Lightning Balita

Right now countries are rolling out their own national inter bank payment systems and digital money wallets.

All across the developing world all you see now is the ability to pay via bank apps by scanning a QR code. No card and no cash needed. Its so prevalent that a large share of the stores accepting payments by QR code no longer accept cards or cash.

This works fine within a country as every citizen has access to that network. But what about tourists. Tourists cannot open a bank account and use the national banking apps if they arent a citizen, even chat apps that allow payments require national IDs because of all the regulatory rules and laws around money transmission.

This means soon there will be countries that operate mostly on inter bank QR code payment networks and tourists wont have access. Tourists will start finding everywhere they go no longer accepts cash or card and they cannot access any app that allows them to pay locally via QR code.

This is why national digital payment systems are broken by design and they dont work on a global scale. They are dead on arrival.

The only solution is neutral interoperability and the only neutral interoperable payments network on earth is lightning.

This means countries literally need to implement lightning payments if they want to go digital without excluding all tourists and expats from their economy.

I think Dubai will be the obvious first mover in this regard. Dubai is so reliant on tourism that they didnt close their borders at all during covid. They need to accommodate tourists because tourism makes up a massive portion of their GDP now. They are a smart city and want to digitize every sector of their economy yet the only way to digitize payments while accommodating tourism will be to use lightning payments infrastructure instead of a government issued digital wallet that tourists wont have access to.

Lightning will win simply because it is global and open.

A lightning wallet is the primary interface that regular users have with the Lightning Network. It is one of the most vital components of the ecosystem.

Since the network’s inception, wallets have come a long, long way in terms of usability.

That the Lightning Network cannot be used self-custodial without running a node on a separate device has become a myth thanks to how far these wallets have come.

We just published an article where we talk about self-custodial wallets in the Lightning ecosystem.

https://bringin.xyz/blog/resources/self-custodial-lightning-wallets/

Bitcoin lightning wallets - Self-custodial-wallets

https://carlbmenger.substack.com/p/the-lightning-network