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Comment by BobbyJo | Hacker News Reader

This was largely based on an implicit technical promise that did not pan out. Bitcoin simply doesn't scale well enough to ever be a functional payment system, certainly not a commonly used one. I doubt any digital currency will ever be performant enough to work like a credit card while being widely adopted, not without some level of centralization, but then why bother?

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Well, credit cards are very expensive to use (3% of every transaction on average). Digital centralized stable coin type of currency could compete with those.

But a centralized stablecoin has.. basically none of the benefits of Bitcoin?

At this point it looks like a bait and switch. We were promised a decentralized currency and we just got a get rich quick scheme.

Not to the customer. I don't pay 3% more for anything if I choose a card vs. cash, in fact the card gives me a 1% cash back reward.

Meanwhile buttcoins have ridiculous spikes in miner fees. New bullshit "distributed app" like the next cryptokitties is clogging Ethereum again? Now moving $10 costs $40! Money of the future!

Current stablecoins are fraudulent wildcat banks. Research Tether.

You might want to look into the Lightning Network - this enables instant payments on top of Bitcoin.

It's just a talking point. Only about 2x as many people are using it as 3 years ago, and due to being boat-anchored to the molasses slow L1, it would take 75 years, $500,000,000,000 worth of electricity and all the remaining block reward to open a lightning channel for everyone on earth. Even then its quadratic routing complexity would likely render it completely ineffective long before that many people tried to onboard. It's like a Soviet phone line, if you apply now, you might get a channel before you shuffle off this mortal coil.

So you're against the lightning network because it can't be scaled infinitely?

The overall system is just software, and it can be improved.

L1 is capable of 4.6 transactions per second.

L2 is capable of 25 million per second currently.

L3 will be in existence long before getting a channel to every human on Earth becomes a problem (please note that this is something the traditional financial system has also failed to do, despite hundreds of years and legislative support).

I’m against it because it’s physically impossible to sign up people in any quantity and doesn’t offer the same guarantees as the L1. We can talk about an L3 when there is one.

I've not even got anything against LN per se, what I'm pushing back on is the marketing that it's some sort of panacea, that it makes BTC a viable payment mechanism, or even that its particularly interesting.

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