[yelnatz]

It was getting there.

I remember Bitcoin was getting a wider adoption for payment back in 2013ish. I paid for my domain from namecheap in Bitcoin back then.

But it then blew up and everyone treated it more as a store of value and it made all the shops stop accepting it as payment due to its volatility.

[Robotbeat]

Well, this is baked into the limited number of transactions per second. At 10 transactions per second max, the usefulness as a day to day currency is inversely proportional to its popularity. Our favorite joke coin, DogeCoin, does 10 times better at 100/sec with faster blocks, but it’s still too slow. Visa is like 2000-100,000 transactions per second depending on if you use average or theoretical maximum. Anything which wants to be usable as a day to day currency of the future should shoot for either niche uses or should shoot for 10,000-100,000 transactions per second as a minimum. 1 million to be on the safe side.

Otherwise, the more popular it is, the less usable it is as a real currency. (As the transaction fees get bid up to higher levels if transaction throughput is limited.)

(Oh, and without a custodian, the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this. Maybe something like that will someday be usable but it sucks right now.... and it’s not obvious how these problems will be solved in a way that doesn’t introduce a whole bunch more game theory and/or technical/resource/usability constraints.)

[saalweachter]

> the Lightning network sucks as a bandaid for this.

I believe we have now reached the point where more time has passed since the Lightning whitepaper than between the Bitcoin and Lightning whitepapers.

[moralestapia]

>1 million to be on the safe side

This + micropayments, (i.e. negligible fees so it makes sense to send 0.01USD to someone, every day, or w/e.

[buffalobuffalo]

It's not just the speed, it's also the fees. You ideally want something that has really minimal fees, so that you can send $.0001 without paying 10x that in fees. The ability to process micro-transactions cheaply and at scale could actually have the transforming affect that bitcoin was originally after.

[Robotbeat]

Right. That’s what Satoshi wrote in their paper.

But throughput and fees are related, of course. As I noted, low transaction throughput combined with high popularity means very high fees. Fees get bid up. So to maintain low fees while having high popularity, you need high transaction throughput.

[saalweachter]

Hmmm, working the other way, if your goal is to process 100k transactions / second, with each transaction being 1/100th of a cent and your transaction fees being 1/100th of that, your budget for operating your network would be, what, $3M / year?

[Robotbeat]

True centi-cent microtransactions like that is going to need probably tens of millions (or even billions) of transactions per second.

[alwillis]

Bitcoin is Not Too Slow: https://unchained-capital.com/blog/bitcoin-is-not-too-slow/

[eli]

Not sure if you meant that as a rebuttal but it concedes the point: “The bitcoin blockchain will never be a layer for mass payments”

[alwillis]

The base layer of bitcoin is more of a settlement layer; Lightning Network and other layer 2 features allow for super fast and super cheap bitcoin payments.

http://lightning.network

    Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments
    without worrying about block confirmation times. Security
    is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating
    a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments.
    Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.

    Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of
    transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows
    away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude.
    Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without
    custodians.

    Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the
    Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which
    allows for emerging use cases such as instant
    micropayments.

[eli]

Yeah but those are not Bitcoin and very close to nobody uses them for payments anyway

[alwillis]

1. Nothing could be more wrong; bitcoin is bitcoin whether it’s on the base layer or Lightning Network. Full stop.

2. There are over 10,000 lightning nodes with nearly $70 million in liquidity where payments occur everyday: https://1ml.com/

[codegeek]

Pretty much. If bitcoin (or any cypto) can be a stable currency, I would jump on it. Otherwise, it is just a gambling tool at the moment. I don't gamble with things I don't understand (unless I am in Vegas and willing to lose a few bucks for fun). So it is a hard pass for me at the moment.

[DennisP]

There are stablecoins on top of Ethereum. Some are backed by off-chain bank accounts, others are based on price feeds and on-chain derivatives over ETH.

[AstralStorm]

In which case it's not a casino but a confidence trick. It depends whether you trust the issuer of the stablecoin and its backing to survive a bank run. (Black Friday anyone?)

They could just disappear on you with your money, and you would be left with gas on a contract nobody wants anything to do with.

[DennisP]

I agree and I'm not a huge fan of that type. I'm a bigger fan of the ones backed by ETH, as long as the price feed is reasonably decentralized.

[Salgat]

Too bad gas fees make the whole thing very expensive.

[DennisP]

Yes, if you're doing it on chain. On rollups it's cheap.

[jamal-kumar]

I'm finding it to be used a hell of a lot more in countries with precarious economies like where I've been spending most of my adult life. In brazil especially I've seen a lot of facilitation of adoption of crypto. I know because I've developed the systems myself, from everything to paying your phone bill to bus tickets, although bitcoin is hardly the only or best option for these things

[gtirloni]

Could you give real examples of widespread adoption of Bitcoin in Brazil?

[jamal-kumar]

Yeah for sure, without giving away too much PII on myself or advertising -- you don't see it on this page, but the company I had worked for can do cool stuff like load up a prepaid contactless mastercard on a wearable wristband with crypto you can just go and buy at a lottery ticket stand. I don't think that North America has solutions like this, but I worked on the integration myself and while I am not in that country anymore it was still impressive and something I wish I could easily use worldwide

https://atarpay.com/

I think my favorite explanation of latin america is like 'yeah its kind of cyberpunk these days just more horizontal than vertical'

ah ok here's a video of someone doing this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtAcRonh8dU [ - ATAR BAND, Pagamento rápido e fácil do banco amigo das criptomoedas !!! ]

[Salgat]

Unfortunately most "investors" aka gamblers aren't pushing coins with the best tech, but rather the coins that are most deflationary (and using the tech as sexy marketing to hook people in). Unfortunately deflationary coins just encourages everyone to never spend on actual stuff, simply hold onto it till they can sell it off to some other investor.

[bingbong70]

People are looking forward to an economy that revolves around a deflationary/limited-supply currency like Bitcoin so, for example, excess housing supply doesn't get wasted for the sake of speculation/inflation-hedging. People looking to protect wealth would liquidate as many assets as possible for Bitcoin to achieve the maximum passive return and not hold underutilized assets on their balance sheet.

Have 3 houses and only live in 1? The fact that your houses are losing value in Bitcoin terms will push you to sell if wealth preservation is the goal.

[eli]

Most investors in Bitcoin are looking for a quick buck and nothing more.

[eli]

Gives buyers too much credit for strategy. “Meme potential” matters more than anything in a white paper.

[stevecat]

I think it was around 2013 that I paid a busker with Bitcoin (their suggestion, not mine, I'm not that weird). That briefly felt like the future.

I hope he hung onto it!

[cryptoz]

I spent .2btc to buy a $50 domain name at one point around 2013, that I only used for a year or something. Woooops. But hey, I figured, the future of money, let's do it! Oh well.

[DebtDeflation]

>store of value

One whose value fluctuates wildly over time, one that is lost if you lose your keys, one that is susceptible to a hacker stealing your keys, etc.