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Comment by jordigh | Hacker News Reader

I just wanted internet money, not a speculative financial instrument. :(

Yeah, that's what bitcoin should have been. Too bad it also consumes an insane amount of energy and isn't able to process a lot of transactions per second. Hope that a good cryptocurrency gets more traction and will be the next decentralized "paypal / digital currency".

What about Lightning network? AFAIK it works right now, it's instant and scalable.

Doesn't relying on the Lightning network compromise Bitcoin's promise of no-trust finance?

Nope, you're still benefiting from the base layer's security while being able to transact much faster and cheaper on layer 2.

You still need one slow and/or expensive Bitcoin transaction to start using it, while having enough funds for a justice transaction. You can't use it trustlessly on your phone and it's also not scalable (no decentralized route finding that scales exists and is an intractable problem).

Just use another crypto if you want to pay for things. 0-conf are just as instant as credit card payments are.

The only cryptocurrency that might one day become real “internet money” is nano, because it has no fees and transactions are almost instant.

* In the future sidechains are going to be used in a big way on Ethereum. Lower cost, higher transaction processing. All the cool shit is being developed on Ethereum right now because of a robust toolchain. Also, there are many infrastructure startups that are filling in technology gaps.

* Basic Attention Token (BAT) is another "internet money" contender because the user can earn it through viewing ads. No fiat onramp needed.

I haven't researched Nano but I would be interested to hear the trade-offs compared to Ethereum and Bitcoin.

I looked into nano because it kept getting mentioned. Seems like the only way to acquire it is to buy it from someone who already has it. Somehow, that isn't very motivating.

Originally it was distributed in a very fair manner, compared to other coins; it had a faucet which required captcha solving to get coins: https://medium.com/nanocurrency/the-nano-faucet-c99e18ae1202

Now, yes, you have to exchange for it from other currencies, as there is a finite supply which has already been issued.

Yeah, see, finite supply entirely in the hands of early adopters doesn't really sound very legit to me.

I'm not sure what other options work out better though. BTC is now only mineable by large groups with tons of hardware, which seems less fair to me. At least with the faucet approach everyone was equal in terms of what they could acquire.

Personally I didn't use it anyway, I just traded for the coin like anything else.

This is the only one I'm still interested in, and the only one I hold. When you transfer it around between your wallets and exchange it feels like "Yes, this is what I thought BTC would be". It's significantly more eco-friendly and actually a really interesting concept in how it works: https://docs.nano.org/whitepaper/english/

Needs more adoption from the mainstream crypto payment providers though. Honestly I suspect half the reason support is lacking is because nobody actually understands how it works (because it is quite different).

Nano is fast and free because it is not used much. How many transactions per seconds did they achieve? I think it was in the ballpark of a 100, much too low for a global currency. Let's say 10% of the earth population want to use nano once a week. Then you need 0.1×8e9/(7×24×60×60)~1000tps. Then it might replace paypal, but not cash or card, and the microtransaction usecase is even farther away. Indeed it seems better than bitcoin, but that's a low bar by now. I do like nano's idea of voting weight delegation, it seems like an elegant solution to keep the power over the system in the hand of the user/owners.

At the moment I feel a centralized privacy coin would work best for me. Centralization brings performance and the private part avoids excluding participants.

Algorand is interesting. It’s the first decentralized proof-of-stake blockchain. It’s also created by Turing award winner, Silvio Macali.

https://www.algorand.com/

DAI is your friend - always pegged to the USD, non-custodial stablecoin.

Speculation could be discouraged by having a fixed block reward, so that it takes all of a century to bring yearly inflation below rate 1%...

How would that discourage speculation?

It doesn't. Doge works that way and is highly volatile.

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