Ive been running a Bitcoin and Lightning node for nearly two years now. It's super easy to get started and it's a great way to support the network.

I think dollarized nations are prime candidates for orange pilling. They don't control their currency anyway and realizing that they really have nothing to lose by adding decentralized sound money as legal tender makes a lot of sense.

Generally, I think the playbook for Bitcoin as legal tender is being written right in front of our eyes in El Salvador right now. If it is generally considered to be a success a year or two down the line I think the dominoes will really start to fall.

The Lightning Network hasn't really seen a hockey stick like adoption from what I can tell. What do you think is holding Lightning network adoption back? Do you think the PoS integration Strike is launching could be a catalyst in this regard?

Interesting that the timeline is so vague. Hopefully it will rollout soon!

If you're not running your own node there are several services that will swap sats for onchain/offchain for you.

Haha, yeah me too when I first read about it to be honest.

1 - You can either store sats on Lightning by running your own node. You're keeping sats in a hot wallet though so it will never be as secure as keeping your Bitcoin in cold storage, but as long as you secure your node well and safely store your seed you should be fine. The alternative is to go for a custodial solution by utilizing something like Muun, WalletOfSatoshi or some other reputable actor in the space if you dont feel like running your own node.

2 - The Lightning Network holds tremendous potential. It effectively solves the variable time and cost a Bitcoin transaction involves El Salvador's Bitcoin onboarding is pretty much completely based on Lightning (and level 3 solutions). We are still in the very early days of Lightning Network adoption though and there are several significant technological developments in the pipeline such as Pickard Payments / split payments that will make LN scale a lot better and handle larger transactions more smoothly. The LN hasn't seen the hockey stick level of adoption but I'm pretty sure it's coming. It's pretty much the only way for Bitcoin to be used for everyday payments. Furthermore, what Strike is doing shows that you can utilize Bitcoin the network without even thinking about bitcoin the asset, allowing users to essentially transfer dollars or any other form of currency over the Lightning network. If you don't yet understand the difference between Bitcoin and bitcoin I recommend reading up on that.

Most retail investors come in during the raging bull runs and buy the top. Nothing new there.

Lyn is one of the smartest people out there. She raises some legitimate concerns here for sure. However, to play the devils advocate I feel there’s only room for one major PoW based blockchain. Ethereum as a pure dApp and smart contract platform might just be able to pull off being PoS. No, it won’t be anywhere close to as decentralized or secure as Bitcoin but maybe it just doesn’t need to be. Idk. I’m generally skeptical of PoS and the need for stuff like Solana and Cardano to even be a blockchain at all, but the Ethereum developer eco system is really mature and I can hesitantly agree that some of its utility holds potential. It just won’t ever compete with Bitcoin.

The 5G rollout just started recently. Unfortunately, Nova Labs have to get licensed spectrum in every single individual country they want to roll out 5G radios in. In the US they are using the CBRS band which is open for public use. I don’t think many other countries have anything similar so it’s possible, likely even, that Helium based 5G won’t be available in a large number anytime soon.

That said, the idea is great. Cellular carriers have very little incentive to build out infrastructure in rural areas and licensing spectrum is extremely expensive. So being able to a) rely on a decentralized 5G infrastructure in areas they don’t offer coverage in themselves and b) offload users in high density areas to different frequencies is valuable for everyone, including the telco companies.

Just to be very clear. I don’t buy HNT or speculate in its price, but I do use the network with dozens of LoRa devices and love the idea. There are other LoRa networks such as TTN but the Helium network dwarfs other alternatives in terms of coverage since there’s an incentive to set up hotspots in areas with poor coverage

Humans have literally used almost everything as money throughout history. If you haven’t read “The Bitcoin Standard” you might want to consider doing so :)

Except Helium is now also offering 5G and have WiFi on the roadmap.

Hardware wallets won’t suddenly stop functioning if the company goes out of business, but I get your point. There are a multitude of open source hardware wallets out there so even if the company behind it goes away the source code for the firmware is available online for anyone to contribute to. Both Bitbox and Trezor are good examples.

Anything can be money. Doesn’t mean that it’s anywhere near as good money as Bitcoin is but it has a value and it’s provided as an incentive to route data traffic for IoT devices, similarly to what you describe in your post.

I won’t pretend to be able to predict the bottom. Statistically, we’re all exceptionally terrible at it. However, nothing has changed with the fundamentals of Bitcoin so I’m happy to stack as many sats as I can.

That said, I doubt we’ll go much lower than 20-15k.

You’re basically describing Helium ;)

Well put. Bitcoin will be for finance what the internet was for communication.

Ideally, mining power wouldn’t be so concentrated but the beauty of Bitcoin is that the miners don’t control the network. The node operators do, and pretty much anyone can run a node. Remember, miners opposed SegWit but they were forced to comply thanks to the nodes.