No. It cannot. Bitcoin cannot be used, because the rate of transactions is much to low for such an application. Currently its only use is gambling and burning the planet.

Last time I checked, in El Salvador you could buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Bitcoin.

People aren't actually making transactions within the Bitcoin chain there. It wouldn't work out, the on-chain fees are outrageous.

Burning the planet is the primary effect. The beer is a side effect :)

Under 10 transactions per second globally is why Bitcoin isn’t used in retail.

Micropayments and nanopayments require thousands and tens of thousands TPS. There are newer generations of crypto that can do that and with none of the energy consumption problems of Bitcoin and other Proof of Work systems.

Sphinx chat payments work exclusively on Lightning and so is the El Salvador Chico wallet. Why do people keep using the same uninformed arguments every time bitcoin is mentioned?

Sounds like recentralization to me.

IMHO, if we’re gonna do cryptocurrency, we should try to make as many transactions as possible on layer 1.

You can run Sphinx on your own hardware. You can pay bills on El Salvador with any LN wallet connected to any node.

I think summm's comment was mocking anti-bitcoiners, but some people probably took it seriously.

No, you in El Salvador you can buy beer from a machine with a cell phone using Chivo, which is a local payment scheme with a centralized ledger that's just denominated in BTC.

You can send money to/from Chivo using Bitcoin; but the settlement of that beer purchase would not involve Bitcoin network at all.

That is just a PR stunt, just like the Bitcoin city that "is going to be built"

He said on the lightning network.