At this point it can be used for payments practically everywhere where Bitcoin accepted, but it’s not yet practical for payments over $100 as far as I know, so I still only use the base Bitcoin layer for paying for my travels.
There are new algorithms in late research phase though for much larger payments (like $5000) that are expected to go into production this year. I’m waiting for that before switching to using lightning network.
For people in the US though they can just go into a Walmart or McDonald’s and use it right now.
> For people in the US though they can just go into a Walmart or McDonald’s and use it right now.
Am I right to assume that "use" here is in the same sense[1] that you can "use" "dollars" to pay your Big Mac in Paris with your US credit card? I.e. French McDonald's does not set the price in dollars but euros and does not need to touch dollars with a ten foot pole during the whole process and receives euros in their account?
[1] Which hardly makes any sense to me, to be honest.
Why doesn’t it make sense to use your USD based credit card in France? I use both EUR based credit card and my Bitcoin wallet while travelling in Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Panama, and setting up bank accounts in those countries would be infinitely harder.
Regarding hotels and flights, I book it on internet, and I don’t even know which country the travel agencies are located, and I don’t care.
> It does not make sense (to me) to say that you use dollars to buy a big mac in Paris. You use euros, which your credit card company conveniently bills from you as dollars.
I see your point. To be more precise I use the MasterCard payment network that uses a combination of Mexican Peso, USD, and EUR in the background to settle with the merchant’s bank periodically in the background (and as I use Revolut based Mastercard, it’s even more complex).
Last month the biggest POS company integrated the lightning network, an international payment network protocol, that uses Bitcoin as its settlement currency and Bitcoin network using Strike, and as the POS company does the settlement with the credit card company, the merchant in practice doesn’t see the difference between accepting credit card payment or lightning payment, as it doesn’t handle any of the two (the POS provider handles them).
It does not make sense (to me) to say that you use dollars to buy a big mac in Paris. You use euros, which your credit card company conveniently bills from you as dollars.
but yeah, bitcoin has no utility. you'd just have to wait until The Merge inevitably occurs, or use any of the few PoS cryptocurrencies that are generally better & more capable than bitcoin in every capacity, like Avalanche, Cardano, Fantom, Solana, etc.
