They are using lightning wallets. So no on chain settling. No (extra) trees were harmed for hamburgers (though obviously opening and closing of channels and initial mining it self is energy intensive).
Which is of course to be expected, as the bitcoin network is entirely unable to process the transactions of a small rural town.
Basically, people in El Salvador will use a centralized payment app that happens to denominate prices in Bitcoin. It will be interesting to see how much this actually works with the extreme volatility of Bitcoin, but for a country that is apparently desperate to get foreign value into the country it may be the worse option, except for all the others.
With ligthning, you're not using the bitcoin network to process transactions. If we opened a lightning channel for our 2 personal bitcoin wallets, and I paid you 1000SAT over the channel, and then someone checked my bitcoin wallet, they would see that I still have all those SATs (of course, I can't double spend them).
Did Jo and Alice participate in a USD transaction?
If Bitcoin's original thesis of truly decentralized P2P cash still holds, then it should be viewed as an M0 money supply. Financial services and products build on top of and separately from the main chain make sense as analogues to reserve banks and payment processors that do not handle the majority of transfers in physical cash.
Calling it a promise makes it sound like there's counterparty risk and you're relying on them not changing the code. Changing the lightning code would have no effect on your funds locked into lightning using the old code.
Similarly, if I send you 1000SAT through the lightning network, I am trading in bitcoin, but not using the bitcoin blockchain to do so.
Sure, Lightning relies on guarantees offered by the bitcoin blockchain to promise payment security. But it's not the same thing, and the Lightning network could become compromised even if the bitcoin blockchain remain secure For example, if Lightning accidentally started adding an extra 0 to transactions, if I send you 100 SAT over the LN you could see that you are receiving 1000 SAT and send me some products. Later, when the channel is closed, the bitcoin blockchain would refuse the final transfer, but it may be too late.
[0]: https://twitter.com/OpenNodeCo/status/1435264127241527306
Nobody is required to use Chivo, but people are required to accept legal tender. There's no reason to expect that Chivo-Chivo transfers will go to the trouble of opening individual lightning channels for each user, which costs non trivial amounts of money for each opened and closed channel.
It would make sense that users of the app can settle with each other and it doesn't so much as escape the four walls of a database at Chivo-HQ. But McDonalds is a multi-national enterprise and won't be trusting Chivo (or any El-Salvador official banking infra, I'd assume) to manage their wallets.
It is really cool to see a (hopefully) successful application of Lightning on Bitcoin in the wild, from a person who has been nay-saying about Lightning. I will be really glad to see it succeed. But I'm dubious about the success of this app.
One should hope the two successes are not tied to each other – it's encouraging that there are other companies. I have no way to judge Chivo and I've never used their software, but I have little trust of governments to implement complex systems well, and if there ever was a case study of a burgeoningly complex system, I think Lightning and Bitcoin is the big one.
I don't know enough about lightning to dispute it, but it would seem these reports about Opennode and McDonalds are in conflict with those reports. Do you have any local color or stories to add? I'm interested in what they actually are technically doing, I didn't know that Lightning could be "partitioned" but my Technical Spanish is rusty.
Are there any controls that would prevent folks from using Chivo to spend their $30 literally anywhere they wanted, in as much as there is a Bitcoin receiving address for them? (If I opened it up to "all lightning-capable nodes" would that change the story? I understand little in spite of knowing lots about Bitcoin and friends, something something, needs to be a route/path from one node to another?)
Chivo has just usual Lightning node as any other, you can follow it publicly here: https://amboss.space/node/02f72978d40efeffca537139ad6ac9f099... and you can see that they have direct channels with IBEX and others, so payment to many businesses from Chivo can literally be done with 0 sats fee. IBEX then has channel with OpenNode, so when paying to McDonalds there's a chance that IBEX will take some fee.
But in practice, it's absurd to imagine that the population of a whole country will learn about lightning or bitcoin directly and create their own Lightning channels or bitcoin wallets (though doubtless some will). Instead, most will use an app that hides all the complexity from them, and since the government is advertising one particular app, that will likely see overwhelming use.
And then, the official app or any other app will likely avoid wasting money on lightning or bitcoin to settle app-app transfers, and instead settle most transactions in their own centralized backend.
You're just moving the goal posts. Here was your original statement:
> Actually, they are not even using lighning wallets
Here is your updated statement:
> it's absurd to imagine that the population of a whole country will learn about lightning or bitcoin directly and create their own Lightning channels or bitcoin wallets (though doubtless some will)
You started with what sounded like fact, then revealed that the justification is just the invocation of a thought experiment. There's nothing but speculation here. You're right this may happen, but a hyperbolic angry comment isn't the way to add to the discussion. This is why HN cryptocurrency threads are garbage dumps.
>They are using lightning wallets.
If your real intent is to improve discussion, maybe you should address that instead of erroneously invoking the "move the goalposts" fallacy. Moreover, I think both comments had substance to them, especially when compared to, again, the original comment about the lightning network.
The non-hyperbolic statement would have been "they will (99.99% certainly) not be using even lightning wallets".
Still, while this is a forward-looking statement, it is more than idle speculation - the government is encouraging the population to install one specific app, even offering money to anyone that does. In contrast, running your own lightning channels is known to be very difficult to do, so it is a priori extremely unlikely for a large proportion of the population to run their own.
pull the plug of your computer
leave the metaverse
> Are you figuring in the Lightning Network?
No.
The lightning network is a separate system for transactions denominated in bitcoin. It does nothing to modify the capacity of the bitcoin network, it creates a way to do transactions WITHOUT using the bitcoin network (except occasionally).