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El Salvador Abandons Bitcoin as Legal Tender After Failed Experiment (ticotimes.net)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] workerONE 96 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (27 children)

Bitcoin isn't good for making little purchases, firstly because it takes so long to get confirmations, if each block is 10 minutes and you need like 3 blocks to consider it confirmed that's 30 minutes. But that ties into the second issue which is that you probably don't want millions of tiny transactions on the Blockchain, you want them processed off-chain and then settled in bulk (to the Blockchain) periodically as a single transaction.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (23 children)

Bitcoin is great for little transactions if you use the lightning network. Sending on the lightning network means instant payments with no confirmation required and absolutely tiny fees. And the only thing that shows up on the blockchain is the transactions to initially start using lightning network and to take your coins back off the lightning network. Transactions made over the lightning network aren't recorded anywhere other than maybe by the people transacting.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

i got back into bitcoin recently and decided to move the contents of my old wallet to a new SegWit one and look into using lightning.

To open a lightning channel i have to stake £170 up front though which is crazy, how are people in poorer countries supposed to do that?

or even here. poverty is on the rise, a lot of people are living hand to mouth and just having that kind of money lying around isnt a thing.

i like the idea of bitcoin but i worry it doesn't scale well.

Add to that that virtually nowhere accepts it. The value of bitcoin comes from its use as a currency. if it doesn't have that then it's entirely speculation.

oh well, i have £2k in there and i'm not turning it back into fiat. I'll spend it if i can or ride it all the way to 0 if that's the way it goes

edit: if BTC does hit $1m a coin as the hodlers hope then that would amount to $2000 to open a lightning channel (or more realistically $2400 as electrum wouldnt let me open a channel with the supposed minimum 0.002 BTC, i had to make it 0.0024). I hope that the minimum amount to open a channel will be updated long before that happens though, but i guess we'll see