Half of that is probably mine
Discussion
impressive
I like eggs
If you come to the Bitcoin meetup I'll sell you a shitload of eggs
buying eggs with sats from local bitcoiners is one of my very favorite activities
Buying locally produced goods and services using lightning from someone you have an open channel with is peak bitcoin.
For agorism bonus points, give them some goods or services you produced and only settle the net via Bitcoin.
open channels with them is the last missing piece for me. I'm lucky these people are even on custodial lightning wallets...
Maybe I should get into Uncle Jim mode just for this purpose...
do people running their own businesses and providing goods and services have time to manage a LN node?
not yet, no. do they have time to manage relationships and integrations with credit card companies? no, they don't have to - they use Square or something.
well get there
that's why I floated the idea of doing it for them, in the interim.
His question wasn't sincere. He was just looking for an opportunity to shit on P2P bitcoin.
insincere questions are my favorite to answer.
and very occasionally you find out they actually weren't.
the UX hurdle is indeed why I dont run a LN node for my own business.
It may be peak Bitcoin
but the reply was intended to draw attention to why its not being offered.
I use Bitcoin p2p almost every day asshole.
As a business who operates own LN node, the biggest issue is requirement to lock-in BTC in significant amount.
good to know!
ongoing maintenance and channel management havent been a big problem?
Once I figured out how LN is ought to work, I just configured the node to be able to route transactions so that other nodes have incentives to open channels as well. Bunch of swaps at LightningNetwork+, few liquidity purchases at Magma from Amboss and a few channels to big LSPs made it not necessary to manage anything more frequently than once a month. Budget is what hard in my case - I can't just open many 1+ million sats channels
When you consider what they are losing in fiat land it makes more sense to ask how they can afford not to go to a LN node.
40 hour week. Lots of small businesses are paying 10% in CC fees. Let's ignore inflation losses. I don't spend 4 hours a week on my LN node but they are spending 4 hours a week working for visa.
4 hours a week really hurts with small business margins.
Thats true
but you also have to factor in educational hurdles
and probably time spent converting back to fiat to pay expenses
farmers often have a completely different skill set than VPN providers, for example
Most are hodling from what I've been told. We have multiple revenue streams and live below our means. Inbound Bitcoin is savings. Inbound fiat goes to fiat bills and buys some more Bitcoin.
Not a problem until Bitcoin revenue is a bigger % of revenue than the % that goes to buying Bitcoin anyway. We'll just switch to living on Bitcoin fully at that point.
yeah...
"independent businesses will hodl until Bitcoin standard" is hopium
personally its what my business does..
and we mostly succeed in not even being in a position to sell BTC. we have extremely low expenses.
but my rancher cant do that for example.
its not a viable strategy at scale.
thanks for the conversation tho
The question is, is % bitcoin revenue > % savings. It has nothing to do with field of the business or the size of the numbers or profit %.
Unless businesses are in the Bitcoin field or are very deliberate and selective about customers the % Bitcoin sales is usually very low.
well then youve identified a second bootstrapping problem
why would a business invest in its own infrastructure for a payment method with is hardly used?
also it isnt strictly correct to say it has nothing to do with the type of business.
obviously someone who decides to start a VPS provider is better situated to run their own LN infrastructure than a farmer.
and it certainly does also depend on how profitable the business is.
a business with good margins wont need to sell their Bitcoin, even if it makes of a larger % of their total gross
than a business that has razor margins and always needs their assets liquid.