[eraad]

If card networks, issuers, acquirers, processors and gateways used bitcoin as their settlement layer, most of the current issues would be automatically solved. They could focus engineering resources on creating better user experiences, anti-fraud, etc.

Consumers can keep using their tokenized credit cards, debit cards, etc, but their money would be moved using the bitcoin time chain, instead of hundred of CSV files.

Why haven't the W3C participants even mentioned bitcoin for standardizing web payments? I believe it's because of politics and business. Bitcoin can't be controlled and manipulated and it's not an easy truth to swallow. I hope this changes.

[phphphphp]

xml via ftp is used across many industries because these systems are decades old: there are many suitable replacements — the problem is not that there isn’t solutions, it’s that changing old systems is very hard. Bitcoin doesn’t solve that.

[yellowapple]

> Bitcoin doesn’t solve that.

It doesn't necessarily need to. The other solutions are dependent on fixing the existing financial system, while the premise behind cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is to outright replace the existing financial system. Bitcoin, in other words, offers a path to deprecate and phase out the old systems entirely.

Whether that'll actually happen is pretty uncertain, to say the least, but it's a possibility that other solutions generally lack.

[Foobar8568]

Xml+sftp For data transfer in 2022, best in class yeah!

[rwmj]

No one being able to buy anything online is one way to solve online payment problems I suppose.

[colesantiago]

Bitcoin has failed as a means for payment and after almost 15 years nothing legitimate has come from it.

All people have used for it is gambling, speculation and ruining the planet.

Nobody, not even merchants are using Bitcoin for payments.

[andy_ppp]

I didn’t think Bitcoin could handle that many transactions, never mind the environmental damage it causes…

[Timja]

It is surprising that in 2022 this is still a popular misconception, even on a site like Hacker News.

The amount of transactions the Bitcoin blockchain handles does not impact how many transactions can be done in Bitcoin via higher layers like the Lightning Network.

I think the reason is that secure and trustless payment methods are a new thing that only came up a few years ago, and nothing like it existed before in the history of mankind.

There have been higher layers like banknotes that "represented" gold, but it always involved trust to use them.

With cryptographic solutions like Bitcoin+Lightning, no trust is needed anymore.

[dmitriid]

> The amount of transactions the Bitcoin blockchain handles does not impact how many transactions can be done in Bitcoin via higher layers like the Lightning Network.

So there's no misconception. Bitcoin is as slow as ever, and handles very few transactions. It's other layers that provide more transactions. They store those transactions and then dump it in a batch to blockchain.

Congrats. You've invented batch transactions. Something that traditional banking systems has been doing since the middle ages.

> secure and trustless payment methods are a new thing that only came up a few years ago, and nothing like it existed before in the history of mankind.

Very doubtful. All that crypto space has invented so far has been known to mankind for generations (and in some cases for millenia). Moreover, for actual usefulness you need trust and enforcement, none of which are provided by crypto.

> With cryptographic solutions like Bitcoin+Lightning, no trust is needed anymore.

Except, you know, when I order something on Amazon, I expect the goods I ordered to actually arrive, so I trust Amazon, trust the seller, trust the postal service etc. to deliver this to me.

And if the goods don't arrive? I trust my bank to revert the transaction.

[andy_ppp]

You’ve moved trust from the banking system into code. That might be a good thing. I will look into how the lightening network works to inform myself. The climate change and extreme volatility amongst other issues are still going to prevent Bitcoin being adopted for settlements.

[Timja]

The idea that Bitcoin "needs" a lot of energy is also a misconception.

How much resources are used to produce something is determined by the value of that something. At the moment, about $6B worth of Bitcoin is mined per year. So roughly $6B of resources are used to mine Bitcoin. About half of it is hardware and half of it is energy.

At the same time, about $150B of gold is mined every year. So roughly $150B of resources are put into gold mining. Energy, dynamite, melting, transportation etc. The use of these resources is just as "bad" for the climate.

So if you wanted to do something for the climate, going against gold mining would be more than 20x more effective than going against Bitcoin mining.

Additionally, the production of Bitcoin is halving every 4 years. While the production of Gold will go on indefinitely.

[dmitriid]

> How much resources are used to produce something is determined by the value of that something.

How much resources are used to produce something is defined literally by How much resources are used to produce something.

> about $150B of gold is mined every year. So roughly $150B of resources are put into gold mining.

Kid. Go and read something about a thing called "Value added".

> So if you wanted to do something for the climate, going against gold mining would be more than 20x more effective thatn going against Bitcoin mining.

No, it wouldn't.

[croes]

You do realize that gold has a lot more use cases beside payment after it is mined?

Bitcoin can't compete with that.

Even if tomorrow nobody accepts gold you can still use it in electronics and such.