I remember Bitcoin was getting a wider adoption for payment back in 2013ish. I paid for my domain from namecheap in Bitcoin back then.
But it then blew up and everyone treated it more as a store of value and it made all the shops stop accepting it as payment due to its volatility.
Otherwise, the more popular it is, the less usable it is as a real currency. (As the transaction fees get bid up to higher levels if transaction throughput is limited.)
(Oh, and without a custodian, the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this. Maybe something like that will someday be usable but it sucks right now.... and it’s not obvious how these problems will be solved in a way that doesn’t introduce a whole bunch more game theory and/or technical/resource/usability constraints.)
This + micropayments, (i.e. negligible fees so it makes sense to send 0.01USD to someone, every day, or w/e.
I believe we have now reached the point where more time has passed since the Lightning whitepaper than between the Bitcoin and Lightning whitepapers.
But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.
Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments
without worrying about block confirmation times. Security
is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating
a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments.
Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.
Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of
transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows
away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude.
Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without
custodians.
Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the
Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which
allows for emerging use cases such as instant
micropayments.2. There are over 10,000 lightning nodes with nearly $70 million in liquidity where payments occur everyday: https://1ml.com/
And yet we’re years in and virtually no one uses LN as money despite lots of people having a vested interest in making it seem viable. I’m sure some people trade it back and forth but nobody is buying goods and services with it outside of as a gimmick.
Bitcoin already does the money things as you call it, being able to send any amount of value to anyone else without requiring 3rd parties.
You can send $1 million worth of BTC anywhere in the world in minutes and the fee right this very minute is $5.94 for a high-priority transaction. But if you had any doubt of ensuring the transaction gets into the next block, you could easily start with a fee of $15, which is a trivial amount for a $1 million transaction.
But for use cases where the fees and speed are problematic—you might need to wait 10-15 minutes for a transaction confirmation—there's Lightning Network which clear instantly and the fees are fractions of pennies.
The "off-chain" comment is misleading; Lightning's payment channels require a base layer transaction to open and close them; it's the transactions that happen in the channel that aren't on the base layer because the entire world doesn't want to see every cup of coffee anyone of us purchases on a global immutable blockchain.
Once one of us (me or the other party in the payment channel) have decided to close the channel—like paying a tab at a bar—the end result of transactions hits the main bitcoin blockchain.
They could just disappear on you with your money, and you would be left with gas on a contract nobody wants anything to do with.
I think my favorite explanation of latin america is like 'yeah its kind of cyberpunk these days just more horizontal than vertical'
ah ok here's a video of someone doing this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtAcRonh8dU [ - ATAR BAND, Pagamento rápido e fácil do banco amigo das criptomoedas !!! ]
Have 3 houses and only live in 1? The fact that your houses are losing value in Bitcoin terms will push you to sell if wealth preservation is the goal.
I hope he hung onto it!
One whose value fluctuates wildly over time, one that is lost if you lose your keys, one that is susceptible to a hacker stealing your keys, etc.