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One of the most interesting implications of this is that it is a slight vindication of the bitcoin maximalist "bitcoin fixes this" mantra. If a government can't exercise control over your unit of account, it doesn't matter what they sanction.

Of course the "bitcoin" that "fixes this" isn't the one we have in reality -- you can't use it widely and cheaply to transact and it's so volatile as to be useless as the unit of account for anyone with more than a few thousand $ nw.




Bitcoin fixes this by using a different transaction system then allows you to ignore dust sent to you and never spend it.


On the "cheap to transact" side, lightning wallets let you send for typically less than a penny, and without waiting for block confirmation.


Further, Bitcoin fees are often below 50 cents. For a transaction of any size.

https://mempool.space/


Avalanche lets you natively bridge bitcoin to their network, and it lets you transact fairly cheaply (think my last transaction was $.15) and their consensus algorithm can reach finality pretty quickly. Typically around 2 seconds. But it also has smart contract support.


So does Solana, where transactions are $0.00001 and finalize faster than google's homepage loads.


Lightning isn’t decentralized though. They just reinvented PayPal.


That's completely untrue.


It is federated PayPal.


No it is not. It's a P2P payment network.


> you can't use it widely and cheaply to transact and it's so volatile as to be useless as the unit of account for anyone with more than a few thousand $ nw.

borrow against it. transact with what you borrow.


Borrow what: fiat or other crypto? Transact - how precisely?

Give me an example.


There are a number of lending/borrowing protocols.

https://aave.com/

Supply wbtc, borrow usdc, convert to fiat, if you need.




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