Am I right to assume that "use" here is in the same sense[1] that you can "use" "dollars" to pay your Big Mac in Paris with your US credit card? I.e. French McDonald's does not set the price in dollars but euros and does not need to touch dollars with a ten foot pole during the whole process and receives euros in their account?
[1] Which hardly makes any sense to me, to be honest.
Regarding hotels and flights, I book it on internet, and I don’t even know which country the travel agencies are located, and I don’t care.
> It does not make sense (to me) to say that you use dollars to buy a big mac in Paris. You use euros, which your credit card company conveniently bills from you as dollars.
I see your point. To be more precise I use the MasterCard payment network that uses a combination of Mexican Peso, USD, and EUR in the background to settle with the merchant’s bank periodically in the background (and as I use Revolut based Mastercard, it’s even more complex).
Last month the biggest POS company integrated the lightning network, an international payment network protocol, that uses Bitcoin as its settlement currency and Bitcoin network using Strike, and as the POS company does the settlement with the credit card company, the merchant in practice doesn’t see the difference between accepting credit card payment or lightning payment, as it doesn’t handle any of the two (the POS provider handles them).
What's the significance of that $100 dollar amount with the lightning network?
There are new algorithms in late research phase though for much larger payments (like $5000) that are expected to go into production this year. I’m waiting for that before switching to using lightning network.
For people in the US though they can just go into a Walmart or McDonald’s and use it right now.