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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

> A regular provider charges a regular commission but will not work with you, while another will want a commission 10 times higher and will agree, but may stop working with you at any time.

I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.

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Bitcoin is probably the worst choice you could make.

Public to the point of the transaction getting linked to your identity at some point, crazy inefficient in terms of energy use, very very slow and crazy expensive.

There are so many better ways to use crypto to pay for things and you decided to suggest bitcoin?

There are three older threads down into which I mention lightning - which preserves privacy and is still bitcoin -just a layer 2 network. Why is everybody on HN stuck on Bitcoin knowledge from 2021? In 2026 you can even send stablecoins - such as USDT - over Lightning backend by bitcoins taproot asset management protol - no other blockchain except bitcoin involved.

You said bitcoin, not lighting - you don't seriously expect me to trawl through all your posts in sibling threads to try to guess that you said one thing and meant another?

And you seem to be really really convinced that bitcoin is the way, by going the quite a length and bringing some contraptions to say they're bitcoin-based solutions somewhat providing what other coins/network already offer - better.

And concerning lightning, it only "preserves privacy" when you're extremely careful with how you use it: https://stateofsurveillance.org/articles/technical/lightning...

Still the worst idea.

The threads are literally 3 lines down, mate.

The miners are the middlemen, and they can chose to take your transaction or not. Should bitcoin ever be actually used for payment, it's not to too far fetched to think miners could be forbidden to validate transactions involving a blacklist of addresses...

Partly true, the miners decide. However, "the miners" is not a single person or group, but are distributed world wide under control of different people and pools having different incentives - albeit, making money is the far most common incentive. I.e. a miner can reject your transaction, but you can gradually increase the fee (replace-by-fee) until someone picks it up.

Plus, on-chain transactions would NOT be used to pay 10€/Month subscriptions. The lightning network (a bitcoin layer-2 network) handles transactions instantly and with lower fees. No miners involved in individual payments here (only for channel creation).

Yes, because bitcoin transaction costs never surge in price.

They don't, because you would transfer them via lightning, of course. No one want to pay their porn subscription with traceable onchain transactions.

TIL

FYI, Bitcoin proponents seem to "forget" that Lightning transactions are traceable by the Lightning node operator, whomever that might be.

You can operate your own node (I do). Plus you are not up2date. Trampoline payments were recently introduced, and a client can insert several trampolines. So even if you use a hosted single upstream node, that node can not trace the target. BOLT12 which is currently finalized also hides recipients from invoices.

The thing about layer 2 solutions is, they evolve much faster than the base layer (bitcoin). So dont trust statements that are some years old.

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