lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.

I would guess the price for payment processing drops tremendously when you don't need to handle fraud or chargebacks at all. It's for sure worse for consumers but I do think it has its place (for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors).

Monero is even cheaper and more useful as cadh because it's private. Anyone can see Bitcoin history and where the user got their coins.

Stablecoins can be censored. You deposited into Huobi 5 years ago? Banned. Now we keep your stablecoins, thanks for playing.

You can't censor Bitcoin.

Stablecoins frequently get frozen by Tether and Circle for arbitrary reasons, as if an AI system is flagging

> for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors

This has the default inverted.

The best place for the traditional payments system is when you're making a large purchase from a questionable seller, and then you're willing to pay extra for the assurance that you can reverse the transaction.

If you're making a small purchase or buying from someone you regularly do business with, why would you want the cost of other customers' chargeback fraud or use of stolen cards to be added to the price you pay?

Lightning payments are not stored onchain and have already been proved more private than monero payments

And that isn't even the original meaning either! "open source" in reference to software was itself a term stolen from the intelligence community.

"open" is simply a vague word that you are assigning more meaning to than it actually means.

It sounds like the fee is about $1.00: the delta between $100 and $99.

The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.

Yes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.

You mean payment processing? BTCPay Server is the defacto standard I would argue.

Have used it for accepting LN transactions for years.

OpenAI rings a bell

Obligatory "Stallman was right" here.

Seriously, though. Without legal teeth and against marketing, "Open" never much stood a chance.

"Open as in wallet"

> or cash come to mind

Did you mean Bitcoin Cash?

Open for scammers, rug pulls, and money laundering

Just like how OpenAI is open source.

I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:

- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops

- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard

- People from countries with active sanctions against.

$100 is the transaction value,it is not the cost of the transaction fees.

The fee is $1. They charge a 1% fee for instant payouts.

??

The merchant requests 100 USD. The user pays X BTC equivalent to 100 USD. The merchant receives 99 USD aka the fee is 1 USD

Someone who doesn't have good fiat rails like third-world countries. Or people who just don't want to be part of the fiat system. Or both.

You don't. They are accepting $100 worth of BTC, converting it to dollars and giving you the dollars. They are basically operating like a credit card processor with a 1% fee, allowing you to accept bitcoin but operate in dollars.

It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.

The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.

Avoid trademarking fees! No need to spend money on trademarking what can't be trademarked ;)

They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle. It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.

People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.

As a Chinese person I can confirm. Monero is the way.

>You can't censor Bitcoin.

Your payment processor could be legally restricted from paying you your bitcoin.

DAI exists and is not able to be frozen, but if the merchant's AI system flags a bitcoin transaction do you think you'll be able to cash that out? Just because they can't block it at the protocol level that doesn't mean they'll sign the transaction to send it to you.

Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments. I still think Bitcoin is better than fiat because at least it doesn't require an ID to make a wallet and it's self custody.

Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.

This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.

Open as in "The door is open come in and give us your money"

> with active sanctions against.

Wouldn't that be breaking the law selling to them?

Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.

So, OpenAI is certainly never trademarked? /s

CIA uses Bitcoin for intelligence gathering: https://cryptobriefing.com/cia-bitcoin-intelligence-gatherin...

Really? Did we IT people decide giving up privacy for security is a good idea?

Also BCH + CashFusion for extra privacy

TIL DAI cannot be frozen. Perhaps the first stablecoins I might be a little interested in.

The merchant should send the funds (sweep the UTXO) back to you if the funds are flagged. So you should not be out of pocket.

That's an excellent reason to get rid of them and just make P2P cash payments

Lightning ain't slow though.

> Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments

Indeed, but fortunately, BTC was forked at the right time

afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?

This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…

they just lost a case in Europe about being trademarked

Ironically, OpenAI would be trademarkable because they're not open.

> OPEN describes a feature of the services provided by applicant, in that applicant provides a "public node" that is accessible to anyone and allows users to interact with the blockchain network. See attached from opennode.com. Thus, "OPEN" is descriptive of the applicant's services, in that it conveys the open and public nature of the node that the applicant provides.

https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97399846&docI...

It's hardly just them. This tech has been commercialized for over a decade.

https://www.chainalysis.com/blockchain-intelligence/

They also do work to deanonymize other blockchains, including monero.

The main grifters care for neither.

Even if you're willing to operate fully in the "tradfi" system, your counterparty might not be, and you still want their business.

> (potentially) lower transaction fees

<transactionFeeDiscussion>

Citation needed. I'm looking at the transaction fees for lightning network and they are in the range of FedNow or RTP.

For Bitcoin it's not even close.

</transactionFeeDiscussion>

There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response

1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)

2) Irreversibility.

3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.

4) Lowered friction for international transaction

5) One or both sides can be unbanked.

Worst for whom?

Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.

I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively. The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin. You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.

That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...

Only if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card.

Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.

Until customers don't want to but because they are afraid they have no way to get their money back if anything goes wrong.

(Chargeback exists for a reason, and the reason isn't to piss off businesses).

Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.

MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.

It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.

This! And this is why the “crypto” world is full of scams and heists, in a way that anyone with a brain could have foreseen from the start.

Wire transfer is better?

It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it. Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.

Way to not read the comment. Or at least understand it. Nobody uses wire transfer for "everyday shopping".

Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.

Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.

Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)

It comes down to how much you trust the government, central banks, and the institutions of power, especially post Epstein and COVID.

Not all that different from losing your physical wallet with your ID and debit card or giving your bank info to a Nigerian Prince.

Pick your poison, do you trust corrupt institutions or yourself more.

Dude.

You lose your wallet, you make a few phone calls or walk into a bank and get a new card. You lose very little more than some time. Losing your crypto key means you lose your crypto.

Those are not at all the same thing.