Want stable $ balances? Use a provider or mint that uses USD-denominated balances.
Underneath it’s LN with only 0.5% fees max for the sender. Usually none if it is in the community (as the community mint and savvy providers that want to selfhost can open feeless channels)
Yea, I would likely run the mind and would keep it all internal for all merchants - with the option to out-ramp for savvy users, as you say.
Yeah. You can also support top-ups from any merchant. If they want to get off of this system they can talk to anyone that wants to get in and swap for free.
Congrats you built a P2P exchange economy.
A dedicated ecash protocol can be made for this too. Since only the payment cards care, it can be optimized, and they all speak LN.
Well how convenient, a P2P exchange economy is exactly what I'm trying to do :)
Can't you do all of that directly in lightning. lnbits+ntag424 chips? The nation currency backing would still have to be implemented somehow (e.g. open a future contract on lnmarkets?), and that middleware could do the necessary api calls for the card/chip/wallet.
Putting that aside for a moment ...
The problem I face here is mostly that onboarding merchant is difficult/expensive.
They need to provide tradfi terminals (so they still pay banks their cut) + now they need a specialized device for lightning (if they don't run something with android+good nfc reader; which is rare here) + the chips.
Unless merchant is bitcoiner, my experience is mostly good only if I say it won't cost you anything to provide this payment method.
When they see how it works, we can get into things like gift cards, spend only mints etc. But that almost never happens.
I personally know the handful of merchants involved and would help with getting them cheap android phones for this purpose (or use their existing tradfi POS (which they all have) if its an iPad). they don't have to be bitcoiners (yet), they just need to want to save many thousands of dollars a year in credit card fee extortion.
they are using a worse, more expensive settlement layer just because I haven't finished this yet. I can't abide that.
