What is it then?
> I would not go far to dismiss all of them.
I would. Every single crypto is an affinity scam of Bitcoin. They're just unregistered securities of companies. Bitcoin is just an open and neutral protocol that's not owned by any company.
I could not care less about attempting to 'use' a cryptocurrency that is slower than VISA and as extremely volatile for merchants to use to accept payments with and is useless as 'digital gold'.
Just ask El Salvador.
It is a centralized off-chain layer 2 service which does not use the blockchain to record those transactions. A complete contradiction to the whole point of Bitcoin's purpose.
> I would. Every single crypto is an affinity scam of Bitcoin.
Bitcoin itself is included then, since it was supposed to be a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Instead it is somehow a 'store of value' or 'Digital gold', beyond slow as soon as it can't be scaled up to hundreds of millions of users using it (significantly slower than VISA), thus cannot be used as a form of payment but it is purely only useful as a speculative asset.
Therefore, Bitcoin has failed in its entire purpose.
In that case to do a fair comparison you shouldn't count bank transfers as a part of the dollar system either. The logical conclusion then is that the dollar is a terrible currency that forces you to travel thousands of kilometers just to do a payment.
Lightning is the opposite. A centralized, layer 2 off-chain system that goes against the point of Bitcoin. That is even before I even mentioned why it can't even use it as a currency either.
LN doesn't fit BTC core values and BTC without LN doesn't work => BTC doesn't work
But that's a non sequitur, even if it's true that LN doesn't fit BTC values (which is debatible) and BTC can't stand on its own (which is also not clear) that doesn't imply that BTC doesn't work. Mainly because there are many people out there that see BTC only as a tool that fills their needs better than the alternatives, and can't care less about the inner philosophy. For those people BTC+LN works perfectly. You could say "Ok BTC can work but not without ditching it's values". But then you should provide some arguments about why can't exist a L2 solution that conserves those values.
Strawman. I did not say it 'doesn't work'. I am saying it is pointless to discuss about 'decentralization' whilst telling people to use a system that is centralized by design which defeats the purpose of Bitcoin. Not even the transactions are transparent on the Lightning Network as it is off-chain.
> even if it's true that LN doesn't fit BTC values (which is debatible) and BTC can't stand on its own (which is also not clear) that doesn't imply that BTC doesn't work.
It is all true: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/aba062
> Mainly because there are many people out there that see BTC only as a tool that fills their needs better than the alternatives, and can't care less about the inner philosophy.
You do realise there are more people not using it for actual on-chain payments and are just using it for hodling and speculation?
Another certainty is that on-chain Bitcoin payments are many times slower than VISA, and Mastercard, so why would merchants bother with accepting Bitcoin in supermarkets and groceries especially when the majority of users are not using it for payments and are only hodling it? No where in the Bitcoin whitepaper was it supposed to be a 'store of value' used for speculation.
Not only it tells us that on-chain payments with Bitcoin has failed, it also means that if one was to suggest 'use the Lightning Network' as the workaround for this failure of Bitcoin being unable to be scaled up, then the 'decentralization' argument there is null and void.
I would not go far to dismiss all of them.