I prefer to pay in cash when I can do so. I think payment by cash and by barter will be better, in situations where that works.
However, for computer payment, I had another idea is to make a "computer payment file" that contains the order division and payment division, and with encryption and signature, and send that to them. You will first receive the file telling what payments are acceptable and can use that to make the file to send to them. Stallman mentioned the possibility of payment by cash by pay phones (or with a prepaid phone card), so that might be one way to do it, too; after you figure out the price, you can receive the payment code and include that in the payment file. Other methods of payment would be possible (e.g. store credit), so the payment file can work independently of what kind of payment.
most commerce sites allow you to buy a product and ship it to a different address than the billing. it's an ok way to buy stuff if they agree to barter.
One problem with bitcoin is requiring too much energy use, but anyways it is independent from the "computer payment file" which can be used with multiple methods of payment. (Computer payment file is also intended to solve some other problems involved with computer payment, including various types of cheating that the merchant might do.)
It's an unfortunate mathematical requirement to create trust in a hostile/trustless reality. Just like how it's inefficient but necessary to spend money on defense in a world with potentially hostile foreign powers, we need to spend energy to ensure no parties can compromise the blockchain. There's no way around it (no, PoS is flawed).
It is easy to save energy when you are OK with a lower level of decentralization. I could probably run a payment processor on my computer alone that handles 100k transactions per second.
I happen to know a guy who has invested a lot in solar parks. He’s deeply unhappy about that investment because the electricity prices are often zero or negative when the sun is up and he’s underwater on that investment.
I also know a guy who recently installed a dummy load in a thermal power plant which they switch on when they can’t give the power to the network due to overcapacity, as they can’t just switch off the plant willy nilly.
The point is, in a grid with lots of renewables in it not only there’s a lot of stray energy that can be captured, but a flexible load that can be switched on/off in milliseconds is actually hugely valuable if we’re to have stable grids.
On top of that, how many people die each year due to the American War Machine that can only exist due to the US Dollar and the Fed's ability to print money and pass off the debt to the future generations?
Lightning channels are centralized entities with their own fee structures
They can be opened peer to peer, or hop between other channels, similar to dns routing
They are prefunded with a certain quantity of bitcoin that dictates the size of bitcoin that can move in that route at once - although smaller denominations can go through in rapid succession this just means more fees levied
All of this incentivizes a larger channel to be created by a well funded party, which can be coaxed into censoring transactions because they are a payment processor or institutional service. Likely an incumbent such as Visa joining the lightning network as a victim of LN’s own success.
There are some mitigations built in and actively developed. We are 8 years deep into Lightning.
The difference is that becoming a larger channel is not gatekept by regulation, and not at all necessary. Creating small channels between two parties, e.g. for subscriptions, is viable. Though not as convenient, it is at least more convenient than getting blacklisted by Visa.
Right, yeah, but isn’t the network large enough by now where a transaction would be routed around the censoring nodes regardless? Much like how there are censoring miners on the mainnet, but the censored transactions still go through due to not everyone doing the censoring?
Yes, they can route around. I think the number of people needing to open channels to deal with this, undermines the utility and scaling point of the Lightning network if it ever takes off. L1 will be so bogged down with channels opening and closing.
Sure, but it also brings a whole lot of other problems along with it. Personally, cryptocurrencies are a nonstarter for me because of them, but if it's an acceptable solution for others, then more power to them.
"The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong." - Scott Alexander [0]
I don't have an answer on how to address that, though. You need to have a very strong stance early on to prevent witchery so your communtiy adjusts accordingly. But decentralization, by its nature, has no way to moderate behavior outside of the core design of the tech.
Banking is sadly one of those few aspects where you need some centralization, in my eyes. That's why finance is regulated the hardest in any given society. You need trust above all else to keep and use a digital currency.
The trade-off is different, sure. Much like the trade-offs between using a gasoline vs an electric car are different. But it doesn’t mean it’s not a solution to sidestep private corporations needing to serve as global content gatekeepers.
For a class of non technical people having the bank or credit card company in this case help them reverse charges when they’ve been scammed, and they are at risk of being scammed for a significant chunk of their resources.
I get why crypto enthusiasts like the irreversibility but the inability to understand why someone would want a protected system with an arbiter over it feels like the same energy I get from engineers who can’t fathom why anyone would choose the walled garden that comes with Apple products despite ample evidence for their popularity with the average joe
You could reimplement the traditional censorable banking system on top of bitcoin, where users never touch the asset, and instead interact with tokens/promises of money and transactions were reversible. Reversibility is not an inherent property of the medium of value it’s the property of the trustful model we’ve layered on top.
The difference is that normal people have access to uncensorable digital payment rails if they are motivated and accept the associated risks (the same they accept when performing cash transactions)
This is also true for debit/cash, basically all payment methods throughout history except for credit cards.
This is also not entirely true, to a minor extent law enforcement and the legal system can provide redress for scams. It helps to only do business with registered entities so you can at least take them to court/small claims.
> This is also true for debit/cash, basically all payment methods throughout history except for credit cards.
Of course it is, since credit cards are a recent innovation if you are analyzing across historical time frames.
And even so, do you see most people preferring to pay in cash nowadays? Or debit card even? I’m not sure on debit vs cc usage rates but I’d for sure be surprised if cash was in use at a higher rate than cc
credit cards make it relatively easy to get a chargeback, few questions asked. They will do the trouble of blacklisting the merchant instead of battling with the consumer. That's very much not the case with crypto.
However, for computer payment, I had another idea is to make a "computer payment file" that contains the order division and payment division, and with encryption and signature, and send that to them. You will first receive the file telling what payments are acceptable and can use that to make the file to send to them. Stallman mentioned the possibility of payment by cash by pay phones (or with a prepaid phone card), so that might be one way to do it, too; after you figure out the price, you can receive the payment code and include that in the payment file. Other methods of payment would be possible (e.g. store credit), so the payment file can work independently of what kind of payment.