site that would last in a cyberpunk distopia, putting the average HN user in the middle of an unmoderated forum would be like the end of Logan's Run. We'd all be standing around, stupefied by a world we don't understand.

I'm being facetious, but it's true. The average person is a weenie, and we rely on a great deal of well-maintained, centralized infrastructure to keep us going. There's a reason why people here fight to keep Fortnite off their iPhone and tries to bite the hand of anyone peddling crypto: deep down, we're all scared! We need corporations to coddle and exploit us, just like they need our money. HN, and the world at large, wouldn't want crypto even if it was "the right thing" to do.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#286

Post by freeAgent »

once_inc wrote: post #110
Hamuko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin is the equivalent of gold That definitely wasn't the original goal of Bitcoin though.

This argument usually comes down to the "Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash" quote from the title. I'd like to point out that the word "cash" is used differently in the cyberpunk community from before 2008. BCH and BSV both interpret it as "money used for every transaction" and thus advocate bigger blocks, while cypherpunks back in the day used it for "permissionless value tokens" (my phrasing here).

How do you explain this: https://twitter.com/gavinandresen/status/929377620000681984 ? You don't get much more "cyberpunk OG," especially in the realm of Bitcoin than Gavin Andresen. It's one thing to disagree, but it's another to ascribe beliefs to people that they don't hold.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#287

Post by shudza »

arcticbull wrote: post #156
shudza wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well 'scuse me, Mr Privileged. Countries which are not US do in fact exist, and are not using USD. Check some other CBCs YoY against USD, and tell me how much they lost on average.

So they have access to USDC. I love how people pull out the privilege card the second you suggest that a so-called currency that loses 70% of its value in a year (BTC) might not be that good for poor folks. True privilege is being able to lose 70% of your net currency value in a single year without being on the street and advocating for it even after. For everyone else, there are better choices. I suspect somewhere a…

USDC != USD. We know what happened to UST, the rest will follow. Poor folks are also buying homes, which will drop, in some places maybe 100% in the next year, but nobody doesn't seem to have a problem with that.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#288

Post by eldenwrong »

stonogo wrote: post #240
eldenwrong wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you familiar with OSI and TCP/IP architecture? Because it definitely works in layers.

Scaling is not a goal of the OSI model, and TCP/IP predates (and does not adhere to) the OSI model anyway. For insight into how and why this came about, I recommend Padlipsky's "The Elements of Networking Style."

But TCP/IP does have layers that help it to scale...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#289

Post by kkielhofner »

When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something with that "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor to the average user?

Google went from a research project to incorporated and usable on the internet in roughly two years with a total investment of about $2mm in 2022 money. Let's just say the pace of innovation had some serious roadblocks at the time (they literally had to build their own servers and host them in a garage). Not to mention the status of dev tools, frameworks/libraries, developer availability, etc in 1998 vs today.

We are four years in to A16z alone raising roughly $16 BILLION dollars with their crypto funds. For at least half a decade it's been routine to see announcements of various blockchain companies with $5mm seed rounds (and beyond). Follow-up Series A and beyond in the hundreds of millions with multi-billion dollar valuations.

I've been following the space extremely closely for over five years and I have yet to see an application or solution with that "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor. I still don't know a single person outside of the tech scene that uses anything blockchain related other than trading on an exchange.

Bitcoin is 13 years old with an ecosystem that has had an incredible amount of investment and man hours thrown at it yet we're still getting research papers on how to make the original premise of bitcoin (Peer to peer digital cash) actually usable at any practical scale.

I know LN has been live for some time yet looking at the best available numbers I can find it's only being used by an absolutely insignificant number of the world's five billion internet users (this goes for all other chains and L2+ that can be analyzed).

I don't get it.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#290

Post by eldenwrong »

kkielhofner wrote: post #289

When will the blockchain ecosystem provide something with that "WOW I need this in my life right now" factor to the average user? Google went from a research project to incorporated and usable on the internet in roughly two years with a total investment of about $2mm in 2022 money. Let's just say the pace of innovation had some serious roadblocks at the time (they literally had to build their own servers and host the…

Yeah sending value through the internet without an intermediary that can't be stopped, confiscated or censored is whatever

Maybe the problem is that you lack an understanding of what money should be and what problems banking and fiat have?

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