Topic: VISA vs Lightning Network - page 2. (Read 891 times)

It's not a nitpick, it's annihilating your earlier balk at merchants paying $200 to become their own payment processor.  You said:


And I rightly pointed out that there are a significant number of companies that could easily recoup that setup cost in a very short space of time if people use LN payments instead.  You simply don't understand how much these credit card middlemen are profiteering.  1.51% might not sound like much, but it's absolutely huge for some businesses.  The resulting savings would easily cover any costs from "running 3 programs" and still leave money to spare in the company coffers for other things. 

for large transactions, credit cards are horrible. i've processed cards on behalf of nonprofits and such. hundreds of dollars evaporating from a single $10k or $15k transaction---that's insane.

clearly bitcoin's design shits on visa when it comes to high value transactions.

as for low value transactions? we're getting there. why are you talking about "$1-$20 per bitcoin tx" in the context of lightning? even if you include commitment and settlement tx, you know the average transaction costs using lightning will be much lower than that.

doomad
take your insults and go play around on some social drama forum

point being
10p and small % a certain group says is bad per tx

yet think $1-$20 per bitcoin tx is good
many are saying leave bitcoin at the 1mb base = ~2000tx a block
meaning requiring $20 to match a $40k blockreward in a scenario of there not being a block reward

if the only point you can knit pick is my not mentioning a small % number of visa... then your missing the point

so here is another point.. without being 'conservative' like i was before to just simplify things
would you use the Pound if it cost you £1-£20 per payment
would you use a paypal pound if it cost you £10-£200 a fortnight to set-up 5 accounts to make it effective to use.

if you want to be one of the guys that think making bitcoin $1+ per tx is a good thing then maybe you should aim your insults at yourself

Is an interesting topic because bitcoin can't supplant Visa because the TPS (Transactions per second) in bitcoin is too low, but now with LN this is possible. And the LN fees are even lower than bitcoin transaction fees, so, we are talking about the future of the payments.

Learn to read, moron.  That's $0.10 plus 1.51% of the transaction cost.

I work in a large call centre.  On an average day at work, eight hour shift, I can easily clear between £4000 and £6000 worth of transactions.  Sometimes more.  Not all of them are card payments, some use direct debits, so let's say £3000 to £5000 on cards.  In case you're as much of an idiot as I think you are, let's show you what 1.51% actually means in practice.  That works out between £45 and £75 in fees.  Per day.  And that's just the transactions I process, not counting the other 200+ people that work there.  

Yeah, companies are just going to be weeping in sorrow at having to pay a few hundred to become their own payment processor.  

Fucking imbecile.

The success of the lightening network to be use in stores all depends on how user friendly it becomes at the end and with a flexible and low fees in carrying out transaction by stores then I think digital currency will be the future of all online and cashless transactions in stores and market palaces.

BITCOIN
means you can just get a keypair and display it on paper.

you dont NEED a full node.(advantageous but not essential) but even if you did, its only a few hundred dollars.
the issue is devs are pushing for BITCOIN to be FEE priced more than visa for transaction fee's to attempt to get people to use another network that is not community audited, doesnt solve byzantine generals. has no guarentee of settlement, requires people to have co-signers and require co signers to be online, funded and linked to possible destinations for it to work
basically LN is not the open borderless sovereign system that made bitcoin popular a decade ago

LN is not even a feature unique and solely functional to give bitcoin an advantage.

but hey the promotional material is supposedly all for a current convenience of low fee. which as we all have seen wont stay low
think about all the 'min dust relay' stuff implemented in bitcoin so that nodes dont get hit by loads of transactions.

the foolishness is to raise the BITCOIN FEE by saying there is a option of LN for those who dont like the fee war instigated by the devs. but then LN is doing/pretending to do things some users dont want thus causing a loss in the whole ethos of what originally made bitcoin popular.

remember if you only have $60 in a channel your not gonna want 60 users routing through you to buy a $1 product or 20 people buying a $3 coffee routing through you as you will get your funds raided before you can spend it yourself.

even the LN devs have been saying they have noticed LN nodes already upping their fee's to prevent this stuff.
even companies offering services/goods via LN are admitting LN payments are having a 10% success rate

but hey those thinking visa $0.10 bad or paypal $0.20 bad.. but bitcoin $1 fee good. are obviously either sniffing glue or dont want people using true bitcoin

Indeed.  With the way Visa are raising their fees, that $200 is going to start looking quite tempting to a large number of merchants.  It puts them in the drivers seat and could save them a small fortune over the years if their customers start paying with LN instead of a card.  I believe the current Visa fee is $0.10 plus 1.51% of the cost of the transaction.  I can't seem to find any reference on what it's increasing to in April yet. 

I think from both of them is a very good network, only having problems in terms of effectiveness and efficiency, I'm sure every store has its own considerations.

sure its conventional and that what makes visa more acceptable than crypto or lightning network  . visa isnt also out dated if its outdated then why we still see it everywhere ?


when using bitcoin people spend fees and they also wait for the transaction to be mined  while using a visa/credit card are instant  . no fees , no waiting time .


thats impossible  . some will stick on the old way of paying because crypto is too complex for them  . though this lightning network is a good implementation to speed up the crypto processing time  .

I think Kroger's rejection of Visa signals that these payment processors have abused their position similar to monopolies. This bodes well for the Lightning Network and competing technologies. The key for the Lightning Network will be ease of use and stability. Additionally, fiat ramps will be needed for quick conversion for customers and merchants. I am expecting this will be a big year for it to properly scale.

he also clearly emphasised the cost of a a full node..

the whole size weight significant increase is the bull crap myth.
no one is saying gigabytes by midnight.

the main proposals was 2mb which would have been at most 104gb a year meaning 3 years of using the raspbi before needing to upgrade the hard drive,

$200 for 3 years(200gb for 10 years historic, and 300gb for ATLEAST 3 years future) is cheaper than many computers and game console systems which people upgrade in the same time frame. which means the excuse of price is like saying
"online gaming cant work"
"dont do online gaming" because internet speeds and console costs


but with that said the point being is LN requires MORE than bitcoin
but LN offers LESS security
but LN offers LESS payment success guarantee
but LN offers LESS convenience

too many people that advocate for LN dont use it.
those that do, get too optimistic and only explain the most perfect usecase and call it 'flawless' but too afraid to admit the flaws. which when funds ar involved. people actually want to know the flaws/risks too

do you know the real funny part though.
the devs that suggsted not to scale bitcoin ntwork but concentrate on a separate network for multicoins. are the guys happy with fee's being 'higher than 3rd/developing countries can afford'.

meaning even if 3rd/developing countries decided to go for lite wallets. as full nodes are not essential, its still expensive to use bitcoin.

but lets also think about LN
imagine it this way.
$1 fee, channel lock length 2 weeks = $2 a fortnight
=$52 a year JUST TO open/close a channel periodically
=$156 for 3 years

and thats just 1 channel. average experience is 5 channels to have reliable service. so yea expect more costs just to set up reliable channel routes even via just a phone app

and if wondering why i say $1 onchain fee.. well those loving LN and think that onchain fee's will replace rewards and blockchain needs to stay where it is to cause a fee war to pay pools. doing the math of 12.5*$3500+= >$40k
that $40k is for ~2000 TX meaning each tx in the future may need to be $20.. so i was bing very "conservative" by just using $1 with 1 channel as oppose to $20x5 channel
but even with low "conservative" numbers below the expectactions of the group that love the "conservative" buzzword, still adds up to a significant amount that doesnt help 3rd/developing countries.

oh and by the way. a 1TB hard is cheaper then you think

wait... so for 4 years people been screaming that bitcoin is broke and cant scale because its too complicated and expensive to run 1 program on a pc

but now there is a solution involving running 3 programs.. but funnily one of which is the one that was supposedly too big to run.
and it just costs $200

OMG shocking.

If people are not familiar with cryptocurrencies they won't use it. Why should they buy Bitcoin for fiat currency and then buy whatever they need for it when they can just buy what they need for fiat without messing up with anything else?
LN supposed to be a great thing for offline payments but the only existence of such technology won't make anyone to use cryptocurrencies.

Seems like Carlton Banks already answered this topic


As for now, i run a bitcoin core node, c-lightning on top of core and lightning-charge on top of c-lightning... It's actually pretty easy to setup, and it runs without hiccups for weeks on end... So, if you're serious about accepting lightning payments, and you want a "from-scratch" sollution, i'd probably go for something like this:

- Add a second, empty, 512 Gb SSD disk to a fast computer with sufficient RAM and BW, running linux. mount the device under ~/.bitcoin
- Install bitcoin core, run it, let it sync
- turn off the pc, remove the SSD, setup an rPi 3b+, plug in the SSD, mount it under ~/.bitcoin (create a seperate user)
- install bitcoin core on the rPi, run it, make sure it runs smoothly before the next step... It should sync pretty fast, since the bulk of the work was already done on a fast pc
- follow the installation steps of c-lightning: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning
- follow the installation steps of lightning-charge https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning-charge
- at this point you can setup a LAMP stack on your rPi and write a very simple php script calling lightning-charge's rest api, create qr codes, display them, check for payed invoices,...

All in all, a rather extensive walktrough, but if you're reasonably technical, it's far from impossible
Total cost (not including the fast pc... I assume most people have access to a fast desktop machine somewhere, either at home or with friends or family):
1 512 Gb SSD => $90
1 rPi 3b+ + case => $80
S&H => $20

So for less than $200, you should be up and running accepting LN payments in your store..

If you don't mind using a payment processor, bitpay already accepts LN payments I've used them for my latest bitgild purchase and it went flawless...

Thanks for clarifying that. I was kinda hoping I can accept payments on mobile. I asked coz we have a small mom-and-pop store and thinking of adding a BTC payment option if we get more Bitcoin users in our community.

samson mow also said segwit is great. he was even selling hats to promote his controversial method to force segwit into activation..
but once activated, samson mows then company BTCC were not using segwit addresses for their coin rewards. which just goes to show they didnt really trust segwit tx formats for their own income

Even Samson Mow now says that Bitcoin should not be used for payments, and there's questionable utility surrounding LN. Even if it works well, it's YEARS away from this stage. I cannot recommend any merchant to adopt Bitcoin right now, at least not in good faith.

More and more people eyes are beginning to be open to the fraudulent cash been made by our faulty financial system, and they are now set to dumping it. Lightening network is the answer to bitcoin scalability. This will attract mass adoption, I understand some merchants are already using it.

emphasis:
works flawlessly when already having a channel between client and store node is funded and both online.

however many stores/merchants wont want to have a permanent open direct always online connections with millions of users
(DDos risk, hacking, other funding issues on store/merchants side(EG paying all close channel fee's for millions of users))

so then routing/hubs/hops becomes a concept. which is less than flawless.
recently fold done a 'pizza for LN' and showed only a 10% success rate. (1500 transactions, only 150 successes)[/list]