At this point, Bitcoin is everywhere and it's here to stay. Investment funds are buying bitcoin, corporations like Microstrategy are buying bitcoin and in Latin America small businesses and individuals are adopting Bitcoin at lightning speed (pun intended). We've got Bitcoin Beach in El Salvador where president Nayib Bukele has actually made Bitcoin legal tender.
In Guatemala, we've got Bitcoin Lake with orange tuk tuk taxis and even a water taxi called Pier to Pier:
and just next door, in Costa Rica, there's Bitcoin Jungle. Bitcoiners from all over the world are flocking to these destinations to host conferences, festivals and just show their online followers how easy it is to live on a Bitcoin standard in these countries.
The problem with Bitcoin is that it's slow. Sending a bitcoin on-chain transaction could take you anywhere from 10 minutes to a couple of days. Imagine holding up a grocery line for 48 hours, lol Yeah, that's not going to fly, is it?
Layer 2 solutions
Lightning Network
To fix this, Lightning Labs developed the Lightning network, the most popular layer 2 solution to the above problem. By connecting your Lightning wallet to a Lightning network node, you are able to send even small amounts of Bitcoin very fast. This means that development teams like IBEX and Osmo have been able to build interfaces for businesses to accept Bitcoin payments and even have the option of converting that Bitcoin to fiat currency in the back end and have it deposited to a bank account.
Check out IBEX Pay here
The interface is super easy to use. I use it at my business @recording-box and the best part about it is it integrates perfectly with other L2 solutions developed on the Hive blockchain: @keychain and @v4vapp.
Keychain+V4V
Keychain and V4Vapp are both dapps built on the HIVE blockchain. Keychain is used to store your private keys so you can sign transactions online and v4vapp is a an interface to a Lightning network node that will allow you to send payments to and receive payments from the Lightning network. The beauty of using this amazing combo is that a user is able to effortlessly pay for food or services at any of the marchants that are already touting that "Bitcoin is accepted here".
Both the Lightning network and Keychain+V4V work great, but I'm obviously more inclined to use the latter because it's more decentralized and I can use HIVE's native $HBD stablecoin to pay for goods and services. I've been so absolutely amazed by how easy it is to use these tools, that I've make time every other week to find a new shot that will accept Bitcoin and make a tutorial video showing folks how easy it is to use them.
These are some of the videos I've made lately:
If Bitcoin is recognized and accepted all over the place and my user experience using V4V is seamless. Why would I try to convince folks that Hive blockchain is better than Lightning when I can just show them how to use the tech without them needing to understand all the intricacies under the hood?
The answer is: I don't have to.
I'm just going to take advantage of the fact that everybody knows the Bitcoin name and I use #freedomtools like Hive Keychain and V4V that integrate perfectly with the protocol. That's it.
Like I've said before: I'm just going to use the tech without sounding like a timeshare sales rep.
