Twitter CEO Says Its a Matter of Time for Lightning Network to Come to Cash App | Hacker News Reader

Twitter CEO Says Its a Matter of Time for Lightning Network to Come to Cash App

mybitcoinnews.co

39 pointsdiken134 comments

Last year Alexis O’hanion predicted BTC would be 20k and ETH 1.5k by this time too. Many executives seem over enthusiastic about cryptocurrencies to me.

Predicting the success of a certain technology (the Lightning Network) and the price of something are two completely different things, though.

You don’t think that these two things are correlated?

Many crypto communities have been trying very hard to disconnect the two (price from success) in the public’s conscious. Which has some legitimate arguments in it’s favour. My view, and I don’t have much of a horse in this race, is that price may be one contributing metric but it’s a weak one to use as the only metric.

There’s tons of work involved in getting adoption for the tech happening in the background that is disconnected from the price. Especially considering how many people are speculating with it using vague public indicators (like media hype) without much direct connection to the value it’s producing.

Not to mention the unpredictablity of it’s long term value of an entire tech is far harder to predict than it is a companies value via stock price.

Maybe they are bag holders.

I am still long term somewhat bullish on the tech but I can't see any of the current generation working beyond niche use. Its not just efficiency but also economics. They are significantly more deflationary than gold, meaning there is never any incentive to do anything but speculate on them. If they gain any utility they will "moon" again and the resulting price instability will once again drive off everyone except speculators.

Bitcoin has plenty of issues but being deflationary isn't one of them. Real estate is deflationary and people do not refuse to trade land.

Lots of people refuse to trade land because they think it will be worth more in the future. Look at the housing markets of major cities. And that is when you have a highly localized set of potential buyers.

Real Estate has a certain real world utility.

Land would make extremely poor money.

Whether it's deflationary or inflationary in the long term doesn't really matter for the purposes of whether it's useful as a short-term transaction medium for conversion into fiat on both ends, which is presumably the use-case for the Cash app.

Is anyone else having trouble parsing that title?

Yeah, they should have said "Square CEO", "Twitter CEO" seems irrelevant in that context unless you know it's the same person.

He's way more recognisable as Twitter's CEO

but I don't know what cash app Twitter makes so the title makes zero sense to me.

I did.

The Square CEO (and coincidentally Twitter CEO), says their mobile payments app will need to integrate with the bitcoin lightning app.

That makes far more sense!

Should be "square CEO."

The Lighting network is part Bitcoin Core.

this is the title of the article "TWITTER CEO SAYS SQUARE’S CASH APP INTEGRATING LIGHTNING NETWORK IS A MATTER OF TIME"

(the caps was just how it copy and pasted from the original article. they are not for emphasis)

Not sure if this is one of those news sites that A/B tests different titles but it is a little different than the HN title.

It is still a mouthful though. :)

Does LN still have that crazy design where if you lose connectivity your deposit could be lost?

Also doesn't it make Bitcoin even more hyper-deflationary by forcing money to be locked up in LN nodes?

> if you lose connectivity your deposit could be lost

i haven't heard of that. if you aren't monitoring on-chain transactions the other channel party may commit an out of date state, and you may not manage to issue a justice transaction in response.

"watchtowers" are currently in development, to which this burden can be outsourced.

> doesn't it make Bitcoin even more hyper-deflationary by forcing money to be locked up in LN nodes

lightning channels do not permanently lockup bitcoin, no. the channels have a timelock based maximum age, but cooperative peers can agree to finalise and close the channel at any time.

in any case, value can circulate via the lightning network.

The connectivity requirements are like checking your email once a day or so. It’s not like you lose money if your phone goes through a tunnel.

In practice, your money should end up feeling more locked up if it is not on LN. LN becomes the checking account to the BTC savings account.

Hyper-deflationary? Didn't it have 300% inflation last year?

It's designed to be deflationary, i.e. it's designed to MOOOOON and make the early speculators rich. But, like most things in cryptocurrency, that's failed miserably. We now have hyperinflation instead.

> We have this massive seller network of small and medium, and large businesses

What are the expected transaction fees?

I remember Steam dropping bitcoin when transaction fees started costing more than actual games.

That's the main difference of the lightning network. It's a secondary later, ultimately backed by the Bitcoin ledger, but is capable of performing many transactions that are all backed by a single transaction on the primary ledger.

This drops transaction fees by a massive amount, and allows for much quicker transactions.

Edit to add: I think Lightening is a really interesting tech, and I'm really curious to see how it handles scaling out in the real world. All that said, I think it's far too early to say how effective lighting will actually be for storefronts like Steam.

The promise is that it will help, but we have to see if that promise bears out in the real world.

>What are the expected transaction fees?

The typical procedure is to make the transaction, get a failure, make the transaction again, get a failure again, repeat a few dozen times until the person behind you starts making death threats, and finally give up and pay by credit card. So the transaction fee is whatever your credit card charges.

Lightning is almost completely non-functional.

Why would you need the cash app if BTC with LN works without it?

If Cash app will offer an option to receive BTC and automatically convert it to USD, then suddenly thousands of businesses have a zero-cost, zero-risk (assuming square takes the risk) of accepting BTC for their store-front.

Nobody said you need it. But if you want BTC with LN to succeed, having a payment app with many millions of established users support it is a good starting point that decreases effort of entry.

Fiat -> Crypto exchange

Exchanging USD to BTC.

what's the difference between this and venmo?

There's not a big conceptual difference.

I like the cash app slightly more, since it doesn't publish transactions to a friend network by default. The network effects are still in Venmo's favor, though, so I definitely carry both.

I have a similar experience. I prefer the Cash App because it's visually more pleasant to use and I don't have to publish to the whole world that I paid my roommate $5.76 for lunch. That said, everyone in my circle of friends uses Venmo and I've turned off all of the social aspects so it works just fine.

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