zaps are all fun and games, but figuring out the capital gains on a bucket of lightning transactions is no fun. and that's after you even get the data. i just went through a mini-adventure hunting down a pre-release beta apk of the primal android app and downloading and installing the android sdk emulator just to access primal's new transaction export feature.
(last year's process was even more wild: with no export feature in the app, i automated my phone with adb, grabbing screenshots of each transaction, and sending them to openai to extract the data. a fun exercise, but wow.)
this was all for maybe a total of $1 USD worth of sats.
the real reason the lightning network and bitcoin isn't more mainstream for day-to-day transactions? that's it, right there. you don't have to jump through these hoops with cash or cards for small every day transactions.
why bother? good question!
i wanted to get experience using the lightning network "for real" because i'm curious about integrating lightning network payments into the stuff my start-up does.
(there's only so many blogs or videos or reddit posts one can read to understand something. sometimes you just have to try it to found out.)
on paper, it would be a good fit: a digital currency payment for a minute of compute for test automation of web sites on browsers in the cloud. a perfect match, except for the accounting.
i still might do it, but not until i have a better system in place and a "make the accounting headache go away"-first lightning app i can recommend to users.
dealing with all the taxes is the primary reason to use a payroll provider for your business vs figuring it out yourself. the first lightning wallet to treat taxes as a first-class design problem wins this space. (payroll taxes are probably way more complicated that zap accounting, but i wouldn't know - my provider does it for me.)
zapping is fun, though.
