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Comment by anonporridge | Hacker News Reader

You can also easily pay with better anonymity with the Strike app, https://strike.me, which abstracts bitcoin mainnet and lightning network payments behind USD, so you don't have to worry about actually holding bitcoin or managing tax implications. You just use bitcoin as a globally agnostic payment rail, masked with your local fiat, so the price volatility doesn't affect you.

Mullvad even gives you a 10% discount for bitcoin, bitcoin cash, and monero payments.

I am a bit disappointed that they haven't yet integrated bitcoin lightning network. That would be a huge improvement for reduced transaction fees given the low value of transactions they deal with, as well as instant confirmation rather than 6 block (~1 hour) confirmations. You could even theoretically stream nanopayments for each minute of use with lightning, rather than pay for a whole month.

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"Global payments for the internet"

I was intrigued...

Then

"currently the Strike app is only available in the United States*, El Salvador, and Argentina"

It's the "World" Series of Internet payments.

I also dismiss a project when it's still nascent. /s

Also, "Global payments for the internet" is really referring to bitcoin, not strike.

Strike isn't doing the magic here. It's just one of many possible APIs that can be built on top of bitcoin and the bitcoin lightning network. If you integrate with Strike with your company, anyone else on the planet with any other kind of bitcoin wallet can pay you.

Okay, however I have yet to see any crypto project that even comes close to solving borderless money transfers, although a lot of them claim to.

This is unfortunate as that market is ripe for disruption

You can literally just mail them cash if you want absolute anonymity.

Even with that though you'd still have to worry about them identifying you by your IP address. Are there any other VPN providers which support anonymous payments? It occurs to me that you could get some pretty decent anonymity by stringing two or three independent VPNs together, Tor-style, while avoiding many of the performance issues associated with Tor.

Careful! I used BTC and the processing time was absurdly long.

What is "absurdly long" mean here? They say it can take up to 30 min, I didn't time it but I reupped for 1 year twice and it was right at or under 30min both times.

It depends on current network conditions.

If the bitcoin network is currently congested, your transaction can potentially take hours before it's included in a block. Mullvad would wait at least until this point.

From my comment...

> I am a bit disappointed that they haven't yet integrated bitcoin lightning network. That would be a huge improvement ... as well as instant confirmation rather than 6 block (~1 hour) confirmations.

This is a known problem with blockchains and why naive projects like bitcoin cash that try to just pump up the layer one transaction volume for everyday merchant payments are doomed solutions.

The bitcoin lightning network payment experience is instant and magical, and constantly getting better.

I just paid using Bitcoin Cash (BCH), low fees and simple to integrate ;)

Cool story.

Doesn't scale.

Layer up.

Bitcoin Cash does currently scale up to Paypal's daily number of transactions while keeping transaction fees below $0.01. [0]

Scalability tests are underway [1] to detect bottlenecks for increasing the block size further, which should take it closer to Visa's transaction capacity.

The scalability roadmap aims for eventually supporting 50 daily transactions for each human in the planet, again keeping fees low, which is key for Bitcoin to be used as cash. Check out [2] if you want to read about the technical feasibility of this (even with today's hardware, it will be even easier in the future).

I understand the skepticism about the ability to scale Bitcoin after the Bitcoin Core team has been pushing for years for keeping block sizes low, but please let's consider facts rationally and maintain a civil discussion.

[0] https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-stress-test-goes-beyon...

[1] https://bitcoincashresearch.org/t/assessing-the-scaling-perf...

[2] https://blog.vermorel.com/journal/2017/12/17/terabyte-blocks...

> Bitcoin Cash does currently scale up to Paypal's daily number of transactions while keeping transaction fees below $0.01.

On this here website there was a talk a couple months ago that led me to believe that paying $150 worth of bitcoin costs ... $150 if you want it done at credit card speed. Have things changed?

Without any other information I must suppose you are talking about Bitcoin (BTC), which has limited scalability and therefore high transaction fees when there is high demand. Bitcoin Cash BCH has low fees, below $0.01 as I mentioned.

You can see a graph of historic average transaction fees at https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactionfees-btc-bch...

Credit cards take days to complete the transaction. Much like BTC, there are near-instant checks to make sure the desired transaction _will eventually and most likely_ be valid.

But that's not the user experience.

The UX of BCH beats BTC and ETH by very far.

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