I used it as actual currency not long ago to buy phone credit on Silent Link via the lightning network. So it is possible if quite a niche use case. Silent Link is quite cool by the way - they have an esim that works with almost every network on the planet and the credit doesn't expire.
Yeah, so how can you explain I use it for daily payments here in El Salvador, buying groceries, coffee and pupusas? I need to use fiat maybe once a week, otherwise I pay with bitcoin for everything
And it never will be. There is simply no point to register/log every expense at every gas station in a global, distributed ledger. Actual payments will be done with Layer-2 protocols, such as Lightning or Liquid, which are kind-of separate networks and protocols, but yet rely on the BTC network.
The idea that everyone will run custodial BTC/Lightning wallets is also rubbish. In the future, there will be institutions that do what banks do today: Give out accounts, which are non-custodial wallets like your todays online banking, and settle transfers with other banks in bulk by doing actual BTC onchain transactions.
Average Joe in 2040 will not run his own wallet but use an external service provider - just as Joe is not a member of the SWIFT transaction network, he will not be settling debt with BTC transactions but rather have an "account" and pay with whatever L2/L3 technology we will come up with.
It will be like in the gold-standard days. You had the right to exchange your paper dollars for gold, but no-one ever did. Yet every transaction was backend by gold, just as every L2/L3 transaction will be backed by bitcoin, though no onchain transaction will happen.
The whitepaper shows it was intended to be "peer to peer electronic cash". It did clearly fail at that goal since it has none of the privacy of cash and so on.
You can use bitcoin completely/as anonymously as cash if you wanted to, the same way you’d have to put in a bit of effort to have a completely anonymous cash transaction.
Monero (XMR) which is a fork of bitcoin, is much closer to actual cash
Monero is fine. But how can you even use bitcoin anonymously now? Even wasabi and samourai wallet are shut down as far as i know. Seems highly risky to use any tool like that since i dont know what the consequences will be in the future. Joinmarket? I'm sure it is possible but it is error-prone, takes so much effort, time and fees that i see it as a failure
I have used it, but i dont see how it is related to being able to transact privately. As soon as you do anything linked to your name with those coins puchased on bisq, the whole batch is linked to your identity
Arguably, that's exactly what it was designed for.
There was a very contentious split many years ago now (Bitcoin Cash vs Core fork) regarding this point. Until then, it was taken for granted that block size would continue increasing in proportion to transaction volume in order to facilitate such use. This was Satoshi's expectation, and there was little-to-no discussion otherwise. Quite suddenly, a few powerful, well-positioned people (with conflicting interests in the form of their Lightning side-chain solution) conspired to form a consensus of limiting on-chain transaction bandwidth via astroturfing and comprehensive censorship.
Whether they were responsible visionaries with the foresight to avert disaster using a novel solution, or spiteful saboteurs driven by greed and power, is up to the reader. Un/fortunately, they were very successful.
