2719

So, an unsecured bank?

2720

Sounds like how bitcoin is bought and sold on any centralized exchange. I dare say most people who have traded bitcoin have never interacted with the bitcoin blockchain, and are completely unaware how horrible it is to actually use.

2721

What, in order to scam you?

Are they using the standard credit card infrastructure for the PoS? Please tell me they are.

2722

And unregulated! Don’t forget that. That’s a feature for these people, right up until they’ve lost their savings in a giant scam. Then they’ll suddenly pivot into wanting government to do something about this RIGHT NOW.

2723

Yes, I confused words there for a second. Oh, boy, it’s a good thing Smart Contracts are smart!

2724

That sounds too good to be true. (looks into it.) … Aaaaand, well, it is. Instead the Lightning Network is a kludgy system of bilateral mini-blockchains that relies on the payer paying a fee upfront to create a wallet, and then locking up Bitcoin in that wallet to fund their (for example) coffee purchases with a particular merchant.

So if you want to prepay a chunk of your coffee money with with McDonalds in Bitcoin (or technically put your McDonalds coffee money in escrow, and then take the money out in small transactions) you can, and it won’t take ages for the transaction to clear like with a regular blockchain transactions. All your transactions are recorded in the mini-blockchain. Then, when you’re all done spending your McDonalds coffee money for the month or whatever, you close out the wallet and the meta-transaction takes place on the real Bitcoin blockchain instead of on the mini bilateral blockchain. So the good news is that you are consolidating a bunch of smaller transactions into one single transaction on the big, expensive blockchain.

But you can’t go to the Starbucks next door and do the same thing without setting up a separate wallet, paying a separate fee, putting up a separate amount of Bitcoin, etc. Basically you have to have an account and an account balance with each merchant.

Too bad there’s no other, less convoluted way to buy a cup of coffee! Well, except for using filthy fiat money, and we couldn’t possibly use that.

… Addendum: I don’t understand how the mini-blockchains are hosted or paid for with this, or how you know for sure Lightning Network transactions will be faster, but honestly I don’t care enough to find out. Also, this sounds bad:

One of the greatest problems with the Lightning Network, however, is offline transaction scams. If one participant in a payment channel chooses to close it while the other party is offline, the former can steal the funds. When the latter party finally comes online, it’s too late to do anything. The scammer can just remain offline with no way to contact them.

2725

Reading that just gave me an aneurysm, thanks.
Everything I read about Bitcoin is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read about Bitcoin, until the next thing I read about Bitcoin.

2726

So, basically, the best way to use bitcoin for real-world transactions is… to not use bitcoin.

Maybe just don’t use bitcoin?

2727

Yeah, it sounds like a bitcoin PayPal analog.

2728

I don’t get it. Won’t vendors want their USD in real-time? They don’t want to be holding a volatile asset/currency as part of their run-rate cash-flow business - that’s one of the reasons Steam et al turned off BTC payments.

Who fronts the cash to pay the vendor in real-time for these micro-transactions while BTC is locked up in these layer-2 contracts? Someone has to be holding the risk here and hedging against currency (BTC) fluctuations. Is that what Strike/Taro does? That’s what essentially makes them unregulated/unsecured finance operations, right? With the customer holding the bag when it all goes tit’s up, since none of the vendors would be ponying up collateral on the smart-contracts since they are the product/services provider and the vast majority of micro-transactions will be unidirectional.

And do Strike/Taro actuially operate an off-chain chain? Or are all these smart-contracts and microtransactions just occurring in web 2.0 database constructs?

It’s all so fucking dumb.

2729

There doesn’t seem to be any formal information available, so who knows, but I given what Strike does I imagine they’re internalising it, so you wouldn’t have individual users setting up a Lightning channel with McDonalds, all Strike users in a given time frame would go through the same Strike channel. I believe, though I may be wrong, that all Strike users’ bitcoins are effectively pooled anyway.

2730
2731

54-year-old heavily invested in Bitcoin calls our 80-something year old as “geriatric” and blames him for hindering Bitcoin.

2732

I will take the 80 year old geriatric over the 54 year old Trumpy asshole anyday.

2733

Thiel is just worried that Buffett might get to drink all the sweet sweet youthful blood before he can.

2734

Douche makes douchy self-serving statements, film at 11.

2735

How has he not exploded from the combined generational ire of the hordes of thirtysomething coinbros?

2736
2737

A still-unidentified attacker had borrowed $80m in cryptocurrency and deposited it in the project’s silo, gaining enough voting rights in exchange to be able to pass any proposal instantly. With that power, they voted to transfer the contents of the treasury to themselves, then returned the voting rights, withdrew their money, and repaid the loan – all in a matter of seconds.

2738

These are honest crooks. They did repay the loan!

Pretty slick. I wonder if the person or persons can be identified? I would think anyone who manages to borrow $80M in crypto would have to undergo some kind of rigorous ID check. Maybe the long game here is to give back the money after extracting a handsome multi-million dollar fee for returning it?