Bitcoin Lightning network could disrupt $150B year payment/remittance industry

"could"

If you don't buy bitcoin right now you're a sucker, look at all these people making money. Oh yeah, it also has some business justifications that totally make sense, trust us, this isn't vaporware... look, see, all these people are using it to buy drugs! /s

"Let’s say you want to make a $100 payment to a merchant. Using your credit card would cost the merchant $3, which is then passed along to you via hidden costs. "

You also get 1-3 credit card points, which for you is extra money that you wouldn't get if you were to pay for this with Bitcoin or, for that matter, cash.

Also if the merchant screws you and sends you the wrong or a broken item, you can dispute the charge and real humans from American Express or Chase will spend their valuable time to help you resolve the dispute.

And, of course, if someone makes an outright fraudulent transaction with your card then the CC company will return your funds no questions asked. With bitcoin, your funds are lost for ever whether it was a mistake or a fraud.

These services are necessary (to build trust or for regulation reasons). If that was not the case we'd have seen a lot more real world adoption of crypto by now.

> ... Arcane Research estimated that in Q1 22, Lightning facilitated $20–30M in monthly payments. That’s a 4x YoY increase, but a far cry from the $866B Visa facilitates each month.

It's worth noting the scorn and hate once thrown on this idea as a scaling method for Bitcoin back in 2014-2018. Part of the problem was that the protocol needed to be upgraded for certain things to work well. Part of the problem was that the underlying concept, although simple, is very technically deep. (Many people still don't realize that Bitcoin does "smart contracts" and always has). Part of the problem was that the "obvious" solution from the perspective of beginners -just make bigger blocks - seemed so natural while Lightning seemed so alien.

Edit: why is this post now flagged?

Lightning Network is just a centralized company acting as a middleman, occasionally (if ever) committing changes to the blockchain right?

If that is the case, then theoretically Visa and Paypal are already lightning networks, just without the periodic bitcoin commits.

If so, wouldn't that mean that if Visa and Paypal are banned from letting country X citizens send funds to someone in country Y, wouldn't the gov of X just block whatever new lightning network companies pop up? Isn't it the same thing?

Either I don't understand, or Crypto finance is just a new way of doing the same thing but confusing enough to make politicians get bored reading about it, allowing them to avoid regulation