> Find Bitcoin-Friendly Coffee Shops – We Need Submissions
I'll bite: If i own a bitcoin, evaluated today at, let's say, 100 k$, and then pay with it for a coffee, how much bitcoin will i have left ? Do they give change ?
If this is a serious question... you'll pay a (small) fraction of a bitcoin, just like you'd pay a fraction (or some units and a fraction) of whatever currency.
Just as when you pay with a card or online, you just pay the amount. There's no change.
There is no problem with that, as Bitcoin itself will never reach the transaction volume of regular cash - it couldn't even handle that given the number of transactions (nor does it make sense to store your coffee payment on any given day for a lifetime in the blockchain). Thats where layer 2 solution such as Lightning come into play - for everyday, more privacy-friendly smaller transactions that are not put on the blockchain. And on Layer 2, you can go even smaller in denominations.
To reiterate and paraphrase: "we need more coffee shops to accept bitcoin" "but it's not divisible enough" "that's fine because we don't need coffee shops to accept bitcoin"
Well to be fair, Lightning IS bitcoin - and inevitably tied to it. It is just a different protocol, or a different mean of accounting and transferring ownership of bitcoin.
Just imagine Gold was used as money, but you quickly realize that weighing and dividing gold is cumbersome. So someone creates a layer 2, prints green paper bills in arbitrary denominations and that very someone guarantees you can exchange those green paper bills at a fixed rates for ounces of gold. You exchange green paper bills, the green paper bills have value, but the underlying asset still is gold. Until that someone decided no longer to do the exchange to gold for those green sheets of paper, and basically performed the first rug-pull in history. That is where bitcoin steps in, as its decentralization guarantees there is no such rug-pull. And lightning is the green bills that can be exchanged for the underlying bitcoin anytime, without relying on the promise of a third party.
There is already a lot of data about this in OpenStreetMap: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bitcoin
cool. i'm adding now. thanks
The thing my morning latte was always missing: speculative assets.
exactly!
A solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist
Oh btw which coffee shops can I pay with dirt at? I have lots of dirt in the backyard
someone on stacker.news was asking for this so i built it.
> Find Bitcoin-Friendly Coffee Shops – We Need Submissions
I'll bite: If i own a bitcoin, evaluated today at, let's say, 100 k$, and then pay with it for a coffee, how much bitcoin will i have left ? Do they give change ?
If this is a serious question... you'll pay a (small) fraction of a bitcoin, just like you'd pay a fraction (or some units and a fraction) of whatever currency.
Just as when you pay with a card or online, you just pay the amount. There's no change.
Technically you’d transfer a larger chunk of bitcoin and receive change
Technically how? In a way that isn't abstract to either parties in the transaction?
Basically you split your bitcoin and send one part to the recipient and one part back to yourself.
bitcoin is divisible to 1M places.
with lightning you can send a satoshi.
you can even send millisatoshis (but depends on the node configuration, often it is declined). But lightning nodes do take milisats as fees.
So divisible to $0.10, and if it goes to the moon like hodlers insist, divisible to $1, then $10, then $100, then $1000.
No one hundred millionth of a bitcoin
If one bitcoin is worth $10 million then 1 millionth of a bitcoin is still $10.
There is no problem with that, as Bitcoin itself will never reach the transaction volume of regular cash - it couldn't even handle that given the number of transactions (nor does it make sense to store your coffee payment on any given day for a lifetime in the blockchain). Thats where layer 2 solution such as Lightning come into play - for everyday, more privacy-friendly smaller transactions that are not put on the blockchain. And on Layer 2, you can go even smaller in denominations.
To reiterate and paraphrase: "we need more coffee shops to accept bitcoin" "but it's not divisible enough" "that's fine because we don't need coffee shops to accept bitcoin"
Well to be fair, Lightning IS bitcoin - and inevitably tied to it. It is just a different protocol, or a different mean of accounting and transferring ownership of bitcoin.
Just imagine Gold was used as money, but you quickly realize that weighing and dividing gold is cumbersome. So someone creates a layer 2, prints green paper bills in arbitrary denominations and that very someone guarantees you can exchange those green paper bills at a fixed rates for ounces of gold. You exchange green paper bills, the green paper bills have value, but the underlying asset still is gold. Until that someone decided no longer to do the exchange to gold for those green sheets of paper, and basically performed the first rug-pull in history. That is where bitcoin steps in, as its decentralization guarantees there is no such rug-pull. And lightning is the green bills that can be exchanged for the underlying bitcoin anytime, without relying on the promise of a third party.
The important detail being missed here is that the smallest unit is 0.00000001 bitcoin, i.e. one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.
No change. A latte costs $100k if you pay with bitcoin.