[skilgarriff]

I don't have any graphs as like I said it's just my opinion. I'm really only basing it off of 4 things.

1. The general excitement around Lightning Network on Twitter with Jack and tippin.me, as well as this website: https://lightningnetworkstores.com/

2. Coinbase's reported 48,000 merchants/partners reported here: https://www.coinbase.com/clients?locale=en-US

3. I frequent similar places everyday - 2 out of the 3 places that I frequent almost everyday are now accepting btc within the past 3 months - My coffee shop and bar.

4. Musing about Venezuela from crypto podcasts, and articles.

I'll admit I'm biased as I do think it's a good invention, and tend to support Bitcoin. Despite that, I am open minded and would happily check out any information that would propose things are tending in the opposite direction.

[arcticbull]

1. LN won’t serve the worlds needs it will take 35 years to open a channel for everyone on earth and another 35 years to close it again, assuming the population doesn’t grow.

2. Coinbase merchants take out fiat like bitpay merchants because their suppliers take real money, and so does the tax man. Holding crypto exposes them to unbelievable forex risk. If they took bitcoin and held it over the last year how on earth would they pay their tax bills? Taxes are due on the face value of the crypto at acquisition.

3. That’s an anecdote.

4. Venezuela is zero sum unless you can trade bolivars for bitcoin with outsiders in which case that’d be better off with dollars by any measure. If you’re buying locally you’re moving the bags around. Real mining equipnent just gets nationalized. It’s not a solution for Venezuela or any other developing nation because you haven’t solved the initial distribution problem.

[skilgarriff]

1. I have to admit, if you are going to be so vehemently angry against anyone who even talks about Bitcoin as being potentially useful, I'd suggest you do at least 5 minutes of googling. Channel Factories -> https://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/a20a865ce40d40c8f942cf206a7c... Cool stuff, I doubt you'll actually read it, but there's the link anyway.

2. Whoa look at that -> You can pay your taxes in Ohio in Bitcoin. So apparently "how on earth would they pay their tax bills" means send them BTC if they live in Ohio :). Suggesting that because you can't pay taxes or pay suppliers right now with Bitcoin, and therefore it will never be useful or capable of those things is such a silly argument. I certainly don't believe we live in a world where you can buy anything with BTC right now, but like I said my statement was about us trending in that way (Still waiting on all those graphs showing the opposite by the way).

3. Damn, I forgot I can't use anecdotes to influence my opinion. Thanks for reminding me.

4. Don't ask me -> ask the data. https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/VES/BTC "35,000 Bitcoin (worth around $127 million at today's prices) was traded for bolívar on the LocalBitcoins crypto exchange over the entire course of last year." Maybe they would be better off with dollars, but Bitcoin is much easier to transfer across borders, and much easier to hold on your person without signaling that you are carrying thousands of dollars.

I'm happy to talk more about crypto with you, although I'm not sure you are open to actually talk honestly about it - seeing as how you took the time to negatively respond to every post I made on this subject. If there is something that has made you so angry about Bitcoin, I'd be happy to learn it to see if I'm supporting something that I shouldn't.

I'm certainly not arguing that Bitcoin is the perfect solution, nor that it's super helpful or accessible today. But, I don't think absolutely denying any use is a smart strategy, and I'd rather have you make legitimate counter arguments where you've actually spent the time to learn things rather than the lax effort you've put in so far.

[arcticbull]

I’m not angry at bitcoin or at you. I’m frustrated seeing intelligent people throw themselves at something that appears to be a pyramid scheme built on an ancap view of the world where we should all just rely on ourselves and the magic of the blockchain to save us all from the tyrany of... everything, I guess? And everyone who knows about it now will be rich! Bolstered by a lack of understanding of how finance works, they go out there and shill systems that are actively user hostile and rife with manipulation. Scammers on every doorstep and transactions are always final. A vote for Bitcoin is a vote for the scammers, the manipulators, the shady exchanges. The uncensorable, decentralized (excluding China of course) deregulated payment network functioning as designed. It’s a beautiful theory that just doesn’t fit the real world.

1. I spend a lot of time learning and reading about Bitcoin and the blockchain -- that's why I don't like it. The technology is fine, it's just a database with hashes. Proof of work dates back to 1997 (22 years ago) with HashCash. Bitcoin is over a decade old. In all that time, nobody has found a good use for blockchain -- at least one that isn't better solved otherwise. Think of what else has happened in 10 years to technology that adds actual value. Remember the iPhone 1 (2007)?

I didn't have to get half way through the abstract to find the problem, and it's the same exact one I pointed out. You still need an on-chain transaction to open a channel ("Instead of one blockchain transaction per channel, each user only needs one transaction to enter a group of nodes") or in this case join a group. Each person needs to do this. There are 7,000,000,000 of us and if we dedicated the entire blockchain (7tx/sec) to opening channels that would take 34 years just to open a channel (or here, join a group) for everyone on earth. The paper you linked references a paper explaining it for you, as #9 in the references [1].

The paper cites being able to reduce on-chain transactions 96% for a group of 20 people with 100 channels between them -- I'm saying we can't even get to 1 person with 1 channel to 1 other person.

2. Big difference between paying your taxes with bitcoin and paying taxes denominated in bitcoin. If you received 1BTC ($19,000) renumeration for your services January 2018 then went to pay your taxes "with Bitcoin" in Ohio April 2019, expect to pay approximately 2BTC ($7600 / 40%) in taxes. That's a 200% tax rate. If you could pay your taxes denominated in Bitcoin you'd be paying 0.4BTC ($1300) -- or 40% of unit of account, 6.8% of value. Make no mistake you're paying in US dollars, they're just providing a convenient forum for exchange. I'd image they'd do the same with a goat exchange if people decided to be equally backwards and everyone wanted to start using goats as payment.

3. Anecdotes aren't really worth much. It's just as irrelevant as my telling you 100% of the places I frequent don't take bitcoin. I don't hold that up though, I look for studies.

4. Re: LocalBitcoins and the bolivars, if they were traded with foreigners, they'd be unequivocally better off with a USD denominated account and a debit card. They'd have saved (up to) 80% of their net worth relative to what they did. But who on earth would take their bolivars? Zero sum.

If they traded it with each other the same amount of net worth was lost because the total number of BTC in Venezuela and the total number of bolivars remained unchanged, all that changed was who had them. No problems were solved by Bitcoin here.

[1] http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/scalingbitcoin/hong-kong/o...

[arcticbull]

Btw that VES/BTC chart isn’t adjusted for the 10,000,000% (by next year) inflation rate, so in constant dollar terms I’d wager that BTC/VES volume went down over the period highlighted.