Comment by beefnugs

8 days ago

So painful when people recommend bitcoin lightning. Its technically interesting... but complete nonsense to pay like $50 just for one "hop" of the payment chain. It would be an upfront cost of hundreds to get a payment chain you planned on spending fractions of a penny per day/week/month

Hm? As I understood it, you lock up some money, and then secretly agree to reallocate it with the Lightning protocol, and then eventually get it back in the latest allocation. So it costs $50 and then you get $50 back - or $60 or $40.

This is an interesting thing when financial institutions do it between themselves. It's completely useless as a consumer-facing payment system. Consumers aren't going to plan in advance how much money to lock up, that's just stupid.

I assume you're not referring to the transaction fee because last I heard, it's not currently $25.