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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26248 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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Is there a crypto coin that is actually practical for this? The first one everyone thinks of is bitcoin. But bitcoin is slow, it has huge transaction fees (about $25 right now), and like you said it's not that anonymous. Etherium is better (about $1 now) but that's still not great for a use case where most people just want to tip a few bucks, and fewer people have heard of it. There's probably some altcoins that work better, but I don't know if there's any others that have widespread adoption so that non-technical people have heard of it and will trust it. Plus you have to, you know, convert it back into fiat, because at the end of the day that's still how we pay for things in the real world.

I don't know any of the practical details/solutions. The companies that sell sketchy products should have been trying to figure this stuff out for the last decade. If they'd dumped a cumulative 1 billion into solving problems like these how many roadblocks would remain? That is just 1% of the industry in a single year.

They didn't do that so obviously a bunch of roadblocks and practical problems remain in place.

Bitcoin has not been slow, nor has it had high transaction fees, for quite some time now. If you want you make a payment in Bitcoin you use something called an L2, or a layer 2, (an example is called lightning).

This is fast and with negligible transaction fees. Bitcoin L1 is still used as a final settlement layer.

This is mostly transparent to the end user, btw. The interaction is “pay Alice”, and the underlying technology is as opaque to the user as TCP, or various caches and proxies are to a person posting on this forum.

Ah cool, this is the first I've heard of that. Seems like great tech, but how much adoption does it actually have?

I think PayPal (ironically) made a big deal about adopting Lightning a few years back.

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