How about the second layer lightning network? There are trade-offs but fees are low and payments are much more anonymous.

If we’re going to centralize transactions why not just use Visa? Instantaneous, fairly low transaction fees, non-public. It’s also reversible and doesn't have a fluctuating exchange rate with local currency.

The tradeoff is centralization. Basically you now have the worst parts of tokens and money combined together with none of the benefits. Using Lightning is like using an unregulated and uninsured private bank. BTC at least have some semblance of decentralization, unlike Lightning IOUs.

Another issue is that it takes millenias to even onboard every adult to the L2, because every such transaction needs to be done on L1. So ti will take between 15 to 20 years just to onboard everyone on L2 without even doing any other transaction. Same 15 to 20 years to move back to L1 if needed.

Next issue is idiotic architecture of Lighting. It requires people to open a bidirectional tunnel from their L2 wallet to every single peer they will transact with and and lock inside the channel the amount of tokens in excess of all transactions with this peer. You want to buy a coffee - go open a tunnel with a cafe and lock 5$ in it until transaction is completed. You want to buy 50$/m subscription? Open 600/1200/1800$ tunnel to the provider in advance, or open a tunnel for every transaction. And every tunnel creation and every destruction is an L1 transaction, which is limited to 5-6 tps for the whole world.

Then L2 need to solve NP=hard problem for every transaction, and the difficulty will scale exponentially with the number channels.

All this, plus atrocious technical implementation, where a lot of transactions just fail due to bugs and instability leads to the worst monetary system I have ever heard about.

You are contradicting yourself: First you say that it's centralized, then you say that you have to open a channel to every target that you want to transact with.

Both are wrong:

1. Lightning has several thousand routable nodes which you can connect to, which means it's not centralized

2. Those nodes have channels between each other, so to reach some target there just needs to be a path between some nodes to that target. E.g. you have a channel from your wallet A to node B, B to C, and C to target. You can do a payment to the target without a direct channel.

To be fair, $2/$80 is 2.5%, which is on par with the fees a lot of places in the US charge for using cards. $45/$2k is even lower.

Merchant pays the fees though.

Not in my neck of the woods. I just paid a credit card fee at the local DMV.

The big chains around here will pay the fee, but anything local tacks it on as an extra charge.

Who then bake it into the price of the item.

And then makes you pay for it by increasing their product price.

What you're missing is that it costs the same $2.00 to transfer $1T-worth of bitcoin. Try that with anything else that offers final settlement.

The base Bitcoin layer/network is optimised for storing large amounts of value for long periods of time.

The price doesn't care if you're using it to buy a $5 coffee. It cares that businesses and countries use it as their reserve asset.

you and I make $1T transactions daily, it's true

you're clearly both highly intelligent and humorous