Someone in a crypto group I'm part of sent this article yesterday. I stopped reading after this paragraph:
Lightning works like opening a tab at a bar: you and the bar settle later. It is faster and cheaper for small payments, but it relies on middlemen (called hubs) who hold your money in channels and can see what you are doing. It is not the same as handing someone cash. It adds points where someone else can interfere or shut things down.
When I told him I stopped reading after this uninformed paragraph on the LN, they asked me, what is LN? Yet, he based his current negative sentiment on Bitcoin on this article.
This resonates with the article @Darthcoin just posted (#1452620). This is what we are up against. Willful and/or accidental misinformation campaigns.
The LN works. People are working on making it better, but it works.
Most people don't understand how any payment rails work.
Do you think understanding the inner workings of Visa should be a prerequisite to using a Visa card?
We need to stop focusing on winning people over through narratives about Bitcoin and Lightning and start SHOWING the world that "it works" by USING it. Unfortunately, even so-called "Bitcoin companies" are still using fiat primarily. They aren't "opting out", they're pretending to.
When companies refuse to accept fiat payments, opting for Bitcoin only, the people will quickly learn how to use LN without having to understand anything about it.
What's the point in teaching people about systems that no one is using? If SoV and NGU is what 99% of you are here for, then what problem is LN even solving?
The normies don't need to learn about it. They need someone to lead by example, which is certainly not coming from the Bitcoin community, so I'm not sure where it's going to start from.
This is what I've been saying for years now. Not only do people not know how payment rails work. They DON'T KNOW HOW MONEY WORKS. Let alone the FED, fiat, and gold. At this point... I think most people that DO understand these things have had their chance to learn about bitcoin and either have no interest or disagree on some sort of ideological level.
I'm an engineer and I talk about bitcoin to anyone that will listen. Almost every time I get push back on anything about bitcoin the person very quickly admits they don't understand it and that they have never heard what I'm saying.
So yeah.
None of this is bitcoin's failure. Bitcoin is fine. But, those of us that care about it need to use it, need to understand, and need to keep the tools going. Marketing and teaching aren't really gonna work IMO. When people need it... they will learn. They will have to learn or starve. That sounds dark because it is. People are lazy and dumb. They will willfully ignore life saving information if they don't see that they actually need it.
Most people do not understand the problems that bitcoin solves and they will not until they are hit in the face.
Yup. This is why "spending the weak money first" is a losing narrative.
Store of Value narratives will only get us so far. They won't save the world from fiat, and they won't bring Bitcoin to the heights Jeff Booth and Saylor talk about.
The only way to get to the next stage of adoption is to move on from the SoV, NGU phase and into the phase where we aggressively attack the fiat system.
@fiatbad does not use LN when making payments on SNs- @fiatbad only has a receiving wallet attached.
Oh shit, my receiving wallet hasn't worked for a while either. Thanks for reminding me, I need to remove that. I removed Alby Hub from my node because I was fed up with all the problems it was causing.
I tried insanely hard to hook everything up. I even made multiple posts on SN asking for help and clarification. I could never successfully set up the spending side.
This was soon after SN rolled out CC's and all. So, I suppose I need to try again because I'm sure things have improved since then. Sounds like a good weekend project.
maybe try shockwallet - i use the PWA via the bootstrap node - super easy to connect to SN, and can be used with Lightning.pub for sovereign control
https://github.com/shocknet/wallet2?tab=readme-ov-file#shockwallet
https://github.com/shocknet/Lightning.Pub#lightningpub
Not only does it work, but it’s also extremely private, as @supertestnet spent so much time demonstrating last year.
@supertestnet demonstrated to no-node-having monero-holding retards that they couldn't determine anything about a lightning payment.
Maybe he should have challenged someone from ACINQ/River/LN-BIG.
Fine, but that isn’t evidence that he was wrong.
Great point.
It's also not evidence that he is right.
An analogy: I can't tell you when/where someone paid with a debit card. Does that make debit cards "extremely private" (your words)?
I disagree. It's not conclusive evidence, maybe not even strong evidence, but it is evidence.
I accept the rebuke on my use of "extremely" with respect to the privacy level. The only point that I wanted to make is that it's not what the author described, where every node can see exactly what everyone is doing.
Online people often use the word private when they are insinuating secret. Secret payments are a VERY high bar. There are trade-offs. I think this is why Satoshi didn't design bitcoin to be more focused on privacy.
Privacy is simply having limited exposure of something. Control if you will.
A secret is known by no one. Maybe you know it.
I don't know how many of you had parents that told you this but it apparently didn't get said enough. When you share a secret, it isn't a secret anymore.
This whole subtlety is why it is almost impossible to have a rational discussion about privacy with Monero people. I share many of their values and concerns but there are no solutions. Only trade-offs. Everything is trade-offs. I find people that can't acknowledge trade-offs insufferable.
Your "evidence" is not exclusively concordant with your conclusion.
debit cards are pretty private if you understand how they work and you don't use your actual name and info. The payment rails are pretty secure and private. They are not secret though. We often confuse the two things.
This is a retarded statement for which I will not engage with you further except to say that I think people who shift goalposts are insufferable.
The only reason people not attaching both send and receive wallets to SNs gave is for 'privacy'.
These are people who claim to be champipns of Bitcoin.
Oh the hyporisy yet @Undisciplined sides with them and continues to troll my efforts to raise the issue of virtue signalling BTC Maxi hypocrites who refuse to actually maximise and show their use of LN here on SNs.
saw this, opened a tab but never read.
Your post doesn't exactly make me want to try again.
people using lightning properly since 2017 are calmly smoking a cigar, cuz all the drama is solvable, even if it seems like total chaos at first glance;
this statement applies to everything; one who knows bitcoin well, also knows himself, and the wisdom of balance is transferrable across disciplines;
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Lightning can offer a magnificent level of privacy. This doesn't seem to be common knowledge within the Bitcoin ecosystem right now and frankly I think we might be better off letting people discover this organically than publicizing it, lest we attract unwanted attention.
Tabs at a bar is actually a good description of Lightning. Every channel is a tab two peers are keeping with each other.
The middlemen holding your money part is wrong though. That's only an accurate description if you're using a custodial lightning wallet.
My experience with non bitcoiners is that they mostly do not even know such a thing as lightning exists.
I wonder where the author of this article got such a mixed up impression...the title is a bit of a tell: if you go to his X profile you will see that he is a bit of a Roger Ver fan. Also, he likes a shitcoin called Zano, which has forever been yelling about how it should be the coin for all micropayments.
I've never yet heard a normie talk about lightning, so my default is to think that any critique either comes from a bitcoiner or a shitcoiner, and you can usually tell the difference by whether they know what they are talking about.
And yet you constantly attack me for pointing out the hypocrisy of those here on SNs who refuse to attach both send and receive wallets and or deliberately conceal their wallet status.
If people who claim to be bitcoiners cannot be fucked using BTC/LN where ever possible then what hope is there?
You seem to think they have some grounds to not use / or conceal wallets based on the pretext of privacy...that is clearly a bullshit reason used to obfuscate their hypocrisy.
From the title I was hoping it was about ETFs. I feel like fiat games have switched focus from gold to Bitcoin suppression. That's something I'd love to find a deep dive on.
Criticizing Lightning without understanding channels is a pretty common pattern.