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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you understand the practical business realities of the internet.

No typical business is going to work with BTC addresses on the raw. They're going to (and currently) using simple APIs like Coinbase API (https://developers.coinbase.com/) to "implement BTC receipts".

As far as US business is concerned, the typical payment processor for bitcoin is Coinbase. They handle the bitcoint transfer, transaction history, and conversion into USD all at the same time.

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There are many business that run their own payment infrastructure, BTCPay is the most popular. It is better for the network if people DONT use centralized providers. We all have the power to use decentralized infrastructure.

Bitcoin works the way it is intended, that is peer to peer payments. Everything else is just ecosystem, which can be replaced. Coinbase is important as an on-ramp for users for now, yes, but their importance to the network is peripheral.

And the Exim email-server and "bind" DNS server is "decentralized", except everybody uses gmail.com, or even centralized upon AWS.

There's your theory, and there's the practice of the internet and business. In theory, they should be the same. In practice, they're different.

Bitcoin doesn’t care about businesses. It doesn’t care about peoples wishes. It doesn’t care that everyone else is using Gmail. It provides a peer to peer, censorship resistant append only ledger for transactions secured by cryptographic signatures and proof of work. That is all. And that is plenty.

I agree. I think you two are talking past each other to a degree - Bitcoin the protocol is decentralized, Bitcoin the ecosystem in 2022 is moderately centralized in various ways.

Without an on-ramp and off-ramp for converting into dollars/euros, Bitcoin is entirely useless, even for the hardcore idealists like yourself. And those can quite easily be made illegal.

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