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they are not darknet but ive seen noncompliant commerce in research chemicals and unscheduled pharmaceuticals use lightning
Centralized services enables commerce at scale, and that web of trust grows just like the silk road, alphabay, airbnb, and coinbase.
Sure, you can buy some weed from your neighbour with a private Lightning payment from your Phoenix wallet to his Wallet of Satoshi and that has increased the overall network effect utility of Lightning as a medium of exchange for the purposes of commerce.
However, that's not massive scale and adoption like the silk road. The internet facilitates scale, and darkweb markets enable that.
A nostr-based Lightning marketplace could be cool, but the point of a darkweb marketplace is that there's some trusted intermediary that reduces counterparty risk.
If everything is peer to peer and there is no protections, there needs to be some reputation system or dispute resolution mechanism to reduce risk and coordinate trade.
Both alphabay and silk road acted as trusted custodial escrow systems in order to facilitate trade.
Is there even a darkweb market that supports Lightning today? Like in production, operational, facilitating commerce? Bitcoin does this for sure. But if there's no Lightning facilitated marketplaces then Lightning doesn't even compare to pure L1 on-chain Bitcoin.
How long could you operate a large Lightning node for the purposes of facilitating commerce on the scale of the silk road. Let's say you are the LSP to a self-custodial Lightning marketplace on nostr and enable users to deposit funds into their self-custodial Lightning wallet, and trades are escrowed somehow. Wouldn't it be trivial for the feds to take down the node and loot the funds?
The buy button is permanently greyed out/disabled for me. It did work in the past as I have made a dozen trades with my account
Monero is the Tor of money.
Bitcoin is the clearnet.
Then people decide... which they actually care about it's true.
People can use Bitcoin easier now than they ever could before... they just don't want to.
Why pay in Bitcoin... when I can just pay in dollars with the Credit Card?
Bitcoin may go up, and if it doesn't then "I don't give a shit" "I'll just use the Credit Card" is the attitude I get from many. No bravery and no spirit.
That's what happened.
The truth is that the 'heart and soul' of Bitcoin... is dying.
Bitcoin has all the technology it needs to become 'daily money' (albeit volatile daily money) and Lightning is 'good enough' right now. Steak n Shake is evidence of this.
The issue isn't the tech, it's the users the "community". Look at night or on the weekends there are relatively few transactions and compared to the entire world... barely any usage to buy things or pay for things despite having Lightning which works pretty well.
The "community" is number-go-up and trading and 'cashin-in-on-the-exchange' the vast majority of "Bitcoiners" care only about "getting rich" "more money" not "better money" and it shows.
NOSTR is mostly NGU bullshit it gets really, really quiet over there when the exchange rate is down: where is the Freedom? Where is the sovereignty? If those things were the focus the exchange rate wouldn't matter that much.
People don't exchange Bitcoin for goods or services although the opportunity now is greater than ever and the world more "PRIMED THAN EVER" to accept BTC.
When Bitcoin fails and the network dies, which it will at this rate, it will have nothing to do with technology -
People just didn't want it. What a shame it will be for Saylor, Stackers and many others who believed in it.
"How is it <current_year> and we haven't recreated one of the worst features of the fiat system on the best monetary invention ever?"
xD