The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

Post by ska » Fri, Jul 15, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #348

ska wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't mean it wasn't income (it is, and they owe income tax) I meant that wasn't the issue that was being pointed out. With microtransactions the sales tax accounting etc. overhead is fixed, but the amounts are tiny... I may have misread GP. re: " 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?" These are no…

I disagree, but since I've made myself clear elsewhere, "El Salvador".

Post by preseinger » Sat, Jul 16, 2022, 5:44 AM UTC

toolz wrote: post #390

preseinger wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the ability to punish guilty people also adds the ability to punish innocent people. This doesn't mean we abandon the concept of justice.

limiting peoples ability to trade isn't justice anymore than limiting their ability to speak. Sure you could conveniently stop many crimes if you could just monitor and censor everyone's ability to speak - but I think the consequences are quite obvious. There isn't a crime in the world that can't be stopped in more appropriate ways than giving an authority presence the ability to stop me or anyone else from spending…

Post by preseinger » Sat, Jul 16, 2022, 6:26 AM UTC

nwiswell wrote: post #316

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…

Broadly I agree with the argument that crypto is taking an awful long time to come up with the killer app, but this is not a fair analysis. Let's be clear: when Google exploded, that was the growth of the Internet in the driver's seat, not demand for Google specifically. Google's growth was a side effect of the exponential growth of the internet because it solved a need where there was no adequate incumbent solution,…

Post by preseinger » Sat, Jul 16, 2022, 7:14 AM UTC

where_to_inc wrote: post #265

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of Lightning is a failure of Bitcoin's designers to create a system that can scale well, they instead chose to focus on something that was going to be maximum profitable for the miners in the short term and dumped responsibility off onto "L2 chains" as a kludge. The Lightning Network also doesn't "work just fine", the network is fundamentally slow, insecure and unreliable and this will likely never be f…

If you think multiple layers in a payments system is undesirable, I wonder whether you make all your purchases online by putting dollars and cents into envelopes and mailing them to the merchants, or whether you use that additional layer of credit built atop the lower layer hard money supply. Bitcoin was not designed to be “maximally profitable to miners”, it was designed to be a currency that could not be captured a…

Post by lrvick » Sat, Jul 16, 2022, 9:56 AM UTC

eldenwrong wrote: post #360

CharlesW wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Those are even better money laundering tools than Bitcoin. How are cash and art better for money laundering than Bitcoin?

Cash is untraceable....? Although Bitcoin will reach that point as well