Key facts:
“The future of payments must be built on true global peer-to-peer interoperability.”
Something that allows bitcoin through the Lightning network, estimated a specialist at MIT.
The growing adoption of bitcoin (BTC), the leading cryptocurrency on the market, is changing the world as we know it. Not only because its issuance is decentralized, without government intervention, but also because its transactions can be carried out between peers. That is, without the need for an institutional intermediary, which could change the future of payments.
This was explained on May 7 by the specialist André Neves during a talk included in the ninth edition of the MIT Bitcoin Expo, in association with CriptoNoticias. The event was held in person at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
André Neves, co-founder and CTO of Zebedee, a company that allows you to earn BTC in games, said: “To talk about the future of payments, we must first talk about its current state.”
At present, we depend on suppliers and banks to be able to pay for products and services, as well as the fact of transferring money, Neves alleges. This is something that makes the service is tied to your corporate rulescosts and government regulations, which does not happen in Bitcoin with the Lightning network, he adds.
Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer (P2P) network that allows you to make micropayments with bitcoin almost instantly. A system that, if it becomes widespread, will change the future, allowing people to carry out these operations among themselves, connecting with businesses without intermediaries, he added.
Bitcoin allows payments to be free between peers
Geographical distance does not matter. If someone needs to make a payment, for example, from Nigeria to the UK or Brazil, they could do it with bitcoin, since the network allows it. something difficult or it is impossible in the current conventional system that is tied to limitations and restrictions that do not allow it.
“We have this world with big institutions, big corporations, big providers, whose users can’t communicate with each other (to transact money),” Neves said in the MIT talk.
This is something that would be broken by the global adoption of bitcoin through Lightning payments and self-custody wallets. “That’s very, very powerful,” he said.
Now you can send bitcoin around the world, the same way you send emails, with exactly the same user experience. I think that’s the key. Everyone here knows how to send emails. Okay. So everyone here should know how to send BTC to any address by Lightning. And I think it’s important to note that this is all open source. You can host everything yourself (in a self-custody wallet).
André Neves, co-founder and CTO of Zebedee, speaking about the future of payments at the MIT Bitcoin Expo.
Bitcoin enables free global interoperability between users
The exponent warned that the money is much bigger than just the one that manages the conventional system with national currencies.
“We want the same money everywhere, and for that to happen, we needed to interoperate,” said the exponent. But this is not the only thing. Also it is essential that the currency be “free and global”he remarked.
“This is one of the most important properties of money: the ability to trade freely with others who value it equally. A world where local money is not interoperable is not the world we want to live in,” he argued. In traditional finance, most national currencies are not suitable for operating abroadsomething that would stop happening if everyone uses bitcoin.
The specialist closed the talk saying that the future of payments must be built with real global interoperability between users and providers, not just providers. And how did we get there? he wondered. “We have open source and interoperable money. Find out about Bitcoin”, concluded the specialist at MIT.