Reflections from a journalist of a Year of Toying With Bitcoin

[gentlemand]

If anyone came up to me and told me they were interested in BTC and the very first thing they were going to do is set up their own lightning node I'd assume they were fucking nuts.

It's not something that's crossed my mind yet and it won't for a long time, if ever. I haven't seen anything yet to convince me. And no one is billing it as anything other than an outlier with a potential future at present.

Using bog standard tools and the most high profile and safe services is no harder than online banking. The security aspect certainly isn't but there's enough dayglo advice about that too.

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[Arkann]

Not bad. I read the article made by Leigh Cuen and I understand where she is getting it from and why she feels that way. If we are to talk about how people could send money half-way across the world with fewer fees, it's BTC ftw. In the case where it's in real-life situations when you need to use BTC, I understand it.

I like the way she approached the part where it's going to be some issues with regards to personal information risks. It's the connection between the aliases that you have online and the possibility of having it be connected if that's the concern you could have. It would be a problem, and it's still not perfect.

This article helps me realize that there is still room for improvement not just for Bitcoin but how we could use it IRL.

In fact, you said everything correctly.  But on the way to such a reality is the most important problem, which is that the popularity of cryptocurrencies is very low today.  At the same time, the poor condition of the cryptocurrency market and the fall in prices in 2018 affected the popularity.  If as many people as possible are interested in cryptocurrencies, then not only bitcoin will be really used in everyday life of a person, but also other cryptocurrencies.

[Hydrogen]

I read OP's article & got the impression a banker paid her $$ to write anti crypto propaganda. Its paid marketing, like a commercial. There's no real need to implement a lightning node to sell poetry books over the internet. Reliability is a higher priority than transaction speed for that role. Misrepresenting failures of setting up a lightning node, as failures of bitcoin itself, are misleading and dishonest.

Whatever conflicts she experienced backpacking in india due to cashless society being endorsed, coupled with the state's determination to wage a war on cash: can be attributed to a cashless society paradigm.

The author is more intelligent and clever than most. I think her anti crypto bias is apparent however.

[alexsandria]

Altcoins are the research and development area of the market. There is also another situation. Altcoins to one side. Bitcoin itself is in the experimental stage. Everything's like a test board. We're in a market of $ 250 billion. This amount is not very important for world markets. It's been 10 years since the launch of bitcoin. I think Bitcoin did it.

Yep, bitcoin did at some point. It may look running smoothly however, there are some conflicts/complexity that needs to be addressed, thus, must be let's say... improve? Besides, isn't it that bitcoin was truly designed for such purpose? And we must at least be satisfied to what it can be offer. Technologies, innovations would end at some point in time. Furthermore, there will be some newly revolutionary innovations to exist.

[Silberman]

https://www.coindesk.com/hanukkah-reflections-on-my-year-of-toying-with-bitcoin

I spent 2019 trying a variety of products and services to test how easy it is to actually use cryptocurrency. I ran a Casa bitcoin-lightning node, used decentralized exchanges (DEXs), moved bitcoin from mobile apps to a hardware wallet (a Ledger) then transacted straight from the hardware wallet.

Beyond just running the node, I used the Casa device to send invoices for a small product (a poetry book) to learn more about the challenges independent merchants might face. Lastly, I set up a BTCPay store, which is the stage of this experiment I’ll end the year on.

And after a year of educational tinkering what is my takeaway?

It’s this: There’s no way this technology is ready for prime time.

It's worth reading the entire article because they go into a lot of detail of exactly what goes wrong.

IMO there is too much cheerleading in the bitcoin space, and not enough attention to sorting out the issues needed to make bitcoin succeed.

There is a lot of hype in the space but that is not because of what bitcoin can do today but about what we will be able to do in the future with it, using bitcoin right now is not really practical since there are only a couple of millions of users all around the world and if you live in an area with a low concentration of bitcoin users then there is almost nothing you can do with it, but it does not matter, the technology is still young and will solve many of those issues and when it does we will forget about all the issues we currently have.

[target]

She had written countless articles in coindesk some are related to altcoins yet her conclusion was its not ready for mainstream.
I can agree though but this technology is only 10 years old, you can't imagine how much it had branched out in terms of innovation particularly to altcoins and some wallets for the convenience. She could just use the electrum wallet and if she wants to get paid then there is QR code available. She doesn't have to experiment with LN.