Replying to Avatar Mike Dilger ☑️

Bitcoin had two problems limiting it's adoption: (1) difficult to use and (2) it had a very low network effect. (1) was solved by lightning.

I've thought about the things I spend money on: my mortgage payments, groceries, petrol, clothing, furniture, ISP, electricity. I can't use bitcoin for any of that. The only place I can use it (ignoring nostr for a moment) is to pay for email service, VPN service (which I almost never use), That's what, $20 worth? Nowhere near enough for me to want to accept bitcoin... if I accept it, I can't spend it directly, I have to exchange it for the local currency first. Nostr zaps improve that situation a little bit, but not by very much. How much am I going to pay out in zaps as tokens of appreciation?

Network effect is slow and difficult to grow when you are far below critical mass, as I believe bitcoin still is. So for those of you desperately wishing for bitcoin to take off, you have a lot of work ahead of you. Getting sellers of basic services to accept bitcoin is the biggest thing that could move the needle. Getting friends to install lightning wallets and zap each other probably won't move the needle much.
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optout 2y ago

I agree with that, with the qualification that 'Bitcoin as a medium of exchange had two limiting ...'. This is as opposed to 'Bitcoin as a store of value', which is a more successful story.

Having more people with some sats on their phone increases the need to do something more useful with those sats, so zapping new people can move the needle just a tiny bit -- very tiny bit.

I expect more significant merchant adoption will happen only (where/when) the merchants are themselves incentivized to accept (and keep!) sats; the desire of the buyers projected onto the merchants is a much weaker force.

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