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Comment by anonymoushn | Hacker News Reader

Does this work? The only instances of people attempting to use LN I've witnessed ended in failure.

LN dev here. That seems strange, though in the last 6 years we have improved in all fronts.

It's been a while since I've had a payment outright fail, TBH.

I used BlueWallet a few weeks ago and kept hitting routing errors. I had to mess around with it for more than a day and transfer between several different wallets before finally escaped with my funds, so not very keen to try again

I have been using LN quite a lot for casual payments in the last years. There have been a lot of small hiccups but recently it have been working very fluently for me.

Yes, it works. Try Breez wallet for example https://breez.technology and spend on https://yalls.org

Everyone using Bitcoin in El Salvador is using lightning network for the most part.

Through Strike, right?

Yes, most of them. I think the risk by using strike is much less and you do not have to be online to accept payments.

Which is not a good sign for general LN adoption.

They can use any LN wallet to pay, but most people use the official government app which is called Chivo.

McDonalds is using OpenNode here in El Salvador: https://twitter.com/robertcurrie/status/1443055854056525831

And if you believe Bukele, they have more transactions than VISA

( 65 K / second)

Hmm the population of El Salvador is a bit over 6.5 million, which would mean an average of 1 transaction per 100 seconds per person. That seems unlikely.

They definitely aren't. They're using Chivo which is a centralized custodial wallet solution. Transfers are just updates to their MySQL store - as they should be. Chivo only uses Strike's private LN nodes nobody else is allowed to peer with when facilitating an international transfer -- between two of Maller's own accounts.

Chivo is not crypto. And that's what most folks there are being forced to use by the local dictator. It's centralized, trusted, censorable and entirely antithetical to the Satoshi white paper.

Forbes is reporting[0] that they are using BitGo. FYI Salvadorians are not required to use chivo at all. The interoperability is the exciting part not chivo.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2021/09/07/el-...

BitGo being another centralized custodial wallet antithetical to the white paper? I mean, my dollars are interoperable with every bank in America and that really doesn't excite me. They're also interoperable with the banks in El Salvador since both use the USD.

I've been using it for years - early on I ran into some routing issues for larger payments, but within the past year, it's gotten boring and mostly just "works".

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