El Salvador is the worst example, as they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin. I would also wan't to learn how the situation in El Salvador would be any different if they adopted Monero instead - I think it would be the same outcode.

I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist. I see it more as digital gold, and gold is not a currency today. It will have its role as a store of value and fallback unit of trade that keeps government currencies in check - another pillar in financial checks-and-balances.

▲ neonstatic 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> El Salvador is the worst example, as they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin.

So the 'true cryptocurrency' hasn't been tried yet, eh? ;)

▲ littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

That was not my argument at all. First I said, I don't see bitcoin as currency at all. Second, major nation states have always tryed to use their power to force other nations to use their currency (petrodollar, cough). This is nothing specific to crypto, but something also specific to traditional fiat currencies.

Any high-volatile asset such as bitcoin is IMHO not suited as currency. The good news is, with the bitcoin taproot upgrade and latest lightning standards, you can actually issue stablecoins over bitcoin's taproot asset protocol, and send it over the existing lightning network. My bet is on stablecoins-over-lightning as currency, and bitcoin as store of value. One blockchain to rule them all, other chains not need (for financial transactions at least).

▲ KaiserPro 2 days ago | parent [-]

Bitcoin takes to long to settle, and whilst its settling will need some sort of escrow service to take the risk out for small retailers and consumers.

Plus the global transaction rate would also stop it really being useful for day to day spending for a country.

▲ littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

You replied to me but did not address lightninng. Lightning settles instantly. And you DO transfer bitcoin.

▲ rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

> And you DO transfer bitcoin.

No, Layer-2 systems only transfer cryptographically signed IOUs between nodes.

Settlement only happens when these IOUs are cashed out, and to cash out you need a transaction in the blockchain layer, so the point about latency still stands.

▲ littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

It is as much an IOU as the US Dollar was pre-1971. That is a pretty good image for Lightning/Bitcoins relationship. Lightning is the dollar with a guarantee that you can convert it to gold anytime you like by presenting it at the central bank. Very few people ever converted their USD to the underlying gold as a settlement transaction. The difference with lightning is, the government can't just rug-pull you and stop exchanging those paper bill IOUs - it is cryptograhpically secured that you can always convert to bitcoin. Since no one would consider exchaging dollars as settling in gold, lightning settlement is not tied to on-chain transactions.

▲ rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

Payment channels are possible on other networks as well. Once again, there is no inherent advantage to Bitcoin here. I know because I worked on one (https://raiden.network/). I also dealt with many of its failure modes:

  - insufficient liquidity on intemediate nodes
  - network partitions
  - uncooperative nodes
  - nodes that were liquidity sinks and forced other participants to bear the costs of deposits
  - insufficient market makers

But more than anything: people do not want to use crypto for payments. It gives them no significant advantage over traditional credit/debit cards, it has no built-in solution for appeals or reversals and it forces them to learn a bunch of stuff to be minimally safe...

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littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Payment channels are possible on other networks as well

you are moving the goalpost in the discussion of this thread. User KaierPro said bitcoin would not be suitable because transactions takes to long, to which is responded lightning solves that. Now claiming that other cryptos can have layers-2 is correct, but adds nothing to the discussion or my initial point. Yes other chains have faster settlement times, and can have their respective payment channels - no one argued against that.

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

> which is responded lightning solves that

Theoretically.

In practice, it has shown that it is only viable if adoption by number of nodes and TVL grew by orders of magnitude, and both are very unlikely to happen because - like I said - spenders have nothing to gain from it and no matter how much of the UX friction is solved, it will never be as easy as paying with credit card.

The only people who want to use Lightning are the ones who are invested in Bitcoin. Everyone else just want simple/safe access to a payment network.

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littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

You are just moving the goalpost again, without adding to the discussion. If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Nothing to do with my initial point which was comparing lightning/bitcoin to monero.

	▲	rglullis 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Most spenders will prefer credit cards, but there is a non-zero group where absolute privacy is important and monero is the better choice, therefore more valuable to them. You are the one trying to make some false equivalency by saying that "bitcoin/lightning is good enough for most cases, therefore there is no need for monero". The problem is that you are starting with the conclusion that you want (i.e, "Bitcoin is the best") and you are working backwards from this conclusion to make all sorts of rationalizations. Try going from the use case first and then let's see where the reasoning takes you. You will see that for pretty much ANY use-case, Bitcoin is not the answer.

▲ littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is splitting words. There is a settlement layer in lightning, which is presenting the preimage and unpeeling the onion HLTCs in reverse order. This happens at the latency of the network path, so usually less than a second. Bitcoin settling is usually tied to confirmation in the block, which lasts ~10minutes. Lightning might be IOUs, but ones that are fungible themselves and not tied to a specific debtor. Actual lightning-to-bitcoin cashout would probably not happen for everyday use, or at least not more often than you change bankaccounts in todays terms.

▲ sph 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's intellectually dishonest. It's like saying wire transfers or card payments are only valid after interbank settlements are finalized.

Bitcoin Lightning is cryptographically designed to be valid even if it's not yet settled on the main layer. It provides cryptographically sound mechanisms to overrule anyone that tries to "cheat". There is no mathematical way to cancel or double spend it, just like your dollars are valid when the transaction is committed in your bank's database although the money still technically hasn't left the other bank.

	▲	rglullis 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		There are plenty of failure modes where you can lose your funds even if your wallet keys are not compromised. Try running a lightning node, make transactions worth more than a few hundred dollars and then leave your node offline for a few days. Or even more simply: ask yourself what happens to your funds if the disk on your lightning node goes bust and you don't have a recent backup.

▲ KaiserPro 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

THis is the issue, until its settled in the chain, then you are down to trusting the 2nd layer.

Anything offchain has a whole bunch of issues that are either naively or deliberately obscured by the fact that it _eventually_ writes to the blockchain. The exchanges that offer instant settlement are circumventing trust by doing the settlement for you. You get speed, but not security that they have done what they have said they have.

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Well, to be fair to OP: small business and retailers are also not getting "real" money when they accept payment via credit cards from Visa/MasterCard.

To be honest I think the issue here is not due to speed of settlement, but layer-2 is not an acceptable substitute because it does not allow reversability. For the merchants it's good that they are getting the money right away, but most consumers will not dare to pay anything via layer-2 networks simply because they won't have any recourse in case they want to undo the transaction.

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littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

You can implement reverseability with a credit system, such as Visa/Mastercard. It should not be implemented in base layer or layer-2. It is basically an escrow system.

	▲	rglullis 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		So now you are proposing to build yet-another piece to an already complex system just so we can justify the existence of your beloved blockchain in the first place. How long it's going to take you to realize that even if we built everything you are asking for, we are STILL going to end up with a system that is not as capital-efficient as the status quo?

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robcohen 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

This is just untrue. If someone cheats in lightning, and you demonstrate they cheated as you describe, then you get all of the locked BTC as a reward. This is on layer 1. Essentially you can easily prove your nonce was signed more recently.

▲ rglullis 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> they have been bribed by the IMF to get rid of bitcoin

And the US government is being bribed by Silicon Valley to adopt crypto...

> I am not a bitcoin-as-currency evangelist

Then why all the talk about Lighning and the dismissal of Monero?

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littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

Because lightning uses Bitcoin's blockchain, which is the most secured (as in energy) and the most common (as in market cap) and probably the most accepted as in regulation. Plus, you can use bitcoins taproot asset protocol to issue stablecoins and send them over lightning. No other blockchain needed - which in my opinion, renders monero obsolete or at least a very niche product.

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rglullis 2 days ago | parent [-]

- Lightning is not fully anonymous. It can still be traced by the participating nodes.

- Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.

- Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.

- It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.

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littlecranky67 2 days ago | parent [-]

> Lightning is not fully anonymous. It can still be traced by the participating nodes.

"Fully anonymous" is a strong term. Even cash is not fully anonymous. I would give monero that it is more anonymous than lightning because it is a core design principal. There is a spectrum to anonymity, however. As public enemy number one, such as Snowden or BinLaden, your anonymity requirements are different than a citizen buying illegal erectile dysfunction medication online.

If you consider the new features added in lightning over the past 24 months such as trampoline payments, blinded paths etc. - you will find that lightning is anonymous enough. Plus, you can increase anonymity in the client implementation at the expense of higher transaction fees (longer paths, more trampolines). Lightning's BOLT12 standard, which is currently finalized, will increase anonymity even further.

> Ethereum's blockchain consumes less energy, is more decentralized, it's a lot more resistent to any form of attack and it can also host fixed-supply coins.

Thats is factually untrue. First, ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord. Second, Ethereum is not decentralzied at all, because that is a core property of proof-of-stake: There is no way at any given time that you can be sure that the majority stake is not already in a single entities (or colluding group) possesion - and would thus have absolute control. It is therefore never guaranteed at any given time, that the network is decentralized.

> Market cap is a meaningless metric, it's at best circular logic and at worst it's just a "one billion flies can't be wrong" argumentum ad populum.

Price is ultimately what determines the value of anything. It is absolutely far from meaningless, as the market cap is also a big factor if a crypto asset can be outlawed or banned. Given how many investors in the west already own bitcoin, there would be a massive outcry if it is suddenly outlawed. I say you could outlaw Monero tomorrow and the mainstream media wouldn't even cover it.

> It baffles me how the Bitcoin enthusiasts talk so much about ideology and freedom, but get completely silent about the fact that most mining operations are done in countries with oppressive regimes, financed or subsidized by dictators with access to cheap fossil fuels.

You mean, such as the United States? Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently.

	▲	rglullis 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> There is a spectrum to anonymity, however. But you can only make any claims about the properties of a system when looking at the extremes. If Bitcoin's blockchain does not make strong anonymity guarantees as Monero, then Bitcoin by definition can not be the "blockchain to rule them all" that you so desperately want. >ethereum famously had a human-coordinated rollback with a controlled restart organized between devs and node runners over Discord. That was achieved through social coordination. No backdoor was exploited, no one had their coins stolen on the original chain. The system worked as intended. Can you say the same about Bitcoin? Do you think that all these banks and exchanges trading ETFs have secured access to the bitcoins they claim to have? When one of these institutions goes bust, who is going to bail them out? You keep trying to argue that Bitcoin is more valuable because it is more likely to be supported by the powers-that-be, and that is the strongest indicator that all your evangelism is driven by "Greater Fool" dynamic. Satoshi's idea for crytocurrencies was to have an alternative system that worked despite adversarial governments, yet we keep getting time-and-again evidence that it can only work if it becomes of an instrument for the powerful institutions that caused the problems in the first place. Bitcoin and its blockchain has no intrinsic value. Unlike Monero, it is not fully anonymous. Unlike Ethereum, it has no utility for decentralized applications. It can not be used as a currency. All Bitcoin has is first-mover advantage and a huge number of people with cognitive dissonance trying to keep the bubble inflated. > Because the US (especially Texas) is one of the biggest miners of bitcoin currently. Access to cheap fossil fuels? Check. Facilitated by the government? Check! Serving the interests of the elites and the aspirational 14% instead of the general populace? Check!