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?
if that supernova purchase was you yesterday thank you!! :D
The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
441–448 of 448 posts
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#442Earlier quoted context omitted.
Aren’t the vast majority of people using corporate email or one of the big handful of email providers? Being mostly a status quo and corporate prop doesn’t seem like an advantage
Even if there were only two, it still gives users choice to leave and take their email with them, especially if they bring their own domain. Some orgs still self host. Choice is what matters.
Sure, I’d still posit having a more distributed and less top heavy society is more important than being a status quo of a few oligopolies controlling 90%+ but people can self host
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've done some research (which in this case is a fancy way of saying “opened up Wikipedia” [1]) and looks like in the U.S. you can just run a sole proprietorship without filing anything. Neat! [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sole_proprietorship#United_Sta...
This is confusing. Are people legally allowed to get a lot of income from Bitcoin without a SP or more in these countries? Will Stripe automatically deny people without a sole proprietorship in these countries? What happens if people are able to get on Stripe without an SP in these countries? I assume no one is going to jail over this. I don’t expect you to know the answers to these questions, but the focus was on th…
> Are people legally allowed to get a lot of income
In Russia, they aren't if it's systematic [1] (and if you get caught, which is usually not a concern for many unregistered one-man businesses). Stripe isn't available in Russia but most local payment gateways check your paperwork thoroughly, so if you're not a registered SP, card payments are mostly off the limits and the main payment method is card to card transfer there. (There's a few options, but those aren't widely popular because who cares)
[1]: https://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_10699/cc12ef... article 171 of the criminal offence code (in Russian)
I don't really have any experience with SPs in Estonia, but I think it's pretty similar. Let me try and sign up for Stripe and see what happens :-)
Update: I've just signed up as a “sole proprietor” and charged myself 1 EUR. I've only had to fill in my name and home address. Not even I had to submit any documents, perhaps because I already have an LLC registered with Stripe. Still not sure if it's legal, but from the technical standpoint yeah, you probably can use Stripe without any paperwork here in Europe.
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#444Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't understand this at all. Authority is a fundamental and underlying requirement of essentially all aspects of civil society, including but not limited to justice. There is actually no way to define even the concept of crime without an appeal to a supervisory authority. Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quant…
> Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quantity of human beings.
It would seem bitcoin, a global, massively successful cryptocurrency with no centralized authority, serving as a sovereign nations national currency, serving markets all over the world to the order of trillions of dollars would be one of many direct contradictions to your claim.
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this at all. Authority is a fundamental and underlying requirement of essentially all aspects of civil society, including but not limited to justice. There is actually no way to define even the concept of crime without an appeal to a supervisory authority. Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quant…
> Authority, and specifically "centralized" authority, is a necessary component of any system that can effectively serve more than a nominal quantity of human beings. It would seem bitcoin, a global, massively successful cryptocurrency with no centralized authority, serving as a sovereign nations national currency, serving markets all over the world to the order of trillions of dollars would be one of many direct con…
Neither the fact that the failed state of Venezuela has made some moves towards Bitcoin, nor the amount of nonproductive/wash volume that crypto does per day or whatever, serve as counterpoints to my claim.
Currency had an actual definition, expressed in terms of other actual things. It's not just whatever you say it is, or whatever someone might use to perform an economic activity.
Additionally, Bitcoin is plainly not "massive successful". It is at best "marginally utilized".
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lightning is a hack, not a solution, and certainly not one that can be described as "amazing".
Why is it a hack?
The problem that needs to be solved is, basically, that the fundamental architecture of Bitcoin establishes an upper limit on transactions-per-second (TPS) which is too low.
Lightning "solves" this problem by moving transactions off-chain, bundling them into batches, and then emitting batches of transactions to Bitcoin mainnet. That means a transaction against Lightning is only valid once the bundle in which the transaction is placed is committed on mainnet. A confirmation from Lightning isn't good enough; users have to wait for a confirmation from mainnet.
Batching is a common optimization! But it's not a solution to performance problems. It weakens the guarantees afforded by transaction confirmation. Those guarantees are important. They define the consistency model provided by the system. The model of Bitcoin which includes Lightning is fundamentally different, and weaker, than the core model of Bitcoin.
And so Lightning isn't a solution to the problem. It weakens the transactional model of Bitcoin, and so provides a totally separate system to Bitcoin proper.
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#447Earlier quoted context omitted.
But TCP/IP does have layers that help it to scale... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_protocol_suite
No, those layers are not to help it scale. Those layers are different levels of abstraction that actually sit on top of one another, but encompass the lower layers. e.g. HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc., all sit on top of TCP — that is to say: all of those protocols actually use TCP, they are TCP, they are all made from TCP packets/communications. TCP sits on top of IP, that is to say: all TCP packets are in fact IP packets. T…
I think the problem is that you have no clue of what the LN is and how it works.
And you can't apply your same logic to it bc of lack of understanding.
Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, those layers are not to help it scale. Those layers are different levels of abstraction that actually sit on top of one another, but encompass the lower layers. e.g. HTTP, SMTP, POP3, etc., all sit on top of TCP — that is to say: all of those protocols actually use TCP, they are TCP, they are all made from TCP packets/communications. TCP sits on top of IP, that is to say: all TCP packets are in fact IP packets. T…
I think the problem is that you have no clue of what the LN is and how it works. And you can't apply your same logic to it bc of lack of understanding.
Nah, I know exactly what LN is, and how it works.
To be quite frank, based upon the fact you think the layers of OSI and TCP/IP are to help it scale, you clearly appear to have little (or no) understanding as to how that actually works — so your direct comparison to LN scaling here isn't just weak, it's meaningless and just plain factually wrong. And this is particularly obvious to folk who /do/ actually understand both.
— Good day to you, your bad logic and your poor argument.