Why? What does adding a slow database to the process help?

CobrastanJorji 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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littlecranky67 an hour ago | parent [-]

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 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Zaskoda an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

This sounds like a reflexive "I hate blockchain and cryptocurrency" reaction but I'll give a reply regardless.

You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.

x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.

And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.

	▲	littlecranky67 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Implementing lightning (bitcoin layer 2 solution) is probably easier or at least at par. And way more accesible. Look at lnurl, lnaddress.