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July 01, 2023, 06:38:24 AM |
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Just looked at the Bolt card website. That seems pretty nice. Ideally that is the sort of thing everyone will be using in the future. Basically just a debit card but uses LN.
And for sure when block starts allowing LN payments, combine that with stuff like the Bolt card, and paying with Bitcoin will be as easy as paying through other standard means today, except with BTC and cheaper and the merchant will get the money right away. Win, win, win, win.
Though I imagine the vast majority of merchants are going to want to get fiat not Bitcoin. So they'll just have to use some automated thing, no doubt built into the PoS system, that exchanges the bitcoin for fiat.
OP, you said this:
"As far as I understand, Lighting Network only helps you if you and 2nd person send coins often between each-other, otherwise, if it's only for one-time payment, you can't really save on fees because you have to close channel and that's the moment when you are pushed to pay fees."
Just wanted to clarify that LN doesn't only help if you and a 2nd person want to make transactions between each other. LN is a network. It's not just for paying a single person, you can pay anyone on the network. So no, it doesn't only help if you want to transact often with one other person, it helps if you want to transact with anyone. The idea is you onboard once to LN (pay the onchain fee) and then you transact many times (dozens, hundreds, thousands...) of times over the LN with anyone else on the network, not just with one person. What you are describing would be a private channel, which you can do as well, but that would be a LN channel you open up with someone else in which you aren't connected to the rest of the network and you only plan on transacting with that one person as many times as you want. That would be a niche use case for LN.
As for the discussion between Wind_fury and others, about not minding 10+ minute transactions times...buying things online you could do on-chain, cuz if something has to be processed and shipped out over the next day or two, it doesn't matter if it takes an hour to confirm the transaction. But any normal purchases done in person on-chain wait times would be completely infeasible. LN is needed for those. And also you're gonna want to use LN for online payments as well just because its cheaper. Why pay a $1 or $5 or whatever fee when you can pay a 1 cent fee.
With point of sale systems set up to use LN and payment options like that Bolt card paying with bitcoin is as easy UX as using google/apple pay or credit/debit card. Whether or not LN is the most used L2, only time will tell. Right now it is the only major L2 as far as I know. It certainly has tradeoffs (mostly the fact that your ingoing and outgoing transactions need to be roughly equal, but if people are getting paid in Bitcoin one day that pretty much works itself out ie you open up a LN node with a couple months worth of expenses or whatever, you spend money and satohis are sent to the outgoing side, and then you get a paycheck over the LN and you get satoshis sent back to the ingoing side. balance). LN tradeoffs are based on the limitations of its design with regard to how bitcoin works. It is possible we'll see future L2 concepts with fewer tradeoffs, though I haven't really heard of any. LN I think is good enough to work for everyone, with some people using their own nodes while others (probably most people) use hosted LN wallets. But it would be cool to see if people can try to develop alternate L2 ideas and see how they might compare to LN.
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