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Comment by teekert | Hacker News Reader

I'm not on the receiving end, but to me this seems like the law is behind reality. Micropayments are coming, perhaps using blockchain, perhaps not, probably in a number of different ways.

I guess this is a good question for the hosts of the podcasts that use these features (Like Linux Unplugged, and other shows from Jupiter Broadcasting or the No Agenda show by Adam Curry and John Dvorak.) Perhaps this is not answered yet.

In the Netherlands this only becomes relevant over a certain amount, and I think you can then just bundle all amounts. But I'm also not sure.

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In the US and other countries I have heard about, it applies to the sender also.

If you buy Bitcoin for $X and then buy something with those Bitcoin, then you have to record the "fair value" $Y of that something and pay taxes on $Y-$X. On the amount that your "Bitcoin speculation" has earned you.

Looks like in the Netherland, it is different indeed. Making it much easier to use Bitcoin.

does No Agenda even accepts boosts? I was under the impression they didn't.

> Micropayments are coming, perhaps using blockchain

Blockchain is remarkably ill-suited for micropayments.

L2 solutions are proving that this is not quite true.

Oh god yes. I manage block chain nodes those days. We build some type of wallet. Those things works. But the pain is fresh

Untrue both in general and in particular.

Most blockchains are worthless and have nothing in the way of transaction fees or indeed transactions. Doge is perfect for micropayments! This was a fad on reddit back in the day.

In particular, well, the title of the article says it all. If you have BTC, and you want to send a few sats and pay basically nothing, Lighting has existed for years and works just fine.

Edit: I don't think micropayments are such a great idea to begin with, but the arguments for that have nothing to do with the medium of payment: assuming a perfect micropayment system, people still won't want to use it for off-topic reasons.

The existence of Lightning is a failure of Bitcoin's designers to create a system that can scale well, they instead chose to focus on something that was going to be maximum profitable for the miners in the short term and dumped responsibility off onto "L2 chains" as a kludge. The Lightning Network also doesn't "work just fine", the network is fundamentally slow, insecure and unreliable and this will likely never be fixed, because the problem space (connect an infinite number of nodes to an infinite number of other nodes efficiently) is known to be unsolvable.

I'm only replying to say that, for all I know, you're correct in all of this. I don't think so, but that's a weakly held conviction about an entire ecosystem I don't use and understand only vaguely.

The fact that I personally know people keeping hundreds of thousands of dollar-equivalent-sats on Lightning, who are happy with that arrangement, is what I'm balancing against that guy on the internet with strong opinions with 'throw' in his name.

But hey maybe you know what you're talking about. It's possible. I don't.

But you know that most people wouldn't put hundreds of thousands of dollars in a system like that. It would fall apart if that happened. Also, I don't know how they could be happy with it given the extreme crash over the last few months.

Regarding my name: The short explanation is, I have a throwaway account in protest. If Satoshi's anonymity was enough to convince your friends to put down large sums of real money based solely on a hope, it should be enough for you to consider my (non-monetized) comments on this internet forum that's mostly pseudonymous anyway.

I was dismissive, and I did that on purpose, but I wasn't being sarcastic. Only time will tell which of you is right, all I've got is "eh. looks fine from here".

As for their happiness, I know people with a lot of Bitcoin, and I know a few people who are underwater on their BTC, but there's no overlap in those groups. They might feel a twinge around 7k, more likely, they'd buy as much as they can afford.

If you think multiple layers in a payments system is undesirable, I wonder whether you make all your purchases online by putting dollars and cents into envelopes and mailing them to the merchants, or whether you use that additional layer of credit built atop the lower layer hard money supply.

Bitcoin was not designed to be “maximally profitable to miners”, it was designed to be a currency that could not be captured and controlled by state actors or other large players yet would be able to sustain itself and its network by incentivizing miners to set up nodes and resist attempts at hostile takeovers of the network. [1]

No other solution has managed to achieve this. There are proof-of-stake cryptocurrencies that opt to be more easily scalable on L1 at the cost that they are controllable by whoever holds the largest stakes.

[1] https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Bitcoin is not a currency. Currencies are the exclusive right of sovereign states.

The engineering requirements for successful micropayments are, in my view:

* support for millions of transactions per second

* very fast, basically instantaneous

* if a small fraction of transactions is dropped randomly, no big deal

* easy, simple, cheap on- and off-ramps

* support for anonymity

* good customer support (lost password, lost device, maybe chargebacks)

* support for local currency

* compatible with local law

* very simple API, easily integrated into browser or other devices

* energy efficient

For those requirements blockchain is a terrible solution.

But sure, you can use a helicopter to open a beer bottle, go ahead.

The subject of this thread is the literal solution to micropayments using “blockchains”. And it works amazingly well! “

Lightning is a hack, not a solution, and certainly not one that can be described as "amazing".

Why is it a hack?

The problem that needs to be solved is, basically, that the fundamental architecture of Bitcoin establishes an upper limit on transactions-per-second (TPS) which is too low.

Lightning "solves" this problem by moving transactions off-chain, bundling them into batches, and then emitting batches of transactions to Bitcoin mainnet. That means a transaction against Lightning is only valid once the bundle in which the transaction is placed is committed on mainnet. A confirmation from Lightning isn't good enough; users have to wait for a confirmation from mainnet.

Batching is a common optimization! But it's not a solution to performance problems. It weakens the guarantees afforded by transaction confirmation. Those guarantees are important. They define the consistency model provided by the system. The model of Bitcoin which includes Lightning is fundamentally different, and weaker, than the core model of Bitcoin.

And so Lightning isn't a solution to the problem. It weakens the transactional model of Bitcoin, and so provides a totally separate system to Bitcoin proper.

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