Jack Mallers

You are totally right in each step, but there's 1 thing that makes it different from most exchanges: you can already transfer money in/out of it using LN, which makes it much more practical than using a Coinbase exchange account.

Also, while Coinbase Pro has a 0.1-0.3% fee for market order, if you want guaranteed execution, Coinbase and its competitors take 3-4%.

If you listened to talks from Jack Mallers, he was tracking lnd head instead of waiting for the full releases, and picking and testing pull requests by hand, fixing bugs that come up in practice (or giving feedback to lightning devs), that's one of Strike's advantages over other exchanges.

Also the ,,less regulation'' is just not true generally, people have to go through KYC to link with bank accounts, they are communicating with regulators: https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-public-beta-325877a79f87

From Strike CEO Jack Maller [1]:

Let’s walk through a user story. I want to send $1,000 to a friend of mine in El Salvador:

* When I initiate the $1,000 payment, Strike debits my existing USD balance.

* Strike then automatically converts my $1,000 to bitcoins ready for use in its infrastructure using its real-time automated risk management and trading infrastructure.

* Strike then moves the bitcoins across the Gulf of Mexico where it arrives in our Central American infrastructure in less than a second and for no cost.

* Strike then takes the bitcoins and automatically converts them back into USDT (synthetic digital dollar known as Tether) using its real-time automated risk management and trading infrastructure.

* Strike then credits the existing user with the USDT to their Strike account.

[1] https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b908f611

The dream of using bitcoin as p2p digital cash does seem to be dead for now, the fees are too high for that[1]. Lightning hasn't really taken off for that use case either, the number of bitcoins in Lightning channels appears to have stopped growing.[2]

But it looks like bitcoin can still be very useful as an alternative settlement layer for international payments. Either directly for large payments, or under the hood for something like Strike[3].

[1] https://ycharts.com/indicators/bitcoin_average_transaction_fee

[2] https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-capacity

[3] https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b908f611

Again, and I hate to keep repeating myself, but this is not true and just shows that people are not doing their research and/or they're stuck in 2016.

Strike (https://global.strike.me) has built a product in which they use Bitcoin and the Lightning Network to send money (fiat currency like USD, EUR, etc.) around the world instantaneously and at virtually no cost. In some cases, they are able to offer exchange rates that are better than the inter-bank FX rate.

Explanation of how it works:
https://jimmymow.medium.com/announcing-strike-global-2392b908f611