191–200 of 448 posts
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> Micropayments are coming, perhaps using blockchain Blockchain is remarkably ill-suited for micropayments.
The subject of this thread is the literal solution to micropayments using “blockchains”. And it works amazingly well! “
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There are some semi-trustless systems that work with escrows [0]. But realistically, an arbitration system does indeed require a trusted party. There is no trustless world, just a world where trustless is an option and where "trustful" systems can be built on trustless foundations. [0] Those systems give some guarantees about the trusted party (e.g. that they can't just run with the money).
> where the "trustful" systems are built on trustless foundations. You cannot build trust on a trustless foundation. As, again, the crypto world is busy rediscovering.
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Well, fwiw, imho it's good criticism and skepticism is warranted and I agree with it. But it's early days. I always warn here on HN that we should not throw the baby away with the bathwater, meaning, don't kill (or over-regulate) blockchain before it can grow into something nice (from the monster it is now). Imho these are the seeds of something nice, but it's not there yet. I can feel it coming though, because of th…
It's not still early days. Bitcoin was created 13 years ago, it was useless for payments back then and it's still useless for payments now. Every direction that anyone takes it will be in the direction of some kind of pure money-making thing, usually in the form of a ponzi or pyramid scheme. This has happened over and over again for 13 years. There's simply no one else interested in building on this because everyone…
A cool use of the Lightning network is the podcast 2.0 initative. Currently, as I listen to podcasts, I stream back satoshis (sats), value for value (I use Castamatic on iOS, fountain.fm is also an option on Android). You can also send messages with sats attached, called “boosts”. Creators can transparantly split the sats they receive over various goals (i.e. FOSS projects [opensats], or guests on shows). There are n…
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> The 1.5-3.5% credit card processing fee for starters. Compared to... 1 dollar, no, 15 dollars, no, 5 dollars, no, 65 dollars, no, ... transaction fees for Bitcoin.
How much are Lightning transaction fees?
Why use LN when other simple L1 solutions already work great as money. Litecoin (LTC) has cheap fees and lots of room. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is constantly improving and has a ton of transaction room to grow, with increases if/when demand grows. Dogecoin (DOGE) not my favorite, but does work fine for the money use-case, but development, from what I can see is a bit stale. With these existing simple solutions, I don't see…
Because bitcoin is money, and shitcoins are not.
I'll never understand why BTC Maximalists refuse to acknowledge faults in BTC and see how other currencies can solve them.
A cool use of the Lightning network is the podcast 2.0 initative. Currently, as I listen to podcasts, I stream back satoshis (sats), value for value (I use Castamatic on iOS, fountain.fm is also an option on Android). You can also send messages with sats attached, called “boosts”. Creators can transparantly split the sats they receive over various goals (i.e. FOSS projects [opensats], or guests on shows). There are n…
- There are many ways for a malicious entity to rollback a payment and prevent it from being detected (just DoS the watchtowers).
- You still need to make an on-chain transaction to open a new channel which incurs on-chain fees and limits the scalability of LN.
It's incredible how money can corrupt large groups of people into convincing themselves that a solution works when it simply doesn't.
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How do you handle the tax implications of streaming sats? As far as I know, every payment with Bitcoin triggers a taxable event? Do you record a gazillion log entrys "Paid $0.0000145 for listening podcasts, Paid $0.000142 for listening podcasts ...", crunch all the numbers and then at the end of the year put that gigantic list into your tax declaration?
Not a lawyer or accountant here but I think it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event. Until then, you have deposited some value in a number of lightening network nodes and have been negotiating a set of pairwise IOUs with them for later. DeFi/staking has a similar problem and I believe waiting until gains and losses are realized will be the way it goes down. For now, make…
IAAL. Specifically, a tax lawyer. It would not be reasonable to treat the on-chain event as sole the taxable event.
Every transaction in a cryptocurrency is a taxable event.
This is the same tax treatment that applies any time a non-USD currency is used in a transaction (by an American). Similar rules apply to citizens of EU countries.