[CobrastanJorji]

The argument I had originally heard was "the transaction costs of credit cards is so high, we need a system that works for many tiny payments. But of course, most of the cryptocurrency transaction fees are still pretty high, and a dedicated "tiny transaction" company would presumably be able to offer the same service for less cost than a distributed equivalent.

[Jommi]

not sure where you data is from but most chains now offer sub millicent fees. https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/metrics/transaction-fee-m...

[littlecranky67]

Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.

[sanswork]

Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project.

It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.

It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.

[fruitworks]

The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.

Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.

[sanswork]

People have been debating the blocksize for a very long time now and there doesn't seem to be any large desire to change it so while the ability to increase it exists changing anything that fundamental about bitcoin seems to be a non-starter and while that is true lightning is pointless as a solution for the masses.

Even if you increase the block size 100x though you're still not improving the numbers much since my very generous numbers ignore activity outside of lightning and assume a single on chain transaction for every user and a perfect network.

[littlecranky67]

It is not the blocksize. The throughput of transaction on the lightning network is not at all limited by blocksize or the bitcoin blockchain.

[sanswork]

The ability for users to access the lightning network is limited by blocksize since you need transactions to open channels.

[littlecranky67]

You mistake is, you overestimate the amount of people who want to be self custodial. You don't need to onboard every human being in the world on-chain.

[sanswork]

Given the US example that would be several years in the absolute best for lightning case to onboard even 5% of individuals. Lightning is doomed from the start.

And if you don't care about self custody then the overhead of using a blockchain is a waste.

[littlecranky67]

It is not black/white. It is okay to have the freedom to become self-custodial anytime, but not everybody needs to transact in self-custody all the time.

Taproot was another major step that enables lightning upgrades in future versions (such as zero-fee channel opens) that is barely discussed. The number of X years for onboarding Y amount of people is not accurate, as it disregards all major developments of the last 5 years.

[sanswork]

You need enough users for providers to bother making it an option to pay with so it really is black and white. You might get a few niche providers offering it as a payment method without a critical mass of users but most companies aren't going to invest time and effort into implementing a payment system a tiny percentage of users have access too and if I need to trade money with my friends the low % means that in the vast majority of cases they aren't going to have lightning available either.