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

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

#61

Post by AnonC »

arcticbull wrote: post #42
AnonC wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transferring money across countries without the government seizing or controlling it. Can you list what non-cryptocurrency technology provides a better solution for that? There are several countries with permanent or temporary restrictions (I think Russia and Ukraine are recent examples).

Changing that is very much a non-goal. Just ask Treasury. Countries on the up-and-up are welcome to use Wise. [1] The ones that aren't are broadly cut off from the global financial networks for very good reasons . Either way, if you disagree with those reasons you're free to lobby for changes - but the ability to exclude them is overwhelmingly a good thing. [1] https://wise.com/

This is not relevant, since the comment I replied to said any use case. I just picked one that’s a need for certain people in certain places. It’s not a non-goal for them, and what governments want or push for may not be as good as you believe.

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

#62

Post by nope96 »

jmoak3 wrote: post #56
dbrgn wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, Lightning Network is a distributed protocol. Here's a good intro: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/understanding-the-ligh... Technically, Lightning Network is fascinating and quite ingenious. Practically, the blogpost above was written in 2016, so more than 6 years ago, and LN - in my impression - hasn't really taken off yet... I wonder if it's due to its complexity, plus the potential need for watchtower se…

It just seems to me like it allows you to open a secure high speed channel with someone you expect to transact with frequently. That's interesting but most people transact with different people constantly - so unless I want to have an open channel that closes nightly/weekly/monthly with every store I shop at, wouldn't I use a centralized service? How would that be different than opening an account with Paypal, and ev…

It's a p2p mesh network. Lots of people open channels to lots of other people, payments are routed over the network.

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

#63

Post by pigtailgirl »

-- "Visa and Mastercard are the world’s dominant payment processing networks. By collecting 2–3% transaction fees everytime someone swipes a debit or credit card, they pulled in $24B in 2021"

"There were 343 million Visa credit cards in circulation in the U.S. and 798 million Visa credit cards in circulation outside of the U.S. at the end of September 2020"

"By the second quarter of 2021, there were about 742 million Visa debit cards in circulation in the United States and over 1.8 billion cards worldwide"

"There were 249 million Mastercard credit cards in the U.S. and 725 million cards in the rest of the world at the end of March 2021"

"There were over 1.46 billion MasterCard debit cards in circulation worldwide by the end of the fourth quarter of 2021"

The 24B looks staggering - however in my opinion when you put it in the context of ubiquity - it doesn't seem so insane - given they integrate with banks - provide support - enable payments in countries travelers don't bank - etc - is the lightning network really going to provide that much more bang for buck? Not trying to be a credit card company apologist here - however I'm grateful when I can use my chase debt card in Istanbul -- (sources: statista & creditcards.com) --

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

#64

Post by babypuncher »

librish wrote: post #11

Question for lightning network experts: Can LN truly scale to support feature parity with Visa/AMEX? By feature parity I mean not only tx/s but also - Always readily available for places that support it (I never have to wait to open a channel, I never have to "pre-deposit" funds anywhere) - Fraud protection by default (I can have illegal transactions unwound) And can that be done at a price point that's significantly…

I think we both know the answer to this.

Cryptobros aren't interested in those "features".

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

#65

Post by babypuncher »

xvilka wrote: post #7

Even with all cryptocurrencies prices roller coaster and continuous scams they are 100x times better still than traditional banks - less paperwork, everything automated as much as possible, often even faster. No COBOL and online clients from 1990.

Also no fraud protection

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

#66

Post by arcticbull »

AnonC wrote: post #61
arcticbull wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Changing that is very much a non-goal. Just ask Treasury. Countries on the up-and-up are welcome to use Wise. [1] The ones that aren't are broadly cut off from the global financial networks for very good reasons . Either way, if you disagree with those reasons you're free to lobby for changes - but the ability to exclude them is overwhelmingly a good thing. [1] https://wise.com/

This is not relevant, since the comment I replied to said any use case. I just picked one that’s a need for certain people in certain places. It’s not a non-goal for them, and what governments want or push for may not be as good as you believe.

They meant a use case other than crime.

I mean look, it's not really even good for that. You have a public ledger of all your illegal transactions that you then share directly with law enforcement for them to feed into their automatic crime detection engines. Why bother with pro forma warrants? Just email your transactions directly to the FBI and have them make sure you didn't do anything wrong, I always say.

Dr Nicholas Weaver from UC Berkeley referred to such transactions as prosecution futures. I agree. After all, you're not even defending against current deanonymization tooling, you're defending against all future such tooling. Pepperidge Farm remembers Tornado Cash.

[edit] If I were in an authoritarian state capable of oppressing me, the last thing I'd do is use Bitcoin lol.

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

#67

Post by jmoak3 »

nope96 wrote: post #62
jmoak3 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just seems to me like it allows you to open a secure high speed channel with someone you expect to transact with frequently. That's interesting but most people transact with different people constantly - so unless I want to have an open channel that closes nightly/weekly/monthly with every store I shop at, wouldn't I use a centralized service? How would that be different than opening an account with Paypal, and ev…

It's a p2p mesh network. Lots of people open channels to lots of other people, payments are routed over the network.

Hmm so I have a channel with Target, Target has a channel with my neighbor, and my neighbor has a channel with my cousin.

You're saying I could send money to my cousin and Target and my neighbor would take some sort of cut if they agree to process the transaction?

How do they prevent double spend? What if I have that network, and also a channel with Walmart, and I send all my money to Walmart at the same time I send it all to my cousin, and they give me a sofa

In 's time when everyone closes the channels, my cousin will have my money, Walmart won't have my money, and I have a sofa.

Am I understanding this correctly?

EDIT: Oh, I see, my coins get locked in the process, so I couldn’t have a separate channel with all of my coins with Walmart. They would have to have a channel with Target, and I assume a good chunk of people in the mesh would have to validate every transaction to prevent double spend. So it’s not totally broken, it just scales poorly as the size of the mesh network grows?

To service the needs of an entity like target which may have a channel with everyone at the same time, I still think a centralized company will emerge to take on the processing with an intermediate hot wallet, instead of a lightning mesh.

But thanks for helping me understand lightning!

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

#68

Post by xvilka »

makoz wrote: post #54
xvilka wrote: post #7

Even with all cryptocurrencies prices roller coaster and continuous scams they are 100x times better still than traditional banks - less paperwork, everything automated as much as possible, often even faster. No COBOL and online clients from 1990.

Do you mind expanding why as an end-user paying in cryptocurrencies is easier than signing up for a credit card and paying with that? To sign up for a credit card (in USA), I just provide my personal information to some banking website and they mail me the credit card in a week or so that I can start to use.

It gets more complicated once you start using it for services outside the country, international transfers, or you decide to work overseas, or just retire overseas.

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

#69

Post by nly »

yuan43 wrote: post #8

> ... 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…

Bitcoin smart contracts were neutered early on, were they not?

In practice the bytecode in the protocol isn't used except for a handful of cookie cutter template transaction types?

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

#70

Post by candiodari »

AnonC wrote: post #38
this_user wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every proposed crypto use case, there already exists a better solution that does not use crypto currency technology.

Transferring money across countries without the government seizing or controlling it. Can you list what non-cryptocurrency technology provides a better solution for that? There are several countries with permanent or temporary restrictions (I think Russia and Ukraine are recent examples).

Never mind seizing, how about without 10 organisations, including 2 governments, taxing it. With bitcoin or other crypto you can get it down to 2 organisations, which is a big improvement already.
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