Mostly done with my Pitch Day slides ... back to tuning WoT ... dumped the prod db to local so I can run modifcations of the algo on real data and see how it performs.
Discovered a couple of the servers at 50%+ memory today. 75th percentile of latency has been bad at ~300ms ... rotating in servers with more memory. After Bitcoin conf it'll be a decision between adding more features and speeding everything up. We'd get a huge speed up by doing a handful of things - most notably materializing otherwise slow queries also possibly switching some of the polling to websockets.
Visited the bank yesterday for the first time in a while and I'm still in shock at how they operate...
Bitcoin on lightning is the future and that's that...
I tried once to cancel malicious payment from my account. I came into physical branch and they said the couldn't do anything and actually do not see very transaction I could see from my app.
Was literally trying to convince people to switch to a savings account with a .05% increase in APY. The catch is that they have to hold 10k in their account at all times or they get charged 35 bucks.
The ecosystem is building tools to make it easier and more profitable to earn/spend/pay with bitcoin.
The takeaway to me is that ... it's time, now. Lightning has eliminated the "zeroconf" risk to a retailer thinking about accepting bitcoin. For customers, fees near-zero to send with lightning now, they aren't as hesitant to pay with bitcoin.
What was interesting to me was that in El Salvador, multinational retailers like McDonalds and Pizza Hut had like three months advance notice, and they had their systems online where Bitcoin was a support payment method on launch day.
Do you think McDonalds maybe has been preparing, and El Salvador just happened to be the first country they could "switch it on"? So I suspect it isn't they are just waiting on demand, ... they are probably being pressured to not accept bitcoin ..., by their banks, by VISA and Mastercard, by the regulators, etc.
So ultimately, it's going to (continue) being small victories .. a corner market here, a bar and restaurant there, and so on.
The other thing is the taxation. I do NOT want to have to account for capital gains on every payment to a retailer that I make using bitcoin. I'm fine with a once-a-month conversion to fiat, for example, and then spending in fiat. That's why Tether (or other dollar-equivalent stablecoin) should not be dismissed. When I pay with Tether on Lightning (or whatever method works best) the merchant can do what they want with it, ...including converting it instantly to bitcoin, holding it for vendor payments and salaries, sweeping those dollars to their bank, whatever, I don't care. But other than that last scenario (sweeping to a bank), the banks are avoided on both ends. And that's ultimately what I want to see -- where the money remains under control of those who hold the keys, not under the control of the banks (and less directly, by the government).