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Comment by leesalminen | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be unpopular here, but Bitcoin’s layer 2 Lightning Network is pretty ideal for micropayments.

Strike (strike.me) is a Venmo-like app that lets users connect their bank account and then hold a USD balance. The only difference is that users can use their USD to send Bitcoin to the other end. They’re not exposed to bitcoin’s price volatility.

On nostr, users are sending micro tips to other each other fairly successfully. The UX isn’t great right now, but I recommend trying it out- it is a functioning version of social micro payments.

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Crypto, Bitcoin and the rest of it cannot (and can never be) a solution to micropayments at all.

It encourages people to lose their money due to extreme volatility and nobody uses it for anything other than speculative trading which also encourages people to lose money.

stablecoins.

Stablecoins are not stable at all.

tokens like LUNA went to 0 and USDC, USDT and others depegged which isn't really convincing as a micropayments alternative, in fact it is extremely dangerous.

Stablecoins are more stable than BTC and ETH, so they have quite a bit more utility than one might think, given your comment.

Nope, what are they backed by? Nothing other than 'attestations' and 'trust me bro'.

Tether is a fraudulent ponzi, USDC is not stable and is backed by meaningless attestations, Luna is, well gone all the way to the floor.

Even if we take USDC on ETH there exists the uncontrollable volatile gas fee tax which is pointless for micropayments.

'Stablecoins' (or 'stabletokens' are inherently fraudulent and dead on arrival and is only used to pump the price of BTC in the which is the case for Tether.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

What is USD “backed by”? It’s not gold and it’s not any USG promise to pay.

Stablecoins don’t need to be backed by anything to be stable. I agree with most of what you say, but that doesn’t actually refute my point that stablecoins are, in fact, more stable than most cryptocurrencies. They are more than stable enough to use for a payment aggregation layer for a few days.

I even agree with you about Tether being a fraud; I still use USDT every day (with that knowledge) because it is, well, stable. One day it won’t be, but most days, it is.

At least we know it was backed by _something_, fiat is the worst system except all the others.

Yet USD is legal tender for US taxes and there is a shared interest in using USD rather than some risky unknown potemkin token like 'stablecoins', which nobody accepts or wants.

And you cannot pay US taxes with your stablecoins, so there's that.

> Stablecoins don’t need to be backed by anything to be stable...

So then we will get a LUNA situation of being backed by 'algorithms' then everyone is screwed when the token inevitably goes to zero.