This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LTC.
(Though its hard to compare LTC to a chain with a market cap of over $200b even if the former has a skyrocketing trade volume)
This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LTC.
(Though its hard to compare LTC to a chain with a market cap of over $200b even if the former has a skyrocketing trade volume)
I want internet money. I want to be able to send money to anyone, anywhere in the world, at the drop of a hat, as easy as email. I don't care about speculation or getting rich or avoiding taxes or sticking it to the man or anything like that. I just want to have a convenient way to get tipped on IRC by anyone at any time and to be able to repay in kind, to anyone at any time.
The issues with PayPal have mostly been interfacing with fiat currency, which any system will have to deal with, and transaction fees, which any system will have.
The real problem IMO is the lack of a de-facto service that everyone all around the world has, and we're kind of in this position: https://xkcd.com/927/
Having family and friends in different countries who use different currencies, let me tell you, Paypal is not the solution I want.
I argue it's not convenient for IRC tipping simply because 1) software is not well-integrated for minimal clicks 2) the other person might not have PayPal.
Don't get me wrong, I don't love PayPal, but I don't think Bitcoin brings anything really fundamentally important & new to the table, except maybe the decentralized part. Though, I suppose you could argue the decentralized nature of email was key for its universal adoption today.
You can insist that they charge you in the same currency as you wish to pay with and your bank will do the exchange at an order of magnitude lower fee. Not everyone knows this. The user interface also doesn't make it very clear (which perhaps surprised no one).
I transfer money to my mum in the UK once a month from my Australia debit card and its in her account within minutes, and the fees are far lower than a bank transfer.
Real currency has a federal reserve to balance supply against demand and keep the value steady.
BTC has entirely demand-driven value-- which is precisely as steady and predictable as the human mind.
The gold standard was abolished because the economy was on the brink of collapse. A dollar grossly mismeasured the value of an ounce of gold, because there were far FAR mare dollars than gold to back them, and the mapping of gold to dollars was not adjusted at all (from $35/oz) despite the discrepancy growing and growing for decades. In a sense, each ounce of gold was being double-counted 100 times over by so many dollars floating around in the economy. That situation was horribly unstable, because it was at huge risk of a run on gold (You'd have a lot more wealth if you exchange your dollar for gold; because of the aforementioned double counting, an ounce of gold actually corresponds to a great many dollars. If everyone had realized that and done it, the economy would have been toast).
Disconnecting the dollar from gold allowed the value of an ounce of gold to be correctly measured. So while other prices in the economy remained stable, gold shot up, because now the market was free to price it accurately (reflecting that the economy had grown far faster than the supply of gold). That doesn't indicate inflation, it precisely illustrates how dangerously out of whack things were before the gold standard was lifted.
Financial stability seems like a secondary concern that cannot be solved via computer code but might instead require other kinds of human codification, perhaps legal.
Which LTC wallet support LN in production?