bitcoin appears to have just become another asset that rich people on wall street are hoarding with no real attention or interest in the actual payment mechanism at all. it might as well just be some trading cards being shuffled around.
But it looks like bitcoin can still be very useful as an alternative settlement layer for international payments. Either directly for large payments, or under the hood for something like Strike[3].
[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_f...
[2] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity
[3] https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b90...
I'm not sure I understand what would be the value of using cryptocurrency under the hood for something like Strike. If they are settling the payments themselves, why not just use a simple database to reconcile their transactions?
A multi-country payment service can indeed just update their database. But If there is a net flow of value between countries, then they will still have to move that value over slower and more expensive traditional systems. If they implement fast transfers for their users on top of those slow systems, then that means they need idle capital waiting in each destination country so that they can front the money to the receiver. This adds cost and complexity: interface with traditional systems, capital opportunity cost, need to forecast demand, need to do currency hedging, ...
Transfering via bitcoin and converting via exchanges on both ends eliminates that problem. It also makes it easy to partner with other payment services that do the same, while minimizing the need for trust.
You have to, ahem, adjust for deflation.
That is misleading in two respects: Funds in lightning have high velocity, so it doesn't necessarily take a lot of funds to support a lot of economic activity.
Channels were originally all public, but now most channels are private, so no one really knows how much funds are involved in lightning channels.
People who use lightning generally describe it very positively. The bigger impediment to making small frequent payments is Bitcoin's tax treatment: E.g. in the US every single purchase made with Bitcoin requires line item reporting to the IRS and cost basis tracking.
As we head towards a burgeoning climate catastrophe, no-one should be using Bitcoin.
Are there any estimates, what percentage of that is caused by mining bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies? What about things like machine learning or rendering video footage?
I'm afraid that i couldn't find anything comprehensive, but something like that would be very interesting to explore!
Your keys, your bitcoin.
1 USD = 0.99 USD tomorrow.
1 BTC will always be 1 BTC.
The actual value of 1 USD may change. But so does the value of 1 BTC
There was for a long while talk of whether or not the blockchain would ultimately be adopted for state currencies going forward but it's not clear that this is even an ideal use case.
As an example, I would personally view it as a good thing (and I know others have different views on this) that the government for tax and law enforcement purposes can view the global transaction log (it would certainly simplify taxes while increasing compliance), but is it a good thing that everyone else can view the transaction log too?
Ideally I would like the police and the tax man to know that people are not up to anything nefarious without everyone in the world knowing when you buy birth control or a pregnancy test.
The other issue is obviously money supply. Governments like to be able to manage the supply of currency, but deflationary issuances like Bitcoin are clearly incompatible with that goal.
I actually think it might be interesting for something like voting. Here having a completely public, verifiable record would add a lot to what is currently a very opaque system in a lot of places.
I don't see any evidence that institutional wall street investors are adopting bitcoin in any real way.
It's simultaneously described as a currency for exchange, a store of value and a speculative asset, but logically it cannot be all of these things simultaneously.
As an example, it fell quite sharply the other day while gold and stocks treaded water.
Is it going to $1 or $1 billion? I have no idea. But whatever is, it's certainly not reliably static.