How can I pay my bills with bitcoin while being debanked?
Could you clarify what you find interesting about it? I skimmed their website and looks like just a lightning wallet. Am I missing some key feature that helps one interact with fiat systems?
BTC for investment or long-term store of value. BCH, or various other alternatives (Litecoin, XRP, Stellar, cough Nano cough), for making payments. But if you can use the Lightning network, then BTC works for payments as well (arguably - in this space anything and everything is highly arguable).
If you're seriously looking down the track at using cryptocurrency, spend some time playing with small amounts of it to see how it all works. Different coins have different use-cases, and it's very confusing to come from zero knowledge. Also transferring and converting between different coin types can kill you in fees, so keep an eye on that as well.
And in doing your research don't believe what anyone says about anything, especially youtube folks. Find the most likely narratives amongst the jungle of snakes and traps, based on your own experience at detecting bullshit and applying logic.
Bitcoin itself has the longest, most proven history. It's the safest house in the least safe neighbourhood. It's also the best performing asset of it's lifetime so far (something like that anyway).
It's use-case has changed since it was created, and there are additional use-cases to which other cryptocurrencies cater, smart contracts being the primary example (which then facilitate a whole other ecosystem of products, of arguable value and utility to humanity).
I'm around 50% bitcoin-maxi, to expose my illogical stance :)
I also have barely a little toe dipped into that particular asset pool, so my opinion isn't necessarily fully formed or well founded.
Acting as an alternative to krupan's Bitcoin-centric answer:
- There are other crypto rails other than Bitcoin that could be used in its place. USDC & stablecoins in general is going to be the medium-term winners in this space, as more services are set up to help people pay their bills with stablecoins. Here are 2 services that I've found within a few minutes of searching "USDC pay bill":
https://www.spritz.finance/blog/pay-bills-crypto
- As for transaction costs, L2s are already being deployed, and their fees will only be further reduced as improvements to the L2 networks are made.
> Optimism is an EVM-equivalent Optimistic Rollup chain.
I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.
> I’ll be right back, I need to explain this one to grandma.
Term by term:
- EVM-equivalent: The Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is the part that allows smart contract code can be run on the network. EVM-equivalency means that you can just drop in your smart contract code, and it has to run as it would on Ethereum itself.
- Optimistic Rollup: A Rollup is the current consensus for scaling up the network, by outsourcing compute to other networks, and pushing the important end state back into Ethereum. Optimistic rollups do this by assuming that there'll be at least 1 person to challenge a proposed block whenever that block's invalid. This setup however has the shortcoming of needing there to be a challenge window for other participants in the network to have time to respond.
It's the unfortunate consequence of one gigantic unaddressable problem:
USD can only be minted efficiently by the Fed.
- Collateralized stablecoins exist, but they're inefficient in that they must be overcollateralized to cushion against falling asset values.
- USDC & their kind are efficient, but at the cost of being centralization vectors as a result of current US legislation
- An efficient synthetic stablecoin can exist, but it requires deep liquidity in the marketplace to keep the peg stable. (Probably > $100B at the ready to absorb panic sells) Synthetic stocks are the closest analogy available for this, but applied upon a currency. The chicken-and-egg means that bootstrapping something like this is not feasible at small scales: It needs to be big from the get go.
Law: 18 U.S. Code § 1960