Quote from: stompix on March 02, 2023, 07:36:49 PM

Quote from: karmamiu on March 02, 2023, 07:05:30 AM

I know some of you would say improvements of Security, Scalability, and User Experience, but aside from that, What is the most needed for BTCitcoin right now?

Mainstream as in every average Joe using it daily? It needs:
- less volatility
- way cheaper transaction fees (than now), yeah, including opening a channel in LN, 30 cents might now be much but make that 2 times a day each month and you have 10% of minimum wage on nearly two continents.
- a ton of education that the average Joe is not going to get this decade
- a ton of knowledge on how to keep your funds safe the average Joe will not get either.
- the average Joe to stop hoarding it believing it will get 100x by December and actually using it

Cards are considered mainstream but from what you can see in Nigeria happening now even these have problems getting used by the majority of the population, Bitcoin is one step further away as you need more than just swiping a card at an PoS.

But the biggest problem which has obviously no solution other than entrusting your funds to a 3rd party is that a lot of people really don't like to be in charge of their funds and love to have a guy they can call when a problem arises. Despite how much we love self-custody here and considered it one of the key points in the strength of BTC one also must admit not everybody sees it this way. And simply there will be always some that they will not touch it because of that.

Less volatility for sure. Being needs to be much further in its adoption, which will mean it is less volatile until people feel better about using it. But also, once you've owned Bitcoin through on market cycle, and are therefore in profit, volatility doesn't matter so much for using it for spending, because you've made money. The volatility is really only a worry if you might lose money by spending. Once you're in profit it doesn't matter so much. Like someone isn't gonna say oh I'm not gonna spend bitcoin because this thing last week cost 30,000 satoshis but today it costs 28000 or 32000 satoshis. If any of those numbers are in profit for you you're not gonna really care.

I don't think you know how the LN works. You don't open a new channel every time you use it...then you'd just be doing on-chain payments. You'd like say start up a node and open up several channels once, and hopefully not have to open or close any channels for months. You're certainly not opening up a channel twice a day. Twice a month would be a lot. Once a month would be a lot. Opening/closing a channel should be a rare event and you should be doing dozens or hundreds (or more) of payments for every channel open/close. To make this happen of course you need to be both paying and receiving bitcoin on the lightning network, in which case paying on-chain fees for Lightning operations would be a very rare event indeed.

Education, yes, absolutely. It's gonna take many years for the general public to be educated on Bitcoin. Right now probably like 99% of the public actually thinks Bitcoin is a bad thing! lol. It's gonna take a lot of years to remove the misinformation and the stigma of thinking Bitcoin is a bad thing from a significant part of the public. Hopefully in the 2030s there is a decent amount of the public that are educated not only on the fact that bitcoin is good, and bitcoin mining is good, but also in how to use bitcoin. But yea, Bitcoin payments are definitely not a 2020s thing haha, except for early adopters.

Keeping funds safe goes with education yeah. For cold storage it is simple enough, but for payments its harder. Though honestly the vast majority of the public will be fine using custodial services on LN just because its gonna be wayyyyy more convenient and would be more like trusting a bank, which people are used to, but you get the benefit of bitcoin payments efficiency and of course you can always add more bitcoin to your payment LN account with your long term on-chain appreciating bitcoin. For most people to get to the point of using the LN for payments, they first need to be educated on Bitcoin and get into it as a long term store of value, then once they've been holding for a while and their Bitcoin has appreciated they'll want to use it for spending, and that's where the LN (or potentially other future L2s) comes in, but the LN usage is gonna have to be as simple as using a credit card of Apple/Google play, which means its gonna be a custodial use of LN. If its not as dead simple as using current means of payment people won't use bitcoin for payments but just as a store of value / long term savings on-chain.

The biggest problem you mention, is solved as I already stated, by using custodial services on LN. On-chain cold storage for long term savings, LN custodial wallet for payments. Bitcoin purists will groan at this but 99% of people will groan at running their own LN operation so this is the only way its gonna happen. It's still a huge improvement over the banking system because you've got savings in bitcoin and stored in a sovereign way, and you have LN with same convenience of fiat fintech apps or credit card but more efficient than those.