Big companies are not using actual printed paper money directly. Cash, like Bitcoin, is great for peer to peer transactions, but too slow and impractical for the population to all use end to end for all daily transactions.
Companies like McDonalds operate on credit via privately owned payment rails because ACH and cash are way too slow. Even when it takes cash that cash is not physically shipped to a bank vault at McDonalds HQ but instead local restaurants make cash drops to other private companies, banks, that then take possession of the cash and use their own private network to credit a remote account.
Even tax payment portals allow use of the payment rails of private companies because paper USD is too impractical.
Still, the fixed supply of federal reserve issued USD is what all these magic third party payment rails create an abstracion layer for.
No one Bitcoin advocate that knows how it works is saying Bitcoin will be used -directly- for daily commerce. Even in El Salvador venmo-like apps have emerged that batch Bitcoin transactions and use credit, much like Visa does to abstract slow ACH or cash.
These proprietary credit systems defeat a lot of the point of Bitcoin though, so open off-chain credit systems like Lightning exist. My local Coffee shop accepts Lightning which in short allows us to just continually cancel and re-issue signed Bitcoin transactions off-chain we never publish until one of us needs to settle which in some cases could be years, and that is fine.
Unlike Visa, the benefits of credit solutions like Lightning are available to all replacing KYC and credit checks with cryptography.
> No one Bitcoin advocate that knows how it works is saying Bitcoin will be used -directly- for daily commerce. Even in El Salvador venmo-like apps have emerged that batch Bitcoin transactions and use credit, much like Visa does to abstract slow ACH or cash.
There's something else El Salvador has too. Two really fast ACH networks. The fastest one can do inter-bank transactions in seconds during banking hours. And a second slower one that takes about 15 minutes but covers more banks and is available every day of the year. Payments cards are slower though, they usually take between 2 to 5 days to clear.
Exactly! If Walmart/McD's wish to successfully use Bitcoin, they will easily batch millions of transactions from numerous locations into just a handful of on chain network transactions. The point is finality in Bitcoin for those who wish to hold hard money at the end of it rather than a credit system or fiat currency.
I see a lot of clearly incorrect information being displayed here about l2 such as Lightning Network, and at odds with reality. I'm not addressing the posts but it seems lately HN comments have nearly become a pile-on of misinformation bike-shedding about Bitcoin and in the face of reality, these folks want to spread outright lies and falsities. You may not own Bitcoin and you may not like it, but it's going far when hundreds of comments are so boldly misleading. For folks who are into science and technology, and some who are hackers, the ethos doesn't check out spreading misinformation about energy usage, centralization, and fairness of the system. When I was growing up, hacking was all about freedom to explore, libertarian bent, and/or anarchy.
The cypherpunk movement from which Bitcoin sprang was very libertarian or even one could say classical liberal. This article attempts numerous times to, for some reason, compare libertarianism to communism which is quite absurd. Libertarianism is for as little system of government as necessary, for staunch individual liberty and property rights, and hands-off free market economies. Clearly, communism is for state controlled property and no individual rights, one-world state, and no individual rights at all. Communism seeks to replace free-market economies with everyone equal and no individual rights. It's absurd on it's face to even compare libertarianism to communism when they're at opposite poles. At any rate, I would hope people don't take all these fear-mongering anti-crypto articles just at face value and do some research into what crap they're reading.
Companies like McDonalds operate on credit via privately owned payment rails because ACH and cash are way too slow. Even when it takes cash that cash is not physically shipped to a bank vault at McDonalds HQ but instead local restaurants make cash drops to other private companies, banks, that then take possession of the cash and use their own private network to credit a remote account.
Even tax payment portals allow use of the payment rails of private companies because paper USD is too impractical.
Still, the fixed supply of federal reserve issued USD is what all these magic third party payment rails create an abstracion layer for.
No one Bitcoin advocate that knows how it works is saying Bitcoin will be used -directly- for daily commerce. Even in El Salvador venmo-like apps have emerged that batch Bitcoin transactions and use credit, much like Visa does to abstract slow ACH or cash.
These proprietary credit systems defeat a lot of the point of Bitcoin though, so open off-chain credit systems like Lightning exist. My local Coffee shop accepts Lightning which in short allows us to just continually cancel and re-issue signed Bitcoin transactions off-chain we never publish until one of us needs to settle which in some cases could be years, and that is fine.
Unlike Visa, the benefits of credit solutions like Lightning are available to all replacing KYC and credit checks with cryptography.
Also going back to your point about taxes, several states have serious efforts to get Bitcoin permitted for tax payment: https://www.deseret.com/2022/2/8/22918061/wyoming-arizona-bi...