seems your reading too much into the scripted rhetoric. (obvious by the use of 'coffee' out of billions of possible product purchases)

BITCOIN can be a normal currency. its not the fault of the technology that bitcoin is not being utilised to its full potential. the reason its not at its full potential is the 'conservative' devs who want to stifle bitcoin to offer and advertise alternative networks to try getting people off the bitcoin network.

before anyone jumps in defending a dev. remember bitcoin is not some self manifesting/evolving/writing AI. it is just code. and who writes the code... think about it

bitcoin can be a p2p cash and SoV
but bitcoin cant be just a SoV

to be a SoV it has to have value, which is found due to actually being useful and not a crapcoin.
so if bitcoin loses its value as a medium of exchange then its just an empty token

there is no timing strategy.
no one can predict a future movement of speculation. but they sure as hell can be a preacher and cause a pump and dump.
people say they have strategy groups people can join purely to get naive people in to invest when preached at.
what they dont realise is the preacher making the calls already bought in. and letting th naive investors DO the pumping. and while the preacher is shouting "look i told you it would go up" (but only due to his preach) the preacher is getting ready to exit.
leaving the naive investors stuck at the top while the preacher causes the dump

same goes for trend anals as explained in last post i wrote. they are not predictor guys, they are preachers hoping to get naive viewers to react to their preaches to actually cause the thing thats preached.

there are no 'natural' trends.
there are no 'natural' market cycles

what occurs is some stupid trend anal guy see's 2013's rise.. sees late 2017 rise and shouts out "every 4 years theres a cycle"

what not been told is the 2013 rise was due to the invention of asics
what not been told is the 2017 rise was due to the invention of futures options

2 separate events, 2 events not tied to each other, 2 events that wont repeat
but now. because of trend anals. people start programming their bots that in 2021 expect another big event. (facepalm)

the foolish part is. then a group of bots plans to buy during 2017-2021 with the hope to exit at the preached facepalm date
theres also a group that think due to halvening of 2012 and 2016 they need to buy before 2020.

this causes bot programmers to set thousands of bots to buy early. to get best prices
thus causing rampant price rises.
not due to any actual natural proved trends. but simply reactions of hearing that someone preached something wil happen.

its like self fulfilling prophecy or better known as pump and dumps.
announce something will happen that wont happen if you kept mouth shut. but you cause it to happen just because you opened your mouth,

so here is a simple lesson.
if you think you can predict the future. thousands of others have thought the same thing and set their bots to do so. so by the time you want to act on your plan. others already have.. and you end up too late.

same goes for price dips
the 2014 dip and 2018 dip was not "trend" but was mtgox and a mix of futures sell off and next gen asic where old gen were sold off causing mining to get cheaper thus pools selling at less and still profiting.

this does not mean there is a natural "winter dip" as the events are unrelated and next winter wont occur again. but now bots have been programmed to foolishly think there would be a winter dip and so they will do things before winter,

so again if your planning on a winter dip. thousands already have and so they will react before winter to effectively maybe cause a autumn dip before the preached winter dip.

so here is a simple lesson.
if you think you can predict the future. thousands of others have thought the same thing and set their bots to do so. so by the time you want to act on your plan. others already have.. and you end up too late.

you CANNOT predict the future. because by the time you think you know. everyone knows and everyone has planned to act before it

trend anals are not predictors. they are pump and dump preachers. they say something will happen at Z so that people react and try to get in early at Y so that the preacher can get in at X and get out at Z. leaving anyone hoping to see Z as those left too late holding the bag

if your talking about price cycles and trends. you are not a technical analyst your a trend anal


but to put some technicals into the most simplified numbers even a trend anal would understand
over the last 9 months. the bottomline (hidden) support went from $3500-~$5000
over the last 9 months. the volatile price (visible) went from $3600-~$9000-$7800

right now there is ~$2800 of speculative hype

1. bitmain have been doing OTC for years... nothing new
2. billions of bch.. well anyone that had btc at august 2017 automatically gets bch.. nothing new. doesnt mean they love bch
3. your talking about an altcoin being exchanged for fiat. nothing new or impacting to btc

again just altcoin social drama.
moving on. just remember to towel off

P.S when OTC changes from making random/separate calls/facetimes individually.. to be a 'desk' of multiparty organised trades around one point its then called an exchange.

hint at the difference between OTC and exchange
"One unnamed source told the website that the crypto services startup, called Matrix, “will be the biggest over-the-counter (OTC) desk and asset manager overnight.”

Matrix’s OTC offering is likely to be boosted by its close ties to bitcoin (BTC) mining company, Bitmain. The new business will reportedly offer custody and lending services to the Beijing-based giant, receiving a liquid pool in return."

'asset manager..... custody.. liquid pool'  thats not 'OTC' thats 'exchange'

based on some pencil on envelop maths.

if we stuck with GPU. 55exa would be 30billion graphics cards. ~approx 10mill pc's of 3gpu each. using 600w psu
thats like comparison of 5 billion S9's

however 55exa only uses ~approx 4million s9's = over 1000x efficiency in only 5 years
the hashrate has only halved once in that time. so although btc went from 25 to 12.5 the efficiency of technology has done its job by many folds more...

as for the cost/payment to pools. transaction fee's do not need to have developers mess with transaction count stiffling to push fee's
pools right now dont care about transaction fee's
3000tx@25cent=$750

pools dont like to waste seconds of time collating and choosing transactions to put into blocks for just $750 when the time wastage of doing so risks them not getting a block solved. which not only is losing them the $100k block reward but also the $750, simply because that pool wouldnt win the race.

if pools want income from fee's, shrinking the blocksize does nothing. ASICS themselves dont ''process' transactions. there is no hard drive in an asic to store/validate transactions. an asics job has nothing to do with transactions.

the pools job however is to choose the transactions(collate a block to get a header to then give a piece of data to asics). and right now and for many decades pools dont care about fees. the only reason they add transactions is for 'community care' of making sure bitcoin has a purpose so that people use it so that pools have people to sell their rewards to.

stiffling blocksize decreases users available.
stiffling blocksizes does not affect hashrate or difficulty.
stiffling blocksize hurts user adoption which hurts pools

if pools EVENTUALLY want more income from transactions, pools would prefer:
more users paying less. so theres more happy people in the community.and collectively totals more fee's
pools could also raise the min dust/min relay without needing the blocksize stifling

its like public transport buses. if a bus is empty or full the minimum bus ticket is the same. if a bus company wants more income they would:
add more seats but charge the same per seat = more income
increase the ticket without messing with decreasing seats.
they would never take seats out or incentivise people to use UBER to empty out a bus and then have people go to auction for tickets

LN atomic swaps are possible but things still need to be worked out
such as:

1. price discovery
imagine it like localbitcoins. loads of listings of offers but no aggregated 'average price' with no central lookup for people to see an average price, it makes the 'store of value' more volatile as there would be no common spot price

just try using local bitcoins without looking up a website that shows an average price. you will find it a little harder to set your own price. and if everyone tried it. the price would go all over the place

2. speed of trade
exchanges offer fast trading which can be profitable. but if people have to search out trading partners in LN under a peer to peer scenario and then route to that peer, is slower than an exchange based trade. there can be instances of by the time you found someone offering a trade, by the time you commit a signed htlc, the other peer has already took an offer from someone else.
this is an actual problem, bcause even in central exchanges they have issues of multiple uses trying to make/take same orders which is where trading engines get designed. in LN doing per-to-peer atomics. there is no way to have a engine managing offers.

3.offer discovery
with routes having to 'find their own way' by going through partners in a 'try, if fail try else' method to get a destination. trying to find an offer involves searching all active nodes for possible offers. this alone can be very bandwidth heavy pinging thousands of nodes. and by the time you found 1-3 offers, one of those could have expired by someone else taking up the offer

summary
LN will become more central around hubs and factories which offer central services like exchanges with trading engines to get around issue above. the ONLY difference of 'centrality' is that its accessed via a node interface rather than a webbrowser interface

the https://1ml.com/statistics website has stats of
nodes with active channels: <5k
number of channels: <35k
thats an average of 7 channels per active node.

so if your funding 7 channels (onchain data minimum 1 in 7 out) then the close sessions needed at the end of 2in 2out X7(14in 14out)
again for emphasis doing more than 7 transactions onchain(8-15) just to set up and close,
so if someone is only transacting once a week. they are not really benefiting if they are using monthly channels(4 a month)

as for the under $100 stuff..
the fee war is not some technology limit. its a human imposed and enforced thing by those advocating for fee wars.
implement a fee mechanism into bitcoin. and onchain fee's become respectful and people who dont spam daily can use onchain even for smaller than $100 amounts.

but thank you for proving a point. devs choices to not implement a fee mechanism has made people foolishly think that bitcoin cant cope with low fee's and so think LN is foolishly the solution.. the real solution though is an actual fee mechanism IN BITCOIN

25%??

ever checked the UTXO set.
not even a few percent actually spend funds daily/weekly. so LN will only be useful for a small percentage, while those remaining on the bitcoin network are drastically effected negatively by the whole dev instigated tx limiter and fee war

not only that but:
LN is a niche for people who spam(spend more than once a day)
by the time someone gets paid. works out how much they want to deposit into LN for spending habits of the month. works out of that share which 'channels' would best satisfy having which amounts to have for the best chance of good efficient service. and then pays the fee's to set it up.
if they are not using it daily they wont want to
have to keep the app open to ensure their counterpart is playing by the rules.
accept/deny random requests from routers asking to use them as a path
worry if they autopilot the app or factory/watchtower it, that route raiders wont empty their channel

towel thought:
when was the last time someone went to a bank with a bank note(promise/iou) and exited the bank with gold
when was the last time someone went to a bank with a bank note(promise/iou) and exited the bank with less precious metals

if you say the 1950's
in the 1950's
how many went to a bank with a bank note(promise/iou) and exited the bank with gold
how many went to a bank with a bank note(promise/iou) and exited the bank with less precious metals

the answer is more people deposited gold in but ended up taking silly small coins out

big mega hint:
LN is not a sole bitcoin feature of only bitcoin design and function
LN REQUIRED bitcoin to change to give bitcoin an access method to use LN
LN is a separate network
LN is a network of independant/guaranteed payment. but a network of requiring users to be funded to join, online to be paid and requires another entities authorisation just to attempt to get funds moved

1. if he done it OTC then it doesnt impact exchange prices
2. once sold. temporary price drama, social drama surpasses and another day begins.
3. bch has nothing to do with btc

without even thinking about the world. did you know just in the U.S
a $10 bank note is near 2 hours labour in wyoming and georgia ($5.15 min wage)
a $10 bank note is near 1 hours labour in Connecticut and maryland($10.10 min wage)
a $10 bank note is near 50 minutes labour in Massachusetts ($12 min wage)

as for a loaf of bread.
going store to store i bet you will see an array of different prices for a basic loaf. all varying location to location

"universal metric and measure." pfft

whats next..
someone 'buys a lambo' then 5 minutes later sends a special new tx declaring the coins that just moved are 'stolen'

hmm chargeback scamming 2.0

here is a secret.
1. dont give out private keys
2. exchanges should never have private keys on server
3. multisig funds, so if one key is found, its useless alone
4. dont hoard larg stash on one key
5. if your funds move and you didnt initiate it. confirms take 10min. so try CPFP to intercept the unconfirm
by creating a new parent child double tx and get it confirmed back to an address you prefer using more fee than the theif
6. in short, look after your funds because once they are out of your control. they are.. out of your control

other secrets
9 out of 10 'exchange hacks' are actually exchange ceo retirement plans

love it. i can just imagine that conversation

bitcoin dev salaried by corporation:
     'bitcoin cant scale because you cant receive, validate and broadcast 3000 tx in 10 minutes'
bitcoin dev salaried by corporation:
     'LN is where wveryone should be because you cant recieve, validate and broadcast thousands/unlimited tx in seconds'
community:
     'why cant bitcoin?'
bitcoin dev salaried by corporation:
     'coz hardware'
community:(in sarcastic tone)
     'ohhh the same hardware LN needs to receive, validate, sign, revoke old sig and broadcast thousands tx in seconds'

in the UK and a few other places. for situations like you explained.
the buzzword they are starting to use is DLT distributed ledger technology

because government elections only occur 1 day every 4-5 years. governments dont really have many chances to actually use blockchains for real.

governments are researching blockchains and other distributed ledger technologies(DLT: centralised blockchains) but they are still working on the main issue of how to disperse out the tokens used for a vote. as thats the stumbling point.

counting/auditing th votes is easy. but its getting the vote out to the population where people cant just for instance:
sell their private keys on blackmarkets to activists groups that buy votes.
someone accesses a relatives phone to steal their vote

its why although annoying, polling stations exist instead of just having everyone use a phone app. because physically turning up is a psychological tactic to vote scammers for not wanting to be caught double voting

yes there is technology available  to identify people and only accredit one-vote-one-face. but generally people are against needing to identify themselves when voting.
but as i said its not the blockchain part thats the stumbling point, but the distribution of votes ethically

LN is a separate network with a pegged token called Msats that are not recognised on the bitcoin network
'close sessions' are the converter onramp tx from LN back to bitcoin

LN is not about 'scaling bitcoin' but deburdening the bitcoin network by REDUCING/DE-SCALING the utility of the bitcoin network
LN is not about increasing transaction count of the bitcoin network for more users to make direct sender to recipint push transactions,
LN is about making people use another network of 'pay if agree'. where the dvs only nvision increasing bitcoins network purely to fit in more spcial transaction formats that are just onramps in and out of LN
it already begun. segwit txformats only advantage is to be the onramp/gateway to LN. segwits 'weight' expansion on the network does not help legacy transaction increases

....
other 'offline' / 'offchain' services are also about deburdening the bitcoin network of transaction count, not expand it

the point being
the less people actually making transactions on the bitcoin network daily = less people wanting to be full nodes because their activity is not daily to need to be fullnodes.
EG if everyone had a LN channel with a 6month lock. factories and services only need to check once every 6 months and then play around on the offchain networks

---

adoption wont occur due to regulation.
there are more weed smokers since regulation of drugs had been weakened
there are more alcoholics since regulation of alcohol(compared to prohibition era) had been weakened

even banking has increased in popularity when 'savings groups' / credit unions became more popular due to making regulations less restrictive.
years ago it was impossible for a country to invent/use a currency like Mpesa, but then reducing regulations actually allowed these things to flourish

regulations are not peoples friends. regulations are just a shiny certificate that makes a business/institution look like it has a seal of approval from a government to service and police its customers.
yes the shiny certificate brings attention. but attention can be attained by other ways too
regulations help businesses/institutions. not assets and not people

also
"is this USB authentic? or is it chinese replica which looks the same but is just a USB stick with a public key on it"

imagine it. though it retails for $15 for the device i bet china can replicate the usb board for $3 and just be a public key holder.

you just buy 5 devices (contains same public key)
you load on 1btc to public key

now you have 5 devices that look like they have ~$40k combined (5xbtc)

$15 +1x$8k(btc you still own) = $40k scam

by the time someone eventually wants to spend and snaps off the resistor or bypasses the resistor. realising its just a public key held..too late

other issue is there are ways to bypass the resistor thus spend without having to 'pop out' the resistor