Lilly

The network effect alluded to barely exists, and the extent to which it does is not limited to Bitcoin payments on the SHA256 chain. Outside of Bitcoiners paying for each other's dinners at conferences, Bitcoin is almost never used for payments anywhere - the notable exceptions use LIGHTNING where the vendor and customer aren't limited to use of one chain or ecosystem. @SteaknShake is pretty much the only large merchant in the US I'm aware of that actually accepts Bitcoin (not @Newegg style which doesn't count although revealingly, there is very little objection to the egregious things they make their customers do) - and they accept Lightning, which of course ends up as "BitcoinSHA" on their end, but it doesn't have to begin that way on the other end. No one wants to wait for on chain confirmation for a burger and this is true of the majority of offline commerce so the default for adoption of "crypto" for payments funnily enough ends up being chain agnostic by design for the technical limitations - blockchains suck for payments. And actually this is a huge win. Staying within the Bitcoin ecosystem for payments increasingly results in having to "explain the origin of my coins" (see my post yesterday). If I'm using Lightning, with or without coming from another chain or using stables, KYC is impossible. I am basically trying to explain to you what Lightning maximalism is. All that is happening in sha-land with Lightning is @lightning integrating Tether. That should tell you something. The fact that you have people paying SteaknShake with XBT and BTC adoption in countries like El Salvador coming in unison with Tether (same apps, tight integration between the two currencies) means that's what looks like the practical path for global adoption of a workable escape from the fiat system for MoEs. You see this same integration with Liquid in a bunch of Bitcoin wallets, which is its own blockchain. It isn't a faux-pas because Liquid is a Bitcoin sidechain, but Tether isn't and no one seems to object to that either. People tolerate Lightning in ways orthogonal to the sentiment expressed by @parman_the because it doesn't make sense. The multichain crypto utopia we all rolled our eyes at is actually how Lightning is designed to work and responsible for pretty much all of the real MoE adoption we see in the world so it'd be pretty hypocritical to dismiss it. Instead, Bitcoiners have largely forgotten about payments, focusing only on escaping inflation with a superior store of value to fiat, but the associated cult-like devotion to the one-supreme-blockchain doesn't carry over into providing an alternative MoE because it's never really taken off. Face the facts. The darknet markets which were Bitcoin's original killer app now all just use Monero because it's just better in every way for that purpose. While the merchants and countries (really just one merchant and one country) onboarded themselves with Lightning because Bitcoin adoption for payments just never took off on L1 for whatever reason (it can be the technical limitation I mentioned above or something more insidious like influence from @saylor - take your pick, they're both true). If L2 thrives, that's great, but again, Lightning is not a blockchain. Payers and receivers do not have to use the same network. In fact that's one of the fundamental principles of it having been built on Litecoin before Bitcoin. Bitcoin maximalism is increasingly going to require dismissing the practical ways merchants will adopt payment tech external to the fiat system if it cannot reconcile its inability to provide a Bitcoin-only and scalable way for the world to adopt it for that purpose. This has largely happened anyway. There is no meaningful pushback against the wallets with "stablesats" or stablecoin usage in general. It's literally fiat and a continuation (and now even penetration into Bitcoin) of the very system we were meant to be ending. All that's left of that original mission is a cult-like devotion to a chain that both cannot be and isn't actually used as a medium of exchange anywhere for anything outside of a small group of enthusiasts. The reasonable objection to what I'm saying here is that the vast majority of Lightning activity is BTC<>BTC with just BTC along all the intermediary hops. That is going to be increasingly diluted with Tether payments anyway, but to my earlier point, I think there truly is an agenda to make Bitcoin fail in getting adopted for day-to-day payments and that its inefficiency for doing that at scale on L1 is a convenient excuse, not the entire reason for the overwhelming failure of Bitcoin to thrive as a MoE rather than just a SoV. And everyone knows, it cannot be one if it isn't also the other.

The absolute state of payments in "Bitcoin".