Convinced a friend! (& First lightning use) Some Reflections.

I had an interesting experience yesterday, I’m in the process of convincing a friend that crypto has practical uses, and yesterday he set up coinbase, went through KYC and bought some. He also set up a reoccurring buy, just small amounts but at least he has his foot in the door.

As he is a bartender, for his parents bar, I’m trying to get them to accept BTC and use lightning as a method of payment. So first step was showing how to send “value” to someone using a simple method, I used Wallet of Satoshi as its as simple as it gets and has a Point of Sale function too.
First through I needed to send some btc to my own Wallet of Satoshi app, but coinbase has a 48 hour waiting period to send to a new (white listed) address. Then I realised, I am also my own bank! I have a ledger hardware wallet, so used that with my ledger live app on my iPad, my nano x and sent it within minutes! Last night I went to the bar, and he’d set up his WoS app, using an email address so as to be able to reuse his wallet on other devices, and it was just so quick and easy to ping him some money! Overall a great learning experience for us both!

This shows the benefits of being your own bank, but also it has downsides. I sold a Motorhome (RV, camping car) last week, and the lady buying it had to jump through so many hoops in order to get her own money. Then up to 3 days to receive it in my account(weekends in France)! She went to the bank branch in the end on Monday and kicked up a stink, I received the money later that day, but had to delay all her plans due to this. With crypto I’d have had it straight away! But also, there are scammers that could also take advantage of this. Some people need protection and are not responsible enough for self custody of their money. A scammer could take a person’s whole life in a matter of minutes. Banks are missing a trick not already acting as custodial of peoples wealth. Governments should enforce that bank have this as a service maybe? For people who want it, they should have it. Coinbase does obviously, but no guarantees.