lightning is critical to merchant adoption
this is so wrong. go to el salvador or any of the places on this map that has high density of bitcoin-accepting businesses
www.btcmap.org/map
if you scroll around you'll see quite a few hotspots, eg https://btcmap.org/map#13/46.00261/8.93870
i've been in bitcoin for a while and i can tell you in the context of bitcoin's history this is an absolute explosion of growth - driven mainly by lightning fwiw
Discussion
yep and it works perfectly now. for many businesses it is simply cheaper to accept lightning than any other payment method
(and yes, I paid at this business with bitcoin)
lightning is literally the cheapest, fastest payment network ever devised, it's faster than any of them, 90+% of the time and the fees are absurdly low
also, i don't know if this is inherently different to credit cards, but i really like that you get the invoice on your phone, showing the amount, and then choose to pay it (or not)
rather than you just ok whatever the merchant has on their terminal
(i guess paying with a card on a phone will be able to do this, but i have never done that)
the only thing i dislike is that it means i need to have a phone - but hopefully dedicated devices will be available
yeah, unfortunately so far the cards i know of all have some serious downsides and quite high costs
from the perspective of adoption, almost everyone has phones, and some sort of lightning custodial wallet or semi-custodial LSP based client is easy enough to get... phoenix is pretty good, wallet of satoshi, but that isn't accessible to americans, they can use stuff like phoenix just fine, idk about xapo there but they have lightning built in now, you can receive and make payments with it as well
it's just gonna take time, i guess, and that's the thing, it really needs to be concentrated in small areas, like el salvador and there's that thing in boracay (philippines i think?) and here in madeira
i probably would join in more here if i could live somewhere quiet while not being so far away from where all the community is based in funchal
honestly, check out www.btcmap.org/map - there are a lot of apparent hotspots in unexpected areas
of course, they might not be real but the guys who run the map are legit
eg, the isle of man in UK.. ...lugano in switzerland.. ..some islands i never heard of off belize!
if this is at all real, it's a grassroots uprising
yeah, most of them are legit but some not very serious... there is a pharmacy in the next town west of me but they haven't got their shit together... the guy i was working with on https://github.com/p9c/p9 - you can find him on the map in Novi Sad, no idea what he's actually up to, but he's a web dev mainly, he used to run Bitstickers
for sure it is an uprising, maybe i should look closer at the map because i have some regions in my mind that i'm interested in, if they are bitcoiner hotspots that might help me pick my next move... i have the idea of leaving here in may or so, and i need to plan my next stop, i want it to be the place that i build my hermitage, i mean citadel, whatever, depends on whether i catch myself a wife i guess
yeah, nah, it's really just not happening in former yugo, i think even that there is less now in Split than there was, i'm not gonna put too much weight in it at this point... partly why i paid the insane fees for xapo bank was to have the freedom to not care if they accept sats or not wherever i am, just need either ATM or EFTPOS that accept mastercard
Nowadays virtually all merchant adoption uses Lightning. And lightning is 100% up to that. Anybody who says otherwise lives in the past. OK, I concede 99+% :)
But the big problem is with incentives. The vast majority of merchants don't have the incentive to accept btc. And nobody can force them.
In the west, that's probably true - and they'd need another reason, like ideology. But it's still happening - eg see lugano - and that just means they are Our People, you can go along and meet your family..
But in other parts of the world modern payments are very problematic and have much greater costs. In this case it is perfectly possible that what seems to be true, is true: lightning is cheaper for them.