Pretty awesome. This is by far the fastest way I've found to start selling something for sats on lightning.
Made a picture that people liked, made a product page for it in less than a minute. Great job!
Here's maybe a controversial take: accepting bitcoin is good and asking merchants is fine, but it's the off ramps into fiat that really matter for now.
I think people pick up new technologies when they realize they are useful to them, when they allow them do something new or something old easier, faster, better.
Bitcoin does a lot of things better and faster than fiat (remittances, quick final settlement online...) and some things that fiat has never done (micro payments, true ownership, finite supply...).
And I'm sure that people will flock to these use cases, probably before they start doing the transactions that fiat already does conveniently (buying stuff at stores, paying your run of the mill bills).
But when the unwashed masses want to take advantage of money that cheaply crosses borders or let's them start collecting micro payments instead of those empty little hearts called likes, their eye is still on converting those sats into money they can use - and that usually means an off ramp.
Bitcoin is a no brained for remittances...if you could be sure your family could convert it cheaply to local money wherever they lived.
Everyone would accept bitcoin tips on social media if it converted to a fiat balance that was a nice little passive income stream.
What hinders the really obvious use cases for bitcoin, where people would flock to adoption, is the friction of jumping back into fiat.
I have a general distaste for fiat balances, but the more I talk to normies about all the problems bitcoin solves, the more I run up against the reality that at the moment, bitcoin doesn't solve the problem for people if they can't easily turn it into fiat.
As much as I want to see people holding and accepting bitcoin, I want to live in a world where people are using it to solve their problems.
So, I think in the near future, one of the most important factors impacting bitcoin adoption is low-friction on and off ramps.
100% agree. First defense is don't make it obvious that you have bitcoin.
We had twenty-two kids hunting for eggs today (we got lots of cousins).
I sold Christmas cards for sats at bitcoin meetups. Great experience. Mostly used lightning, but also sometimes onchain.
It sounds a little like you expect a channel to exist between your lightning node and your wallet. This doesn't happen.
Channels can only be between nodes and wallets are not nodes. As with on chain bitcoin, wallets cannot interact with the network (send, look at balances) without a node.
If you have paired your wallet with a node, it means you are using your wallet to sign transactions that are being sent or received using the liquidity in the channels your node has set up.
If your node has not set up any channels with other nodes, you can't send or receive.
Where is the bitcoin? With lightning, the answer is always in a channel--one of your channels if using your own lightning node or one of your custodian's if you are using someone else's.
I really like how you frame this (we are already hyperbitcoinized). The idea that hyperbitcoinization is the world where you have the option to use bitcoin and that is enough is very compelling to me.
One pushback though to your thought experiment is this: if we were suddenly living beneath the iron heel of Tonald Drump or Sosef Jtalin, people will only trade for what they believe has value, (at least at first) I don't think there are enough people in the world who think bitcoin has value to make an economy work.
Bitcoin can resist a dictator, but it can't resist an uninterested market. If we can't find a person willing to trade for it, it won't help us achieve the freedom we all are hoping for--even if nobody can stop us from sending/receiving.
All the meetups in the world are still too small a number. I'm sure an authoritarian regime could help bitcoin grow--people using it because its the only money you can use to escape controls--but if this happened tomorrow, you simply couldn't acquire the vast majority of the necessities of daily life.
We may have the freedom to send and receive bitcoin however we like, but the rest of the world has the freedom to completely ignore bitcoin. Until more people make the choice to see bitcoin as valuable, I don't think our freedom to use bitcoin buys us the full promise of its a bitcoin economy.
And this maybe is what people mean when they dream of hyperbitcoinization: a world where you can spend bitcoin in a lot more places than now.
(I really do like how you frame this, though. Its snappy and compelling. And for whatever it's worth, it didnt feel to me like AI wrote it.)
Finally getting some samples posters printed for some of the pictures I make. Hoping to get a whole bunch for sale on the website soon.
Pretty cool! It looks like each topic shows me two items and I pick one (vote on it).
Curious about the win-loss thing. If your post loses, does that mean it stops showing up on the site?
I selected the stacker news topic and voted for several rounds, and then the lightning symbol vanished, but two SN posts were still showing up. Does this mean you can only vote a certain number of times for each topic (or did I just exhaust all the SN posts you had loaded up?)
I like that you're looking for ways to get nocoiners onboarded. It's interesting to think about incentives here. As a nocoiner, I can come to get some easy sats by liking posts (super easy to start, no friction). As a poster, I can link to content so that people will discover it. I could see a symbiosis for people who write guides to link to their content. I got to think more on this, but great job!
Gonna make some Schwarzenegger movie posters into Bitcoin ads...
