Not bank cards, credit cards.
Credit cards were around before bank cards. And before the internet too. I am 59 years old. When I worked at a gas station as a kid, we had to request an ID, put the card in a contraption to "scrape" it to show through triplicate carbon copies.Than I would fill out the date and amount, and the customer would sign it. I kept two copies, he kept the third one.

I am in Canada. I bough an aircraft parts kit in the USA 5 years ago. They told me they will give me a 2% discount if I don't use a credit card. And when I mentioned I was paying cash, they offered me an other 3% discount on top of the original 2%.

Granted, it's not worth paying coffe with cash to save 2%. But the point is it's baked into the price of everything. Along with inflation which is also an other hidden fee.

Than you have to consider stores, banks, and payment processors don't work for free. They have to tabulate all these transactions, and invoice the next middle-man until it gets to you seemingly for free. A.k.a baked into the price.

Well, the big difference here is that bitcoin fees are up front and transparent for everyone to see. But fiat fees are hidden and baked into the cake so most people are not aware of them even paying those fees.
.inflation is a hidden fee baked into the cake. And all digital fiat payments come with their own fees, almost all of them hidden and baked into the price of everything.

Most of those fees ate charged to the merchant who accepts the payment. So it's included into the price of everything. Credit card payments and banking card payments all require some sort of paperwork and separate accounting. Than you have your bank fees and you credit card fees and interests.
It goes on and on..... People have just no idea what % of they transactions go to various fees. So they just assume it's all 'free'. But it ain't.

I would argue fit payment fees are much higher than with Bitcoin, just not as honest

I'm not aware of a single person who had his coin stolen out of his hot wallet. I'm sure it has happened, but not something frequent.
With my hot wallet, you will have to steal my phone, crack the phone unlock, crack the wallet password, and take the coin from there.
If you can do all that, you deserve to have my bitcoin 'fortune'.

Let's be realistic here. Hacking individual wallets is too much work for not enough rewards. They don't hack individual wallets, they hack exchanges.

Your coin is far more safe in your hot wallet than it would ever be in any bank vault.

You sound like a credit card naysayers from 45 years ago.
If I told you in the future credit cards will be used to buy coffee, you would have called me insane. Who's going to show an ID to buy a cup of coffee, sign a triplicate carbon copy of the transaction, and get charged 10% on all transactions? You?

First you would do well to think of the internet as it's own sovereign country. While every other country has it's own central bank and currency, now the internet has it's own central bank and currency.

You tell me my internet currency is not well suited to buy a cup of coffee in your country? Well, your country fiat is not well suited to buy a cup of coffee in my country either.

When you are in your own country, if you have a stable currency, use that. And use my country's currency when you are in mine. And soon you will be able to use Bitcoin in it's native country too: the internet.

And in you still insist on using a foreign currency (BTC) in your country to buy a cup of coffee, don't be an ass and use LN. No waiting 10 minutes, no paying $1 of miner fee.

Are you old enough to remember when credit cards were in their infancy?
Only the well to do had credit cards. And if you had Visa while the merchant only accepted MasterCard, you were out of luck unless you also carried cash at all times. In fact everyone carried cash at all times, even those with a credit card because they knew they could not depend on it.

And if you were lucky enough to find a merchant who accepts your brand of credit card, you would have to show ID to make sure you are the holder of the card. Than it would be put in a card scrapper where the card would be scrapped to produce 3 carbon copies. And those had to be filled manually with items bought, price, taxes, and total. Than you had to sign it.
You kept a copy, the store kept a copy, and the 3rd one would be sent to the credit card company.

It was a lengthy and tidious process. Expensive too. Not something the common man would use.

If you had told me 50 years ago that even students will use credit cards in the future to buy a coffee, I would have called you a nut job. Nobody is going to fill out a triplicate carbon copy to buy a coffee. Are you insane? Do you really think you will have to run around town to look for that one coffee shop that accepts your brand credit card? You think shops will all accept to fill out tons of paperwork for every coffee they sell?

So all those who tell me Bitcoin is not a viable payment system, you sound a lot like the naysayers 50 years ago.

I imagine in the future it will look like this: you have your wallet and your LN node running on your phone. When you want to pay for something, you just tap your phone or flash the QR code. Your phone will automatically decide if it should be an on chain payment or LN, or something else we come up with in the future. It will automatically adjust miner fee, rebalance your LN channels, and send the payment.

So you have BTC and the coffee shop only accepts Monero or fiat? No problems. LN just does an atomic swap from your BTC to whatever the shop takes. All done for under a penny.

Most people won't even know the difference between LN and on chain payments. It's all done in the background by your wallet. Just like most people who use email don't even know what a POP server eats during mating season.

That is EXACTLY RIGHT. You win the internet today, my friend.
If having bankers and bureaucrats control your every financial move all for the promised of safety and protection, Bitcoin is not for you. Pay your taxes, make sure all your transactions are approved, tracked, documented, and googlelized.
Freedom is not for pussies and mommiesboyz.

Sorry but I disagree.
The vast majority of people buy something when they see it going up, which causes it to keep going up. And the jump to panic sell when they see it drop, which causes it to keep dropping.
The irrational majority of the population is what causes stuff to get volatile.
The few who can buy when the price is low and sell when the price Iis high, they are the only ones who help stabilize the price.
You are likely part of the irrational 95%. And you are angry or jealous at those who make money at it while you buy high and sell low.

And money (not currency, two different things) is used to dowhatever you want to do with it.
If you can sit on your money and make it grow, or merelely save for a rainy day, good for you.

If you want to buy a pizza with it, good for you. If you want to invest it, or speculate with it, good for you
Currency, on the other hand is a fraud pretending to be money. And offer forced on you.

If Lazlo had decided to hord his coin and if every early adopter all had decided to hord their coin, it wouldn't be where it is today.
So I wouldn't say his is a hero for buying a pizza. A legend maybe, but not a hero. I'm pretty sure you gotta save an old Lady or a cute puppy to be a hero. Buying pizza hardly qualifies, unless it's to feed the homeless or something.
But we wouldn't be here today if it weren't for the early adopters refusing to hord their coin.

One tiny correction. He didn't get the pizzas for free. In 2010 you already needed a pretty high end gaming rig to mine Bitcoin. And you still had to consume a lot of electricity too. I would guess the electricity alone to pay for that pizza was over $25.
Bitcoin incorporates a lot of the values of free market. In in the free market, there is no such thing as a free lunch....or free pizza.
 

 The price of anything depends on supply and demand. How much of it there is, and how many people want it.
That explains why beach sand is cheap in the Sahara but a glass of water is priceless.
With bitcoin, you can remove or ignore the supply side of supply and demand rule as we already know bitcoin supply for the next century or so.

So the price of Bitcoin is based on it's known supply versus how many people want it. It's that simple. Like everything else.

Now, if you want to talk about the future price of bitcoin, that is a different story. Because you have to guess how many people will have a demand for it in the future. And they will make their decisions based on future events.

So if you get me a good well calibrated crystal ball, I will be able to predict future events and read the mind of everyone in the world in the future. Than I will be able to give you a pretty good guess at the future price of bitcoin.

Anything short of a good crystal ball is just a scam or a lie.
You can't find out the future price of bitcoin by looking at past prices and past 'trends and patterns'. That's just as stupid as reading last month newspaper to decide next weeks lottery numbers.

I haven't read the whole thread yet, but I will eventually.
I want to point out that you don't get to decide what is money to others. If Bob and I decide something is money to us, than so it is.
You may say that cigarettes are not money. But inmates all understand that cigarettes are money, even the ones who don't smoke. They all threat cigarettes as money. In fact your dollars are almost worthless to an inmate.

Are Pokemon cards money? You can debate that with a 5 year old and you will lose the debate.
And yes, I agree, you can't hold it touch or see a Bitcoin. But try to think of the internet as it's own sovereign country. Every sovereign country has it's own central bank and currency. Now the internet has it's own central bank and currency.

And like everything else on the internet, in the digital world, you can not touch, hold, smell, or see Bitcoin. Bitcoin simply would not be able to exist as internet money if you could hold it in your hand.

But I am always surprised at people who keep saying you can't touch Bitcoin therefore it's not real. Yet they use bank cards, credit cards, and other digital forms of currencies. In fact when my own father told me Bitcoin can't be touched, I told him I would buy him a steak dinner if he could reach into his pocket and touch his money.

He lost. I still bough him.a nice steak paid for with digital not real money on my credit card.

20 years ago I was screaming on the roof tops that there is a global agenda to make all fiat currencies digital with no cash. All digital currencies controlled by government. And most people laughted at me. Today those same people accept that 98% of all transactions in my country are digital only with no real fiat paper backing it up.

The world will move towards digital currency alright. But it won't be controlled by politicians and bureaucrats. And it will still qualify as cash.

Feel free to completely ignore me. Many people did 5 and 6 years ago. Now many if them are asking me about Bitcoin.

I agree. But the reason why people think otherwise is because a large portion of the population never really used cash in their lives. They have lived their entire life with the bank's safety net under them to baby them.
If your bank can reverse your transactions, or block them from every occurring, that's not a feature, it's a bug. And a very bad one too.
Unfortunately we have on our hands an entire generation completely unable to assume their own responsibilities because they have never been given financial freedom.
Freedom comes with responsibility over your own life. Sadly, most people nowadays don't understand that and they have a warped view of what freedom is.

That is exactly right.
I am a trader on p2p exchanges. So I sell and buy BTC for a 5% profit margin. And a lot of my customers don't understand why I am selling coin now that the price has dropped so much.
If I sell you $1 of coin, I sell it for $1.05, than I turn around and but $1.05 of coin again. I just made $0.05 of Bitcoin in profit. But they don't understand that. What do they think I do with that nickel?

Two years ago when Bitcoin was at around $10k I sold my $6k of it to buy a vehicle for my work. Had I waited an other 6 months, that $6k of Bitcoin would have turned into $36k.
But I don't regret it at all. I needed a truck for work. There was no way around that. I couldn't have taken it somewhere else because all my money was in BTC.

 

You haven't made the math on this.
Right now the Bitcoin blockchain can only process 7 or 8 transactions per second at the very most. In reality, it's closer to a maximum of 5 or 6.
That's not enough to serve a small city of less than 1 million people, much less a large city like LA or Paris. And don't even mention a whole country or the world.
Bitcoin needs to scale, by an order of magnitudes, even with LN in tow.

I do think in the next 10 years an other fork will need to happen to increase block size. There is no way around that. 1mb doesn't mean today what it meant 13 years ago.

---

This reminds me of some guy on Quora who postulates as some sort of crypto expert. Everything he posts is about crypto and he is doling out "crypto investment advises" by the truckload.

He said 2 years ago when BTC was below $10k that the network can't handle the load and at it reaches $40k it will likely collapse due to ridiculously high miner fees.

Small minds can't see big things.

To be fair here, very few people in El Salvador uses Bitcoin. It's used in touristic places, but not really at all anywhere else.
I think it will be gradual. But I'm cool with that.

The world is not ready for Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is not ready for the world either.

In that case, we agree.
To me it doesn't matter if you hodl, day trade, gamble, finance terror, buy dope, whatever.....
All that matters is that you use it. And in time as more people use it, it will become easier to see it as a means of exchange.
It's already used as a means of exchange far more than it ever was in the past. And that use cade keeps growing.
My VPN is with ProtonMail which accepts BTC psyments.

.

You must be young, as in below 40 years old.
I'm 54 y/o and when I was a kid there were no bank cards, no PayPay, no banking machines, and credit cards were for the rich. I would say that 90% of all transactions were done with cash, 5% were done with cheques, and less than 5% with credit cards.
Now, with the 90% done with cash, there was no such this as "consumer protection". Once you paid for your coffee, the deal was done, you couldn't reverse your transaction.

And at the time, there was very little fraud. Most of the fraud was done with cheques and counterfeit fiat.

Today credit card fraud, bank fraud, and banking card fraud are big business. Nobody robs a bank at gunpoint anymore, they rob the bank at mouse cursor point now. And it's a far bigger problem than most people imagine.

The problem is that you no longer walk around with a few $20 bills in your wallet. Now you walk around with the keys to your entire bank account on your phone or plastic card. That has caused a great deal of fraud.

People just have to relearn how money is supposed to work, like it did 40 years ago.

Money is supposed to be a store of value. It's not supposed to be a store of value you can manipulate or take back any time you want.

You just have to learn to be responsible with your money. You have no idea the cost of accepting payments that can be reversed for businesses.
Most businesses prefer cash over digital payments because the digital payments always comes with strings attached and fees. That gets baked into the price of everything you buy.

And you haven't looked very well into LN. It is far more private than any credit card payment you could ever think of.

I disagree. Sound money is a lot more than something you use to buy and sell stuff.

Just because you are not buying coffee with your coin doesn't mean it's not money. Have you ever heard to expression: "Sound money chases out bad money."?
Basically, all of us here understand that gold, silver, Bitcoin, and even yack poop are all better money than fiat currency. Yet if I have $20 of coin, $20 of gold, $20 of yack poop, and $20 of fiat, you can bet your keys I will be spending the worthless fiat first and hodl my gold, coin, and yack poop.

People tend to keep what is valuable to them and spend away what they consider less valuable. So bitcoin will at some point be used to buy coffee. We just gave to wait until your useless fiat becomes so worthless that you still will want to get rod of it, but nobody will want it.
And that is what money is.

Well, I do have to keep some of my coin on an exchange (Kraken) due to my little business model. But other than the coin I move around on a day to day basis, I store my coin on an offline wallet.
I just have and old smartphone with a wallet installed on it with the battery removed. And I only ever go online with it via a secure and encrypted VPN (ProtonVPN).