[astoor]

Transaction irreversability is the whole point of the "peer to peer electronic cash system": "Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments... cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions ... What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third party. Transactions that are computationally impractical to reverse would protect sellers from fraud" from the opening lines of the Bitcoin white paper.

So Bitcoin was designed for micropayments, and irreversability is a feature to reduce the friction. That is fine because it was intended for "small casual transactions" which very few people are going to invest the time and effort into disputing. It even looked like it might be successful as a micropayment system at first, given small Bitcoin transactions were initially processed without any transaction fees.

The problem is that it has clearly failed as a "peer to peer electronic cash system". It is now used primarily for large transactions, which you absolutely do need consumer protections for if you are a legitimate user (indeed the fact that there aren't consumer protections has made the space so popular with fraudsters, scammers etc.). And as others have commented, the newer cryptocurrencies which attempt to offer such protections end up being worse in every conceivable way from the traditional solutions. Leading back to the original article - is there any legitimate point to cryptocurrencies nowadays?

[DebtDeflation]

>It is now used primarily for large transactions

No it's not. It's now used primarily as a vehicle for speculation.

[JumpCrisscross]

> It's now used primarily as a vehicle for speculation

Gambling. It’s gambling. A significant fraction of the American economy continues to gear towards gambling. Whether it be short-term dopamine hits from ad-fuelled social media or trading crypto, it’s a similar pattern of decay across a common although growing demographic stripe.

[lumannnn]

You probably should look at different numbers than just the dollar price.

Number of nodes is rising, number of wallets is rising, number of hash-power is rising.

Also, please look into the "Lightning Network". It's the second layer on top of Bitcoin and that's where the whole ecosystem scales (in terms of numbers of transactions per second). Cheap, scalable and fast transactions.

Adoption is happening in many places.

[around_here]

Nodes rise because businesses that want to build on the chains require them unless they want to a pay far too much for a wrapper API. The number of wallets is literally unbounded, and it’s impossible to know precisely how many entities are attached to those wallets. I am one person. My tens of wallets are only for one person. I make a new wallet every time I try new wallet apps. I make new wallets to try new things. “Number of wallets” and “number of nodes” is a bad metric.

[sireat]

I would be highly interested in finding a serious shop/commerce/ecommerc operation where Lighting Network is actually used.

I check LN every 6 months or so and situation is not looking so great.

As it was with Bitcoin itself in early 2010s the shops advertising crypto acceptance are doing it mostly for publicity/ideological reasons or actually have stopped existing.

So I check: https://acceptlightning.com/map.html

Random selection:

* http://paraeasy.ch/joomla/ - Adobe Flash Player not supported ...

* https://www.kaeserei-lustnau.ch - unclear if the shop actually takes any payments

* https://shop.energy-kitchen.ch/#/shop - application not taking requests at this endpoint

* http://www.room77.de/ - SMTP-packets to port 25 (info[at]room77.de) may very likely get a response just as much as electrons sent to our telephoney landline-device (+49.30.31102260). Single static page.

* https://acceptlightning.com/rummels-acoustics.com - standard Bootstrap page - page not found

Finally I find - https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/graphs This looks like a serious operation - and lighting network is used quite a bit for smaller transactions.

Unfortunately, this is something that would be of interest only to someone who already owns BTC or some other crypto.

If you are Joe Sixpack you have very little reason to pay with crypto because it will be more expensive than paying with Visa/MC/Paypal etc.

So where are the successful use cases that utilize Lighting Network?

[ForHackernews]

https://www.btctimes.com/insight/room77-the-berlin-bar-boots...

[etherael]

> So where are the successful use cases that utilize Lighting Network?

It's been pretty successful as a sword to destroy the original value proposition of bitcoin.

[Olreich]

Lightning network pulls transactions off-chain, thus relying on trusting someone (either the person you transact with or some third party acting as escrow for the funds). By adding in trust, you can mitigate the primary bottleneck caused by proof-of-work consensus methods. But if you have people you can trust to transact with, there's no point in interfacing with Bitcoin at all, just make a micro-payment network without the bitcoin connectivity, like Venmo. This is why we don't see adoption of Lightning Network, it just moves us off of Bitcoin, which lets us get most of the "benefits" for none of the costs.

[mirceal]

That's not how lightning works. While it's true that the transactions are off-chain there is no trust element involved.

A channel between 2 entities is backed by real bitcoin and a scheme to manage the ledger based on bitcoin primitives (multisignature).

Lightning is just a series of channels + routing, so in effect it's a path of channels between you and the party you are transacting with + ledgers of those channels updating with the value that is being moved. At any point in time you can close any channel and materialize however bitcoin you have on your side.

[throw0101a]

> allowing any two willing parties to transact directly

And what happens if one of the parties is not willing? If someone's e-wallet gets broken into and funds are transferred? How does any current system handle that situation?

A lot of folks consider irreversibility a feature, when there's a strong case to be made that it is a bug.

[tiluha]

The system does not handle it. If that is a problem for you, then cryptocurrencies are not for you. In a way it's like cash. If your wallet is stolen, there is no easy way to get your money back.

[hnthrow1010]

>then cryptocurrencies are not for you.

What this means to me is that cryptocurrencies are not for anybody. We don't have to create digital systems with the limitations of cash. We haven't had to do that for decades. Now there's a push to go back to the time before that, for (in general) no discernible reason besides people gambling on the price.

[jlmb]

In reality, a crypto wallet is better compared to a bank account, though. Most people don't carry their life savings (or comparable amounts) in cash.

[throw0101a]

> In reality, a crypto wallet is better compared to a bank account, though. Most people don't carry their life savings (or comparable amounts) in cash.

I would think it was the exact opposite.

A 'regular' bank account has reversibility, and so if there are some shenanigans you can (potentially) get your money back. With a cryptocurrency 'bank account' (wallet), if anything bad happens you're SOL.

[georgyo]

> Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments... cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions ...

Very small transactions happen on the internet all the time. Services like venmo allow for very small casual transactions all the time. And there is no cost for the transaction.

Sure venmo is trusted third party and the transaction is reversible, but it's still significantly easier and cheaper than bitcoin. Or any other other coin for that matter.