Here's a simple idea that bitcoin accepting retailers could do to save costs. The basic idea is that consumers overpay by sending a UTXO for the product in its entirety, and the retailer returns the change in lightning/liquid OR creates a balance of credit in that retailers mint.

Here are some of the main advantages:

It makes good use of onchain UTXO's by not breaking them up and creating unwanted dust.

It looks like a "self spend" to any chain analytics.

It helps retailers balance their LN channel by creating more inbound liquidity.

It encourages more retail adoption of LN.

It saves block space.

Source:

https://stacker.news/items/506979/r/halalmoney

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Discussion

Sounds like it requires a lot of trust, but the benefits are nice.

The same trust required as a customer expecting change back in any transaction, right?

Customer pays a set of (onchain) inputs

Customer receives product/service

Customer gets change outputs back (offchain)

If you were just learning about Bitcoin would you think what was just written was a good idea ?

"Join this new monetary system, you pay more than the sticker price and you might get the difference back."

No one signed up for this, not even back when the LN paper dropped.

Only traumatic abuse from toxic propaganda and cult like fanaticism can push a mind to such unwarranted inconveniances.

The world will just use apple pay and wechat, and freedom will drain past the fingers of the Maxi death strangle.

More than the sticker price? Why?

The merchant pays to open a channel if they want; same as the merchant paying a CC fee (or, ya know, embedding it in the sticker price?)

>The basic idea is that consumers overpay by sending a UTXO for the product in its entirety, and the retailer returns the change

I must be misunderstanding what is meant by "overpay" and the use of the word "change".

If the expected behavior for users of LN is to esclusively pay in what os the cash equivalent of large denominated bills, i.e a 100$ note for a 75$ purchase, and exact change held by a consumers somehow makes the system less efficient, we are in for a bad time.

You are misunderatanding.

The expected behavior for LN users is to use LN; the proposed case is for hybrid customers choosing to pay onchain, replenishing their LN wallet with the change, and adding inbound liquidity to the merchant

I understand, thought the initial purchase was in LN too.

Lol.