Interesting š¤
I won't recommend onchain bitcoin to anyone because of the glaring lack of privacy and anonymity. It's too easy to fuck things up and be ensnared.
Lightning is a non-starter for someone in the position of receiving $2 or $5 (many small payments) while also not having liquidity.
Obviously it also doesn't scale, because either you're opening a new channel with each transaction, or expanding channel capacity (eithet one is an onchain tx, meaning it's neither private/anon or does it scale).
Next comes ecash. I'm not going to be personally liable for the money of everyone I orange pill by running a mint, and I'm not going to recommend a randomint that will one day surely rug them.
For the same reason, I won't recommend a custodial lightning solution either.
Liquid could kinda work, and at least it has confidential transactions.. but software (and hardware, afaik only Jade supports it) support is very lacking.
Lightning works great for people like us (with its many caveats, thr whole network is one giant hot wallet after all). I have channels with obnoxious amounts of usd worth of liquidity that I opened years ago
In case you guys haven't noticed, that's not most people.
Unfortunately I have observed that the vast majority (and that includes even most bitcoiners) don't care and/or don't understand the value of privacy and anonymity.
Bitcoiners at least understand the fiat scam, that's why we're bitcoiners. But most normies in most places don't.
Normies don't get the tech either. It's a bit like the internet, you have a small minority who has any idea how a computer works and how networking works and why you probably shouldn't be running closed-source apps on closed-source systems running in closed-source hardware.. but most people noy only don't care, they brag about not caring.
Until they're hacked (happened to a noob I know recently), and suddenly they understand why they shouldn't have made their entire digital world as secure as their stupid apple login, because now the "hacker" completely owns them. Then they come crying for help, after years of saying they "have nothing to hide". Well, now that person literally has nothing to hide, it was all pwnd š
Anyhow, the point is, I see bitcoin in a bit of a deadend right now unless you're a baller and can put in serious money into it regularly. It's totally unusable in a self-sovereign way for the vast majority of people and I don't see how this is going to change.
That's one half of it. The other half is, damn every single one of you who stubbornly failed to see why privacy WITH anonymity was important (not aimed at you nostr:npub1lnms53w04qt742qnhxag5d6awy7nz6055flnmjkr6jg39hm86dlq7arrnt), and who're all so surprised now that the complete lack of priv/anon in bitcoin is being weaponized against it.
Yeah, no shit.
Why do you think they want the mass-surveillance?
To enforce tyrannical laws. DUH.
A totally transparent system gave them that ability ON FUCKING STEROIDS.
Now the chicken are coming home to roost.
And believe me, I take no pleasure in any of this. I'm just another guy trying to live in peace and doing my thing, but all the NGU fanatics and their arrogant ignorance could only result in what's coming.
Anyway, so I recommend #monero to people nowdays for transactions, and when/if they reach a certain point where saving makes sense, and they have by then enough capital, then it's time to talk about swapping xmr for non-kyc btc.
But mark my words, all of this is too much for normies. One day they want to sell those btc like normies (kyc cex) and their accounts will be frozen.
They literally don't understand what fully traceable means. 9 out of 10. It's incredible, I don't know what's between their ears.
Transparent chain. All traceable. By design. It'll get you into trouble, unless you fit in the officially approved Statist box (kyc purchases, all traceable, no "suspicious" transfers, FULL SURVEILLANCE AND CONTROL).
It's... not hard to get.
Discussion
Actually it isnāt interesting. Heās just trying to force what he cares about onto people who donāt care about it and the complaining that no option solves literally every single problem of money, payments, and finance all at the same timeā¦ which is just an absurd notion, imo.
Of course donāt recommend something hard to use or costly, but the fact that he jumps on Monero at the end and pretends it doesnāt have a vastly worse scaling problem, has even more limited options for layering, and the person is gonna have to KUC on some exchange to buy it anyway, shows this isnāt actually a conversation about trade offs, itās just shilling. š¤·š»āāļø
āLightning doesnāt scale, use Monero.ā Is like saying, āIP addresses wonāt scale, thatās why I tell people to write physical letters.ā š¤¦š»āāļøš¤¦š»āāļø
I donāt think he is wrong when it comes to the normie mindset. People have been conditioned to believe that privacy is scary and evil. How do we get people to care is probably the most vexing aspect of being a Bitcoiner. To us the problem is plain as day but to the normie itās āthatās crazy, did you catch the game this weekend!ā
As for scaling I have no idea how this pans out. Iāve read that lighting doesnāt scale to the entire world, so Iām curious to what other solutions will be out there to help handle growing adoption.
Lastly will normies use Bitcoin or will it be abstracted away until they are using something like a bitcoin backed dollar or something like that?
There is no āsingle solutionā to scaling to the whole world, and lightning was never claimed (except by people who didnāt understand itā to scale to the whole worldās transaction demand. The likely scaling limits are literally discussed in the whitepaper and the people who act like itās not admitted or that it was dishonest were never paying attention, imo.
Blockchains donāt scale, thatās what bugs me about people who say āLightning doesnāt scaleā as if the lack of a universal, complete solution to all scaling in Lightning, somehow means their preferred alternative (with vastly worst limits) should be recommended. The simple fact is that Lightning scales at a significant multiple to any blockchain based payment system, likely in the 100x range.
Maybe Iām more annoyed than I should be, but serial complainers with solutions to exactly none of the problems just feel like such a waste of time to me these days. Maybe I just need more patience and my kids are taking all that energy from me already š