Having used bitcoins as money, I really want the confirmation times and transaction fees to go back to what they were a year or two ago. I keep hearing that this mythical lightning will fix things, and I sure hope it does.

I want internet money. I want to be able to send money to anyone, anywhere in the world, at the drop of a hat, as easy as email. I don't care about speculation or getting rich or avoiding taxes or sticking it to the man or anything like that. I just want to have a convenient way to get tipped on IRC by anyone at any time and to be able to repay in kind, to anyone at any time.

10 minutes isn't really the drop of a hat. But why do you need your first confirmation in approximately the next 10 minutes so badly anyway, especially when it shows up in the mempool pretty much immediately? I paid around 20 cents on an approximately $200 transaction a couple weekends ago, it got verified after about 4 hours but I was expecting longer, it would have been fine. In the last 24 hours, 36,332 transactions were verified with at most 30 cents in fees. (https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/) The estimated time bounds for a transaction in that pool are 25 minutes to 14 hours.

Just knowing it's in your mempool isn't a very strong guarantee that the payment will go through. Probably fine for reversible digital goods, but not much else. Some systems pay miners to look at their block templates to get a better assurance it will confirm (and that it won't be replaced), but it's still not very good, and given that Lightning is now running on mainnet there's little value in continuing in that direction.

We've mostly had this for years, in the form of PayPal. Your ID even is your email.

The issues with PayPal have mostly been interfacing with fiat currency, which any system will have to deal with, and transaction fees, which any system will have.

The real problem IMO is the lack of a de-facto service that everyone all around the world has, and we're kind of in this position: https://xkcd.com/927/

Paypal doesn't work well across international boundaries. It's not convenient for IRC tipping. It's not internet money. And it's not my money, it's their money which they usually will give to me at their pleasure.

Having family and friends in different countries who use different currencies, let me tell you, Paypal is not the solution I want.

I avoid using PayPal internationally because they make it hard for me to pay in foreign currency denominations (they "helpfully" insist on being my exchange) but I have used it, it was no "worse" really than paying domestically. What makes them bad for you for international?

I argue it's not convenient for IRC tipping simply because 1) software is not well-integrated for minimal clicks 2) the other person might not have PayPal.

Don't get me wrong, I don't love PayPal, but I don't think Bitcoin brings anything really fundamentally important & new to the table, except maybe the decentralized part. Though, I suppose you could argue the decentralized nature of email was key for its universal adoption today.

That "helpful" exchange also charges a 3% fee on all currency exchange, on top of their regular fees.

You can insist that they charge you in the same currency as you wish to pay with and your bank will do the exchange at an order of magnitude lower fee. Not everyone knows this. The user interface also doesn't make it very clear (which perhaps surprised no one).

It would be the "not my money" part that is fundamentally different with Paypal. Paypal can choose to withhold this money at any time for any reason, and they have done so in the past. A lot of the money isn't even FDIC insured in the event of bankruptcy etc.

It straight up didn't work with my Vietnamese friend

Have a look at Transferwise.

I transfer money to my mum in the UK once a month from my Australia debit card and its in her account within minutes, and the fees are far lower than a bank transfer.

PayPal is a US-based centralized corporation. They're an application with a single point of failure.

PayPal? Is it this strange service based in USA (of all countries) which requires me to send them a utility bill? Seriously?

Are there any Bitcoin exchanges that don't require photo ID?

Yes. Some only require that if you wish to withdraw or deposit fiat over some daily limit.

You can create a scarce token with all the qualities you desire in like 5 minutes. Creating 'internet money' with a stable value and network of potential transactees probably looks exactly like Bitcoin's development though.

Bitcoin is not set up to ever be "stable" by any definition.

Real currency has a federal reserve to balance supply against demand and keep the value steady.

BTC has entirely demand-driven value-- which is precisely as steady and predictable as the human mind.

I wonder how real currencies existed before central banks...

They weren't stable.

You mean stable like the US dollar which went from $35 per ounce of gold when Nixon closed the gold window to $668 ten years later? By contrast the aureus, the solidus, the fiorino and many other metal based currencies preserved their value over several centuries. What eventually destroyed those currencies was not the lack of a central bank but on the contrary eventual debasement by the central authority.

Actually, I'm glad you pointed to the failure of the gold standard. It's a great example of why commodity money is dangerous.

The gold standard was abolished because the economy was on the brink of collapse. A dollar grossly mismeasured the value of an ounce of gold, because there were far FAR mare dollars than gold to back them, and the mapping of gold to dollars was not adjusted at all (from $35/oz) despite the discrepancy growing and growing for decades. In a sense, each ounce of gold was being double-counted 100 times over by so many dollars floating around in the economy. That situation was horribly unstable, because it was at huge risk of a run on gold (You'd have a lot more wealth if you exchange your dollar for gold; because of the aforementioned double counting, an ounce of gold actually corresponds to a great many dollars. If everyone had realized that and done it, the economy would have been toast).

Disconnecting the dollar from gold allowed the value of an ounce of gold to be correctly measured. So while other prices in the economy remained stable, gold shot up, because now the market was free to price it accurately (reflecting that the economy had grown far faster than the supply of gold). That doesn't indicate inflation, it precisely illustrates how dangerously out of whack things were before the gold standard was lifted.

Looking at the Coinbase graphs reminds me of reading CPU charts, comparing resource use between 3 web servers. Sometimes one coin will spike or dip independently, indicating higher utilization of one coin over the other 2 - an arbitrage opportunity; other times all 3 coins see a matching dip or raise, likely indicating a systematic cause.

I'm mostly happy with bitcoins except for what I mentioned: transaction fees and waiting times. If those things can really be brought down by the lightning network, that's all I care about.

Financial stability seems like a secondary concern that cannot be solved via computer code but might instead require other kinds of human codification, perhaps legal.

>This is precisely what Lightning aims to solve, and at least anecdotally so far, has done so in the case of LTC.

Which LTC wallet support LN in production?