We work for money or for bitcoin, and hold our bitcoin to separate us from fiat currencies and their declines of purchasing power over time. Hodling bitcoin (in long term) saves us from inflationary or hyperinflationary issues of fiat currencies. For example Purchasing power of the U.S. Dollar over time.

However we always need to have money or bitcoin for spendings and it can be from our part of saving in fiat currency or from part of our bitcoins that is in our plans for withdrawals over time.

There is nothing wrong or bad by withdrawing our bitcoins over time and we only need to have good plans for it.
[ANN] JJG Sustainable Bitcoin Withdrawal Strategy.
https://bitcoindata.science/withdrawal-strategy

Exactly, you are another gold bug like Peter Schiff who refuses to acknowledge basic facts and that is why this is a low level discussion, and the most basic fact here is that bitcoin is like gold but much better. Everything else is bullshit from a gold bug who is not worth wasting time with.


Nobody is going to do what you say, or if you prefer, a percentage of people so low that it is insignificant. A currency is used if it is useful to use and there are too many reasons not to use bitcoin as a currency, at least as of today.

I haven't read about this tech, I think there's no point if Bitcoin L1 is so limited by the protocol.
But I'm not interested in tech that isn't out yet - too many promises have been made over the years, and most of them turned out to be worthless (just look at LN).
So, when I see "Upcoming" what I really see is: "We got nothing".

I will read more into it when it comes out and matures a bit, so all shortcomings and bottlenecks unfold.


Yes, Monero is limited by infrastructure as opposed to being limited by the protocol, like in Bitcoin.  

Would decentralization suffer? Sure, but only a bit - many people have fiber connections nowadays, and hard drives are cheap and getting cheaper.  

Statistically, many people still run on slow connections, but these people probably haven't even heard of Monero.  

I use a 5G network for my connection; it averages 600 to 800 Mbit just by connecting my phone to the laptop.

The point is, Monero is ready for the future with its protocol, while Bitcoin is very limited so it can run on outdated computers that don't contribute anything to security by being just passive nodes.

Internet infrastructure is only getting faster, personal computers are getting more powerful, and almost every kid today has the computing power of a supercomputer from yesterday.  

Using Bitcoin today is like using Windows 3.11.

IMO that's too fatalist, I think current payment usage is low mainly by psychological reasons, but if you don't want to go into detail here let's agree to disagree. If you want you can however list your reasons to "not" use it - if it's only "fees", then I've already written my answer in the OP.

The main reason why covenants aren't implemented is that there are several competing options and there's a debate which one is the best, because of Bitcoin's conservative development model oriented on stability.

The code for covenants has already been written several years ago (OP_CTV is 5 years old, OP_CAT was even already enabled in Satoshi's version but got disabled) and there are several BIPs. Taproot also was discussed during many years.

In addition, some developers are now more cautious because they think Taproot enabled Ordinals (although I dispute this), and thus they first want to investigate more in depth if there are undesirable use cases which should be prevented to exist (like MEV extraction, some also don't like hashrate escrows for Drivechains, etc.).

Your decision to review these solutions when they're more mature is of course okay - but saying something is impossible without any proof, is not.

Thank you, it is still one of Bitcoin usecases, I have no doubt about it now and in future.

I am sure there are people who regret or very regret about their past Bitcoin spendings and I can understand their feelings.

With me, I don't have that feeling or more frankly to say, I used to have that feeling but when I have more experience with Bitcoin and this market, as well as when I get older, I become a different person (with more experience in life, not only with Bitcoin), my feeling about it changed entirely. There is nothing to regret, as said in my previous post, if you spent your bitcoin in the past for something meaningful with you or your family at that moment. Think about it like if you did not sell bitcoin for that important spending, what will you do?

Of course there are many big reasons to be regretful if your spendings in the past are for something not too important. I don't know laszlo feels regretful or not, deeply in his heart, but in many interviews, he said he does not regret about it.

Laszlo showed us all that we should spend some of our Bitcoin. Four years ago, I sold a part of my Bitcoin to buy a laptop. Today, that same amount of Bitcoin might be enough to buy a car!  However, I have no regrets. If I had thousands of Bitcoins but couldn't spend them, I wouldn’t really have any Bitcoin.

For 1, sidechain-style and Ark-style L2s do need much less L1 transactions to work than LN needs because users don't need to refill liquidity that frequently, and they can onboard without any L1 transaction. Yes, they're not "mainstream" still, so at least if you're talking about handling "billions of txes per day", at a whole your argument is valid and we have to continue to wait a bit.

For 2, I'm aware of that that dilemma and it will be interesting how it plays out in 15-20 years when rewards will begin to become quite small. The idea of many developers is that a massive adoption for payments would still lead to significant fees on L1 (sidechain peg-outs, Lightning channel openings and closures). And as a L1 transaction always is safer than a L2 transaction, the demand for L1 should still be there for high-volume txes. I however don't rule out that L2s indeed could bring fees down definitely. In this case, and only if this becomes dangerous for the security budget (this moment is still quite far away), I would support a switch to a tail emission.

This is true, but that wouldn't only "upset investors". A Bitcoin hard fork would set a precedent and could lead to more afterwards, and some think it's dangerous if Bitcoin chooses the path many altcoins (like ETH) simply incorporate hundreds of new features via hardforks every couple of months. A split with significant value on the minority chain would also mean practical problems for all users as they will have to manage two differnet coins. And that at each fork. So I personally think this stability-oriented path is correct, and a hardfork should only be carried out in an extreme emergency.

The adaptive block size is something I would support if necessary. But I don't think we'll see it if there are no massive throughput problems in the next years. If LN was more popular Bitcoin would have even less days with more than 10 sats/vbyte than now. These kind of experiments is where altcoins can shine.

And also additionally: I'm sometimes looking onto the devs mailing lists and the discussions there seem sincere and fundamented with technical reasons, not with some concern about some investor.

Yep. Just as it was said in the OP, for some bigger purchases, BTC is a great option, and we should be shy to use it that way too, apart from only hodling and hoarding it.

that is true but we shouldn’t limit our payment method to bitcoin because it is possible that the merchants really have no idea about bitcoin yet and if we keep being too persistent they might get a bad impression of bitcoin

instead we should ask if they accept bitcoin if yes then great and if not then we should kindly recommend it to them

This is not about enforcement, but having an alternative to making payment aside the use of fiat, if the institution or platform you're using allows for that, then there's nothing too difficult to having it as part of the available options we can have in making payment, after all, i have a list here from the link am about to share on where you can spend your bitcoin, so using it to make a payment is just an alternative and not a compulsory thing to do, holding is not what everyone of us will all have to do at the same time as well, some are buying while some selling and at the same time we have people that are holding.

where to spend bitcoin
https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/5467964.msg62902489#msg62902489