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Our church pays a lot of fees for financial services. People who donate by credit card are charged a 30 cent + 2.9% processing fee. Same for when we sell tickets to events. In addition, in order to handle reimbursements to volunteers purchasing things on behalf of the church, we use a financial platform that charges $1 per reimbursement transaction.
We willingly pay all these things because the digitization of payments simplifies our financial management enormously. But if we could have natively digital payments at lower fees, that would save us a lot of money. Lightning network would enable that. But because Bitcoin is so niche, it's obviously not a workable solution right now.
But I'm just saying... I do think there is a real use case for Bitcoin and LN... it's just got the whole chicken and egg adoption problem to wrestle with first.
Appreciate real world story like this!
The old finance system has crazy fees feeding all these middleman. To pay with a credit card, you pay the payment processor, the bank, the card issuer, and many others. Each provides some piece of the puzzle and in reality a system that provides that level of service rebuilt on Bitcoin won’t be that much cheaper. For instance, look at LN liquidity. Nobody is gonna provide that for free.
I agree that bitcoin payment services will need fees too, and the more congested the networks are the higher the fees will have to be.
I do think that the openness of the bitcoin and lightning networks will make the landscape more competitive than traditional banking, which should lead to lower fees in the equilibrium.
Also it doesn't help that most bitcoiners' idea of replacing fiat involves competing with it directly on things like purchasing coffee or normal payments that most people are content to do with fiat. Even for saving most banked people would prefer stocks, bonds and real estate.
Bitcoin just needs to do what fiat does but better is imo a losing a strategy. Competition is for losers. If we want people to use bitcoin, bitcoin needs to do more things that fiat can't.
Agree. What are some examples?
Trustless, incentive aligned financial collaboration which may require protocol upgrades onchain (or perhaps are just underexplored) and do require protocol upgrades on lightning.
imo Trustless, incentive aligned financial collaboration is what bitcoin IS and is also what it provides (beyond being a store of value).
BTC is more than just being censorship resistance, it is hard money and as a result protects from currency devaluation and adopting it is how we can do our part to eliminate fiat which is the root cause or amplifer of all or most problems in the world.
It is about freedom of not having the power of printing currency out of thin air and robbing savers of their time and energy, it is about freedom of privacy also and protection from surviellance. And yes, freedom from theft (taxation) if both sides of a transaction accept use of it.
Freedom is about more than just censorship resistance. Ability to also OWN something that government cannot steal from you via a court order or confiscation.
The regular person doesnt care about 'hard money,' they just want some money in their pocket to buy something with.
And the extra money? (If they have any) it goes right into the stock market which as of late continues to 'go up' with huge IPOs.
Regular people put their money into stocks, essentially dumping dollars for shares, and the shares continue to go up, so why would they want to do anything else? I'm talking about regular people.
... that can only be done with bitcoin - specifically because it can't discriminate and is censorship resistant. I don't see any reason why most folks, outside of us ideologues, would spend with bitcoin otherwise. If people are happy using fiat/stablecoins for something trying to shoehorn bitcoin in seems like a fool's errand - because censorship resistance clearly doesn't matter in such cases; trusted assets over trustless yet cumbersome rails - why?
AML/MTL/taxes don't help either when folks struggle to take self-custody.
We need grey markets and services that 10x when borderless vs bordered.