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Comment by fortran77 | Hacker News Reader

There are many things that keep me away from bitcoin:

1. It doesn't seem to be useful for buying things. It takes a long time to complete a transaction, and it's surprisingly traceable.

2. It's not a stable place to store money

3. There are many, many, scams

4. People get robbed all the time, even from the most popular services like "coinbase." (I just learned about a few of the coinbase security holes from https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/112/ )

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look into the lightning network

Lightning network is non-cryprocurrency ledger that happens to use Bitcoin for eventual settlement. If you are going to use lightning you may as well use a normal debit card.

lightning has the perks of being instantaneous, free or nearly free, and not tied to a specific currency. With visa, it's not instantaneous, charges vendors a 3% tx fee each time a card is used, and requires international clearing houses for foreign payments

I'm not sure how "non-cryprocurrency" applies to lightning in anyway. Lightning channels are denominated only in bitcoin. There is no non-cryptocurrency aspect of it. Lightning has many properties that a debit card does not. For example not having to trust a bank to grant you an account, and supporting peer to peer transactions without intermediaries. Debit card transactions are limited from below by fees, fees on lightning are fractions of a penny, thus allowing micropayments that are not feasible with a debit card.

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