[wcoenen]

Bitcoin's usage as a medium of exchange appears to be decreasing, not increasing.

If you look for graphs showing the growth of merchants accepting bitcoin over time, you'll notice they're all out of date. That's because at some point after 2016 it stopped growing and people lost interest in this metric. This happened when the block size limit was reached: the result was higher transaction fees and unpredictable confirmation times. In 2018 it got so bad there was basically a civil war in the community about it and bitcoin cash forked. Today the average transaction fee is $19.

So I don't think we're on the path you envision. If bitcoin continues to be successful, I expect it will be used as an international settlement system by large corporations and financial institutions only.

[Rallerbabs]

I invest hundreds of hours per year studying bitcoin's development, the crypto markets, etc. But you think your opinion somehow weighs more than mine, eh?

Ignore Lightning Network's development at your own peril.

Increased and decreased interest are part of the normal market cycle, the chart of which I'm betting you don't know by heart.

You have to be extremely & wilfully ignorant to claim 'medium of exchange' is off the table, just now that PayPal & Mastercard are embracing cryptocurrencies.

But whatever, man. You don't wanna belong to the future's 1%, that's fine with me.

[wcoenen]

> I invest hundreds of hours per year studying bitcoin's development, the crypto markets, etc. But you think your opinion somehow weighs more than mine, eh?

You're reading things into my comment that I didn't say. Note that I didn't claim that my opinion is more important than yours, nor did I claim that bitcoin will not be successful. It very well might be. I just pointed out some inconsistencies in the path to success that you envision. (Or rather, the path that Dan Held envisions, because your comment was an almost verbatim copy of what he recently said in a "What Bitcoin Did" podcast episode.)

> Ignore Lightning Network's development at your own peril.

Lightning will help with scaling, but it's not a silver bullet. To give one example: a lightning channel's state management involves composing precommitted transactions, which are not broadcast but can be used to unilaterally close a channel (see section 3.3.2 of the lightning paper[1]). That means the transaction fee also needs to be chosen in advance. That can be problematic when the transaction fees spike, because there is only a limited window for such a transaction to go through. If it takes too long to confirm, it will not be able to override an attempt by the other party to maliciously close the channel with outdated state.

> You have to be extremely & wilfully ignorant to claim 'medium of exchange' is off the table, just now that PayPal & Mastercard are embracing cryptocurrencies.

Paypal does not currently support using bitcoin as a medium of exchange. See Paypal's FAQ "Can I use Cryptocurrencies to pay or send money with PayPal?"[2].

Even if they do enable "sending bitcoin" within paypal in the future, I'm not sure we can say that that's bitcoin being used as a medium of exchange. The medium would be paypal, while bitcoin would act as a unit of account (numbers in paypal's database).

[1] https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

[2] https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/cryptocurrency-o...

[Rallerbabs]

1. I do not listen to the Dan Held podcast.

2. Like with every solution suggested in the bitcoin ecosystem, LN attracts a lot of FUD. The weakness you observe in LN seems to me like arguing in 1995 we'll never be able to stream movies via the Internet. "X Doesn't exist now, so it never will.". Present this argument to one of LN's creators, and they'd likely wipe it off the table.

The fact of the matter remains that any scaling solution has 2 minimum requirements:

A. It needs to be done off-chain. B. All transactions need to be verifiable from the genesis block.

LN satisfies these 2 conditions. If you'd design LN from the ground up, you'd probably end up with LN again. Just like you'd end up with bitcoin again, if you'd design that from the ground up. So these solutions will have to do.

3. Just because PayPal doesn't support this now, it doesn't mean they won't support it in the future. Matter of fact, it's fairly likely they will. Once again... "X Doesn't exist now, so it never will" is an inadequate argument.