Very impressed at net cost. I used to run a small ecom business targeting total prices in the range of $3-10. At $3, payment processing is nearly 11-12% of costs, which is absurd, more if you amortize the occasional chargeback/fraud. Lightning can do it for <<0.1% net cost even at the low end, which is incredible. There are plenty of these kinds of vendors on eBay, Aliexpress etc that would be willing to adopt with a bit of help.
For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken
Anon1096 1 days ago [-]
I would guess the price for payment processing drops tremendously when you don't need to handle fraud or chargebacks at all. It's for sure worse for consumers but I do think it has its place (for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors).
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> for example adult content that has huge chargeback risk or straight up blocked by other processors
This has the default inverted.
The best place for the traditional payments system is when you're making a large purchase from a questionable seller, and then you're willing to pay extra for the assurance that you can reverse the transaction.
If you're making a small purchase or buying from someone you regularly do business with, why would you want the cost of other customers' chargeback fraud or use of stolen cards to be added to the price you pay?
jcfrei 1 days ago [-]
lightning is a pain to set up, you have to open a channel and keep funding it - so if we are talking about small amounts these costs should definitely be added to your calculation. or you use lightning via an exchange - but that again kinda defeats the purpose of bitcoin. in fact all of this could probably be achieved much simpler by just using a stablecoin on tron, solana or one of the ether chains and forget about the whole lightning sending and bitcoin hedging. I doubt you can get lower transaction costs end-to-end staying on btc.
nohell 1 days ago [-]
Monero is even cheaper and more useful as cadh because it's private. Anyone can see Bitcoin history and where the user got their coins.
dfish 1 days ago [-]
They are both useful. Monero is a bit more tricky to use, there is no concept of Lightning network, you still have to wait around 7 minutes for the transaction to settle.
It's not bad, but it is different. The transparency in Bitcoin is a feature not a bug.
They also do work to deanonymize other blockchains, including monero.
akimbostrawman 5 hours ago [-]
>including monero
which they still haven't actually broken despite empty marketing claims which in reality is busting people on KYC CEXs.
kube-system 37 minutes ago [-]
I've also seen rumors suggesting they have attacked it via network traffic analysis, which also seems plausible
Whether or not they've done it by breaking the protocol itself might be of academic concern but is irrelevant in practical terms.
grim_io 1 days ago [-]
The main grifters care for neither.
agalush 1 days ago [-]
Lightning payments are not stored onchain and have already been proved more private than monero payments
akimbostrawman 5 hours ago [-]
considering actual criminals do not use lightning but monero it should be obvious that is not the case.
Palmik 1 days ago [-]
So, this is 'open' as in 'OpenAI', not as in 'open source'. What's the benefit of this compared to something like NOW Payments for merchants (or the myriad of alternatives)? NOW Payments supports a wide range of crypto currencies as well.
samantha-wiki 1 days ago [-]
Is it open source? If not, why choose the name “OpenNode”?
askonomm 1 days ago [-]
Just like how OpenAI is open source.
giancarlostoro 1 days ago [-]
Open as in "The door is open come in and give us your money"
Retr0id 1 days ago [-]
"Open as in wallet"
iamsaitam 1 days ago [-]
Avoid trademarking fees! No need to spend money on trademarking what can't be trademarked ;)
1 days ago [-]
a3w 1 days ago [-]
So, OpenAI is certainly never trademarked? /s
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
Ironically, OpenAI would be trademarkable because they're not open.
> OPEN describes a feature of the services provided by applicant, in that applicant provides a "public node" that is accessible to anyone and allows users to interact with the blockchain network. See attached from opennode.com. Thus, "OPEN" is descriptive of the applicant's services, in that it conveys the open and public nature of the node that the applicant provides.
As other commenters replying to you have said, I was alluring to OpenAI failing to obtain a trademark precisely due to the "Open" in their name.
cwmma 1 days ago [-]
they just lost a case in Europe about being trademarked
gosub100 1 days ago [-]
Open for scammers, rug pulls, and money laundering
pelagicAustral 1 days ago [-]
OpenAI rings a bell
gurjeet 4 hours ago [-]
This is a message for the person who flagged the submission: I wonder what’s the reason this was flagged? Genuinely curious.
zdkl 1 days ago [-]
I don't have much substance to add to the discussion but this kind of topic is very relevant to the GNU project Taler which aims to bring an open payment infrastructure to general use/"the market".
They have significant investment and institutional interest notably from the EU and established organisations such as NLNet.
I am not affiliated but figure this deserves more attention, especially in this conversation.
Genuine question - why would someone hold bitcoin for regular, everyday purchases?
The buying power is all over the place.
dewey 1 days ago [-]
I was talking to someone running an ecommerce site, they also run their own lighning nodes and there's many reasons:
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.
varispeed 1 days ago [-]
> with active sanctions against.
Wouldn't that be breaking the law selling to them?
1 days ago [-]
dfish 1 days ago [-]
Someone who doesn't have good fiat rails like third-world countries.
Or people who just don't want to be part of the fiat system.
Or both.
BeetleB 1 days ago [-]
People in other countries trying to buy stuff from US ecommerce sites. A number of payment processors really don't care about them, and simply will not let customers from there buy using a credit card.
OJFord 1 days ago [-]
Just this week I couldn't purchase from Walmart.ca with a CAD denominated card for delivery to Canada, because my billing address was not in Canada or the US.
tenuousemphasis 1 days ago [-]
Yes, it goes up and down. Fiat currency only goes down. It's a lot more fungible than stocks.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
This has tradfi banking ramps. You don't need to hold it. You can treat BTC as basically a payment network instead of something like the visa/mastercard cartel.
Retr0id 1 days ago [-]
afaict, the main advantages of buying things with crypto are (potentially) lower transaction fees and latencies, and less red tape restricting who can buy what from whom. If you use a "tradfi onramp", doesn't it negate all of that? Why not just use tradfi all the way, for that transaction?
greyface- 1 days ago [-]
Even if you're willing to operate fully in the "tradfi" system, your counterparty might not be, and you still want their business.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
There is no requirement to use the tradfi ramps. It is merely offered as an option. But as it pertains to banking in the USA, a couple differentiating qualities I will offer before the goalposts will inevitably be shifted yet again to damn my response
1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)
2) Irreversibility.
3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.
4) Lowered friction for international transaction
5) One or both sides can be unbanked.
jancsika 1 days ago [-]
> (potentially) lower transaction fees
<transactionFeeDiscussion>
Citation needed. I'm looking at the transaction fees for lightning network and they are in the range of FedNow or RTP.
For Bitcoin it's not even close.
</transactionFeeDiscussion>
stymaar 1 days ago [-]
This was thr original intent of thr Satoshi paper, except BTC is probably the worst payment network you can think about, which is why it failed to gain any use as such over the past 18 years…
dfish 1 days ago [-]
I sent a transfer from the UAE to Spain and another one to the Netherlands. They took 5 days and 7 days respectively.
The same transfer takes 10 minutes in Bitcoin.
You don't do transfers to pay for stuff at the grocery store, the same way you would not pay using the Bitcoin network. You would use lightning network, which takes less than 2 seconds finality.
Max-q 1 days ago [-]
That usage is not a generic payment usage. This is a use case it is good for. But if 8 billion people should use Bitcoin for their everyday shopping, that is a totally different case...
KetoManx64 1 days ago [-]
Well you wouldn't use Bitcoin itself to exchange on, you'd use side layers like Lightning payments for the near instantaneous exchange which then gets aggregated into one of the upcoming blocks.
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
stymaar 16 hours ago [-]
> except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
Bitcoin is absolutely not controlled by its user base, but by another cartel (made of mining pools and exchanges). You, as a user have literally no say in any decisions taken by bitcoin except voting with your feet, which is exactly what you're suggesting against Visa & MasterCard's (which aren't banks by the way…)
KetoManx64 15 hours ago [-]
The exchanges and miners do have a large influence, but the node runners (the users) have a voice as well. The node runners can get together, and refuse to peopogate the blocks of of the miners/exchanges that are being bad actors (BIP 148 for example) and also (BIP 110) that's currently making the rounds.
If a large enough percentage of the node runners need refuses to propogate a block from a bad actor, then another miner can mine the same block and get the reward.
stymaar 8 hours ago [-]
The miners don't need “node runners” to get access to other miners mined block. That's not how the bitcoin protocol works at all.
In an ideal world the best non-miners can do is prevent some transactions by preventing them to reach the mempool, but you're not going to block an exchange this way either.
The bitcoin protocol is actually very friendly to centralization, the only mechanism that was supposed to prevent it was the PoW, which failed because ASICs exist. And as a result, in practice it's been very centralized for more than a decade now.
swinglock 1 days ago [-]
Wire transfer is better?
atomic_cowprod 1 days ago [-]
Way to not read the comment. Or at least understand it.
Nobody uses wire transfer for "everyday shopping".
lesuorac 1 days ago [-]
Worst for whom?
Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.
stymaar 1 days ago [-]
Until customers don't want to but because they are afraid they have no way to get their money back if anything goes wrong.
(Chargeback exists for a reason, and the reason isn't to piss off businesses).
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
It's nice to have the option either way, but if merchants offer irreversible methods I usually pick them rather than pay a 1+% premium to cover chargebacks from scammer customers. For some customers irreversible is a big plus, if they trust the merchant.
atomic_cowprod 1 days ago [-]
Only if they're on the receiving end. You need to remember that businesses also buy things, and often by credit card.
Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
KetoManx64 1 days ago [-]
It's a flex when you compare it to a government based currency where the bank or government can freeze your bank accounts or just empty it.
Plenty of stories from The USA and Canada from the last decade of that very thing being done.
atomic_cowprod 1 days ago [-]
Sure. The vast majority of those stories being the freezing of proceeds from criminal activity or funds that are part of a legal dispute and for which there is a high probability that the holder of those funds will attempt to illegally hide or move those funds.
Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
KetoManx64 1 days ago [-]
It comes down to how much you trust the government, central banks, and the institutions of power, especially post Epstein and COVID.
stymaar 14 hours ago [-]
As much as some amount of defiance towards contemporary governments is warranted, believing that the crypto world is more trustworthy is an insane take. Especially post MtGox and all what followed…
The Epstein class and the Bankman-Fried class are the same people (and don't get fooled by their patronyms, it has nothing to do with Jews, and all to do with the American elite). And Trump is both an friend of Epstein and a proponent of cryptocurrencies.
stymaar 1 days ago [-]
Meanwhile with cryptocurrencies you have the choice between getting blocked by your exchange or losing your wallet (from your own negligence or a hack)
KetoManx64 1 days ago [-]
Not all that different from losing your physical wallet with your ID and debit card or giving your bank info to a Nigerian Prince.
Pick your poison, do you trust corrupt institutions or yourself more.
stymaar 16 hours ago [-]
“I trust my midwit brain rather than the institutions that makes the modern world work” really isn't the flex you think it is.
KetoManx64 15 hours ago [-]
> Institutions that make the modern world
The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash, the same institutions that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply, the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor and stuck by constantly inflating their savings away?
Yes, I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.
stymaar 14 hours ago [-]
> The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash
You rightly call that a “crash” that is nowhere near the scale of the regular bitcoin price fluctuations!
> that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply,
Better trust an ecosystem that has created an endless amount of virtual money over the past 15 years instead then…
> the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor
Did you miss the fact that you now need an entire data center worth of specialized hardware to mine bitcoin? It was supposed to be a democratic hacker currency that anyone can mine, yet it is entirely controlled by a handful of hyperscalers… Pretty much no individual can even hold a full bitcoin now, talk about keeping people poor.
> I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.
Delusional.
atomic_cowprod 22 hours ago [-]
Dude.
You lose your wallet, you make a few phone calls or walk into a bank and get a new card. You lose very little more than some time. Losing your crypto key means you lose your crypto.
Those are not at all the same thing.
stymaar 1 days ago [-]
This! And this is why the “crypto” world is full of scams and heists, in a way that anyone with a brain could have foreseen from the start.
Why this instead of the opensource, well used, and trusted BTCPay that you can self-host and has 0% fees?
winterrdog 11 hours ago [-]
The complexity involved. Most people just want to get on with their work and not get lost into details of self hosting (plus maintaining) yet another service. probably they've self hosted sth else and they're spread thin on resources.
Their rates are not a big inconvenience, IMO
chipcoinchc 6 hours ago [-]
Working on an open-source Bitcoin-compatible testnet exploring post-quantum cryptography. Interested in distributed systems, applied cryptography, Bitcoin, networking, and open source.
futurecat 1 days ago [-]
They've been in business for a long time and I used them when I experimented with QR code for street artists to receive tips. OpenNode is very simple to implement!
mikalauskas 16 hours ago [-]
Paying kagi subscription with opennode. Works flawlessly and instant
ranguna 12 hours ago [-]
People still use bitcoin?
I thought it was a vanity coin now
pooploop64 20 hours ago [-]
Wow I can't believe this lightning crap is still going. No wonder crypto is still a joke, you clowns are still pushing Bitcoin like it's the be-all-end-all of crypto, and not the first ever reference implementation of blockchain. It's so obsolete at this point that it's not even funny anymore. It's sad. I wanted so badly for crypto to be a thing. But it never will because of these people. And I don't even want it anymore if it has to be bitcoin until we're all dead. All of the criticisms of crypto are 100% accurate when regarding Bitcoin. It destroys the environment and the parts economy simultaneously with it's ridiculous hardware requirements. Lightning doesn't make that go away. I remember 6 years ago there was already reams of new blockchains that made Bitcoin look like the cotton gin. And they will never be used for anything. Please switch to scalping pokemon cards from kids or something, it would be less despicable and damage the world less.
greyface- 10 hours ago [-]
Bitcoin is designed to be unkillable; the network won't die just because some people dislike it. The difficulty adjustment will keep it going no matter how much or little hash power is spent on it. As long as it doesn't die, it will have stronger Lindy than any permissionless replacement. Permissioned alternatives (stablecoins, Taler, etc) may find some temporary success, but are bound to monetary authorities that have no choice but to self-sabotage in the long run. Its only real monetary competitor at this point in time is gold, which cannot be sent over the Internet without the aid of a trusted third party. Objections made from an aesthetic frame, such as this one, are understandable but have little to no impact on its long-term success.
You request $100, the customer pays 0.00152 BTC, and then you get $99.
But 0.00152 BTC is almost $100? If I’m a business why would I pay $100 in BTC fees for a $100 transaction?
What is this solving? I’ll never understand crypto.
Edit: nvm I’m dumdum. Will get coffee. Thanks to everyone who replied.
tremarley 1 days ago [-]
$100 is the transaction value,it is not the cost of the transaction fees.
The fee is $1. They charge a 1% fee for instant payouts.
jonbwhite 1 days ago [-]
You don't. They are accepting $100 worth of BTC, converting it to dollars and giving you the dollars. They are basically operating like a credit card processor with a 1% fee, allowing you to accept bitcoin but operate in dollars.
bastawhiz 1 days ago [-]
It sounds like the fee is about $1.00: the delta between $100 and $99.
dfish 1 days ago [-]
??
The merchant requests 100 USD. The user pays X BTC equivalent to 100 USD. The merchant receives 99 USD aka the fee is 1 USD
futurecat 11 hours ago [-]
Why was it flagged?
jdw64 1 days ago [-]
American-style words are really hard these days. I thought 'open' meant source code is available, but at some point, starting with OpenAI, it seems like 'open' has come to mean 'we'll open your wallet.
kube-system 1 days ago [-]
And that isn't even the original meaning either! "open source" in reference to software was itself a term stolen from the intelligence community.
"open" is simply a vague word that you are assigning more meaning to than it actually means.
repelsteeltje 1 days ago [-]
The ambiguity of the word "Open" has a long history. Going back to at least late 1980s, when X Window "skin" OPEN LOOK (by AT&T - Sun consortium) had license issues and Open Source Foundation started work on OSF Motif.
jrm4 1 days ago [-]
Obligatory "Stallman was right" here.
Seriously, though. Without legal teeth and against marketing, "Open" never much stood a chance.
5701652400 1 days ago [-]
not your keys, not your money.
jrm4 1 days ago [-]
Interesting to see that this crypto thing might still have legs, as someone who's invested a lot of time (and thankfully, not a painful amount of money) into the idea.
Yes, it's scam city too, but it will be interesting to see if "permissionless money" actually happens and how.
And for the record, most people here pointing out that bitcoin itself, as perhaps this "opennode" may be useless here, are correct. Bitcoin mostly can no longer do what it says on the box, but newer forms can.
5701652400 1 days ago [-]
when we will finally have good self-hosted, open-source, BTC gateways?
simonmales 1 days ago [-]
You mean payment processing? BTCPay Server is the defacto standard I would argue.
Have used it for accepting LN transactions for years.
5701652400 13 hours ago [-]
yep, but web ui for it is far from Stripe quality.
and C#, I would rather have something in Go/Rust.
it always stike me how whacky ETH dev community is (based on their slack). like you have ETH core written in Go, just make a nice open source ETH gateway with nice UI. nope. neither core team nor community don't care.
and BTC has some Windows XP era C# monstrosity
simonmales 10 hours ago [-]
I have zero experience with C# and it all lives inside a docker container and just works.
Naturally, I would prefer a non-windows language, but it is literally a black box that works.
5701652400 4 hours ago [-]
but you also got to have .NET runtime right? so it is bloat. I have allegeric reaction to bloat of any kind (especially oversized Docker containers)
winterrdog 11 hours ago [-]
Thought you wanted software that just works ?
5701652400 4 hours ago [-]
interesting. maybe becauase I code all-day, every day, for couple decades, knowing what is inside software kind of important to me. what's under the hood.
kogasa240p 1 days ago [-]
Does it support Monero?
w4yai 1 days ago [-]
Glad to see such initiative on bitcoin !
seany 1 days ago [-]
This would be more interesting with other coins. Monero or cash come to mind
hggh 1 days ago [-]
> or cash come to mind
Did you mean Bitcoin Cash?
seany 5 hours ago [-]
Sorry, meant zcash
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
>Bitcoin - the only legitimate cryptocurrency secure enough for transacting at scale.
I prefer the trend of using stable coins for payment instead. I think merchants are much more willing to work with a digital dollars than with something with constantly fluctuating value.
dfish 1 days ago [-]
Stablecoins can be censored. You deposited into Huobi 5 years ago? Banned. Now we keep your stablecoins, thanks for playing.
You can't censor Bitcoin.
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
>You can't censor Bitcoin.
Your payment processor could be legally restricted from paying you your bitcoin.
hggh 1 days ago [-]
That's an excellent reason to get rid of them and just make P2P cash payments
nohell 1 days ago [-]
As a Chinese person I can confirm. Monero is the way.
hggh 1 days ago [-]
Also BCH + CashFusion for extra privacy
nohell 1 days ago [-]
Stablecoins frequently get frozen by Tether and Circle for arbitrary reasons, as if an AI system is flagging
charcircuit 1 days ago [-]
DAI exists and is not able to be frozen, but if the merchant's AI system flags a bitcoin transaction do you think you'll be able to cash that out? Just because they can't block it at the protocol level that doesn't mean they'll sign the transaction to send it to you.
simonmales 1 days ago [-]
TIL DAI cannot be frozen. Perhaps the first stablecoins I might be a little interested in.
The merchant should send the funds (sweep the UTXO) back to you if the funds are flagged. So you should not be out of pocket.
mothballed 1 days ago [-]
If they don't swoop in with random check-ins hassling you for docs for "muh KYC" and "muh AML compliance" the moment you do anything outside of the boring middle ground then they're ahead of basically 99+% of all the other tradfi-interlocking offerings.
dfish 1 days ago [-]
It is what it is. You have to implement KYC if you want fiat rails. A merchant can't KYC every single person that comes to the store. But you could build a system to eventually ban wallets that could be tied to criminal activity.
The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.
desktopentree 1 days ago [-]
[dead]
nohell 1 days ago [-]
Why not just accept Monero? It acts more like cash. Do you really want to leak every transaction you've ever done, every time you buy something?
Bitcoin is surveillance capitalism dream!
Cider9986 1 days ago [-]
Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments. I still think Bitcoin is better than fiat because at least it doesn't require an ID to make a wallet and it's self custody.
Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.
hggh 1 days ago [-]
> Bitcoin is slow as well, unusable for payments
Indeed, but fortunately, BTC was forked at the right time
simonmales 1 days ago [-]
Lightning ain't slow though.
octocop 1 days ago [-]
Looks solid
Rendered at 20:58:06 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
For whoever posted, your cost calculator should be first thing on the page, and you "How we calculated this number" link is broken
This has the default inverted.
The best place for the traditional payments system is when you're making a large purchase from a questionable seller, and then you're willing to pay extra for the assurance that you can reverse the transaction.
If you're making a small purchase or buying from someone you regularly do business with, why would you want the cost of other customers' chargeback fraud or use of stolen cards to be added to the price you pay?
Really? Did we IT people decide giving up privacy for security is a good idea?
They make it incredibly hard to make sense of gathered intel
https://www.chainalysis.com/blockchain-intelligence/
They also do work to deanonymize other blockchains, including monero.
which they still haven't actually broken despite empty marketing claims which in reality is busting people on KYC CEXs.
Whether or not they've done it by breaking the protocol itself might be of academic concern but is irrelevant in practical terms.
> OPEN describes a feature of the services provided by applicant, in that applicant provides a "public node" that is accessible to anyone and allows users to interact with the blockchain network. See attached from opennode.com. Thus, "OPEN" is descriptive of the applicant's services, in that it conveys the open and public nature of the node that the applicant provides.
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/documentviewer?caseId=sn97399846&docI...
https://www.taler.net/en/index.html
The buying power is all over the place.
- High risk customers that the shop can accept if there's no chargeback option. For these users that are excluded from many ecommerce shops that's a good option and they are willing to jump through some hoops
- Customers from countries that are restricted from using VISA / Mastercard
- People from countries with active sanctions against.
Wouldn't that be breaking the law selling to them?
1) Settlement time (wires only sporadically free in US, plus usually settle slower)
2) Irreversibility.
3) The tradfi ramps, if used, only have to be OK with crypto ramp, rather than the whole host of underlying transactions. It is conceivable some banks will tolerate crypto while not tolerating, say, directly handling a particular transaction.
4) Lowered friction for international transaction
5) One or both sides can be unbanked.
<transactionFeeDiscussion>
Citation needed. I'm looking at the transaction fees for lightning network and they are in the range of FedNow or RTP.
For Bitcoin it's not even close.
</transactionFeeDiscussion>
MasterCard was around in the 1950's, in 2026 they do not still use the same method of exchanging money as they did back then and have had to make big changes to their systems as time has gone on, Bitcoin does the same thing except it's not controlled by a banking cartel but by all it's userbase.
Bitcoin is absolutely not controlled by its user base, but by another cartel (made of mining pools and exchanges). You, as a user have literally no say in any decisions taken by bitcoin except voting with your feet, which is exactly what you're suggesting against Visa & MasterCard's (which aren't banks by the way…)
If a large enough percentage of the node runners need refuses to propogate a block from a bad actor, then another miner can mine the same block and get the reward.
In an ideal world the best non-miners can do is prevent some transactions by preventing them to reach the mempool, but you're not going to block an exchange this way either.
The bitcoin protocol is actually very friendly to centralization, the only mechanism that was supposed to prevent it was the PoW, which failed because ASICs exist. And as a result, in practice it's been very centralized for more than a decade now.
Lack of chargeback risk seems nice for businesses.
(Chargeback exists for a reason, and the reason isn't to piss off businesses).
Chargebacks exist in the real world because long, long ago people recognized that electronic payment systems are fertile soil for scammers. The "lack of chargeback risk" that cryptobros keep chirping about is nowhere near the flex they think it is.
Again, this is by design. Such safeguards exist for a good reason. They are tools that are as necessary as a policeman's gun. Yes, they are tools that can be (and have been) abused and for which there should also be guardrails and oversight in place. But saying that crypto is better than "government based currency" because crypto has no such safeguards in place is the same thing as saying Wal Mart security officers are better than police officers because they don't carry guns. It is a naive thought at best.
The Epstein class and the Bankman-Fried class are the same people (and don't get fooled by their patronyms, it has nothing to do with Jews, and all to do with the American elite). And Trump is both an friend of Epstein and a proponent of cryptocurrencies.
Pick your poison, do you trust corrupt institutions or yourself more.
The same institutions that caused the 2008 crash, the same institutions that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply, the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor and stuck by constantly inflating their savings away?
Yes, I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.
You rightly call that a “crash” that is nowhere near the scale of the regular bitcoin price fluctuations!
> that in the last 5 years have printed 50% more of the total US dollar supply,
Better trust an ecosystem that has created an endless amount of virtual money over the past 15 years instead then…
> the institutions that keep the poorest and lowest classes perpetually poor
Did you miss the fact that you now need an entire data center worth of specialized hardware to mine bitcoin? It was supposed to be a democratic hacker currency that anyone can mine, yet it is entirely controlled by a handful of hyperscalers… Pretty much no individual can even hold a full bitcoin now, talk about keeping people poor.
> I think I will trust Bitcoin and my hardware wallet more.
Delusional.
You lose your wallet, you make a few phone calls or walk into a bank and get a new card. You lose very little more than some time. Losing your crypto key means you lose your crypto.
Those are not at all the same thing.
Their rates are not a big inconvenience, IMO
I thought it was a vanity coin now
You request $100, the customer pays 0.00152 BTC, and then you get $99.
But 0.00152 BTC is almost $100? If I’m a business why would I pay $100 in BTC fees for a $100 transaction?
What is this solving? I’ll never understand crypto.
Edit: nvm I’m dumdum. Will get coffee. Thanks to everyone who replied.
The fee is $1. They charge a 1% fee for instant payouts.
The merchant requests 100 USD. The user pays X BTC equivalent to 100 USD. The merchant receives 99 USD aka the fee is 1 USD
"open" is simply a vague word that you are assigning more meaning to than it actually means.
Seriously, though. Without legal teeth and against marketing, "Open" never much stood a chance.
Yes, it's scam city too, but it will be interesting to see if "permissionless money" actually happens and how.
And for the record, most people here pointing out that bitcoin itself, as perhaps this "opennode" may be useless here, are correct. Bitcoin mostly can no longer do what it says on the box, but newer forms can.
Have used it for accepting LN transactions for years.
and C#, I would rather have something in Go/Rust.
it always stike me how whacky ETH dev community is (based on their slack). like you have ETH core written in Go, just make a nice open source ETH gateway with nice UI. nope. neither core team nor community don't care.
and BTC has some Windows XP era C# monstrosity
Naturally, I would prefer a non-windows language, but it is literally a black box that works.
Did you mean Bitcoin Cash?
I prefer the trend of using stable coins for payment instead. I think merchants are much more willing to work with a digital dollars than with something with constantly fluctuating value.
You can't censor Bitcoin.
Your payment processor could be legally restricted from paying you your bitcoin.
The merchant should send the funds (sweep the UTXO) back to you if the funds are flagged. So you should not be out of pocket.
The merchant can also pick to use Lightning and keep the Bitcoin instead of selling it for fiat.
Bitcoin is surveillance capitalism dream!
Monero is the best crypto we have for currencies, though. And currency is the only value I see in crypto.
Indeed, but fortunately, BTC was forked at the right time