20 sats \ 7 replies \ @AG OP 26 May \ parent \ on: 🏷️ Hey it’s Spending Sunday! What Recent Bitcoin Purchases Have You Made? AGORA
that's cool! Do you always go in the same spot? grocery or restaurant? I'm curious! tell us more
My pleasure :)
For now, I always go to the same restaurant for it's the cheapest and good enough in quality and quantity. So I could devote the time to introduce the guy to bitcoin and accept it directly, leveraging the confidence of being an everyday customer.
Apart from that, here we have many apps (the most prominent being Belo and Lemon) that allow you to save in bitcoin and spend in fiat (they make the conversion in the background), either via transference or debit card payment. So I actually use my bitcoin to spend for everything else, tough indirectly. It's instant and seamless, so it feels like living in full adoption already.
Happy to answer anything about this :)
reply
Thanks for all these details, I never personally used none of those apps, just because are both custodial services, however I recognize they provide great value onboarding new people and businesses. Apart switching to fiat and using their card, do you know if they are compatible in case of lightning payments? for example: if I use Belo and the merchant has Lemon, would I be able to pay via lightning? or are both close networks?
reply
Yes! Exactly! The magic of those apps is that, in exchange of being custodial, they make everything interoperable, like (Fiat <-> Bitcoin) <-> (Bitcoin <-> Bitcoin). This is optimal to introduce people for they can seamlessly start migrating from fiat to bitcoin, and then they do operate as bitcoin wallets, so they can send and receive payments by LN and Segwit transfers between the different apps and other pure LN wallets (like Muun). I save in Muun and send to Belo periodically for daily spending. To this restaurant I transfer the bitcoin from Belo to Belo, just to make it as easy and smooth as possible for the guy, for anything beyond that makes bitcoin transfers look like having to summon egyptian hacker gods by deciphering hieroglyph codes from the unfathomable depths of the darkweb for each transfer, literally scaring people.
reply
reply
I understand the tradeoffs Muun does, but even still I consider it optimal and safe enough as a first means to transition to self-curstody, due to how simple their interface is and the smooth level of interoperability it allows within that level of simplicity. Showing Zeus to a beginner, for example, is a NO-GO.
reply
reply
I used Muun all along, prior, during and after the high fee event, and personally didn't experienced much of an issue, mostly due to the fact that I only make relatively large transfers from Muun to Belo periodically, and use Belo for daily micro-transactions. A BIG plus in the case of Belo is that it always subsidizes transfer fees, so I didn't lost anything all along (up to today). Muun fees have decreased substantially yet have not come back to what they used to be, but are still low enough for relatively large transfers (100 USD here is a "large transfer", and fees are 1 USD for those -returned later by Belo-).
reply