@Scoresby139
stacking since: #74100longest cowboy streak: 139
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby 5 May \ parent \ on: CE003: Centralization Risk bitcoin
Good analogy. And it is magical when you get money from someone in seconds with almost no fees.
In the case of easy to use lightning wallets there may be a natural cap in that they are hot wallets and those hot wallets will become targets if they get too big a balance.
I was selling posters at btc++ this last week. I only accepted payment via lightning.
Most people paid with something like phoenix, Zeus, or breeze. Some people paid from cashapp or strike.
I would say it was very rare for people to use fully self-sovereign solutions that relied on their own hardware running their own ln node with multiple channels of their own choosing.
This is at a bitcoin dev conference where the population is probably more likely to use (and know how to use) bitcoin than anywhere else on earth.
Maybe things will get better (the tech will save us) but at the moment fully self sovereign solutions as you describe above are not being used in lightning.
On the other hand, I'm not sure there is a problem with that. Wallets like phoenix and Zeus (even when using them with only one channel to the wallet provider's LSP) are not necessarily a cop out.
I don't do huge volume of sales, but when I hit a certain threshold in my ln wallets, I swap out to my on chain wallet. And I do run my own node on my own hardware for that. Why can't we have the best of both worlds here?
If I was a farmer in India, paid entirely on how my crop does, and some dude gives me an IQ test days before I bring in my harvest, answering the questions correctly would not be my top priority...
Excited that you are doing this! I think Voskuil is very thoughtful about many aspects of bitcoin. Just hard to access because he uses words in a way that often isn't quite the same as their common usage. I like your idea of trying to write each chapter out in your own phrasing. Definitely planning on reading along.
Good on you, cowpokes! If anyone can deliver the seamless experience of bitcoin-enabled forums without doing custody for users, it's SN. Excited to see it shape up.
Also: users almost never do anything until they have to.
Also2: all the regulatory uncertainty around custody might end up being a gift if it pushes the trend toward real bitcoin use rather than centralized databases.
When you can't use wallet of satoshi, you look for a product you can use and end up with something like mutiny or Zeus.
I guess I figured it was more a commentary about a bitcoin issue than about design itself.
Is this the sort if thing you want to see in ~Design?
Yeah, I remember thinking "surely not" and then they closed the beaches. And acted like my kids couldn't play on the playground.
Let's hope it doesn't proceed along those lines.
Do NOT let fear take hold. Stay strong! Also don't be stupid.
I really appreciate this kind of advice. We are not criminals. We should not assume the posture of the guilty. But we don't need to go out of our way to piss off power-hungry bureaucrats.
At the same time, there will likely come a time when we are faced with a choice between freedom and compliance. Hopefully we will remember that sometimes freedom looks stupid.
Most people will probably cave, which is the point.
I was thinking yesterday before all this broke about the miner centralization issue (almost 50% of the hash power being essentially antpool). And the thought I had was that it's better we get to these battles now.
Both of these problems (Miner centralization or a state attack on utxo fungibility) go right to the very core of what bitcoin was designed to solve.
If bitcoiners can't resist them we are better off figuring out what needs to change now rather than when there are more players like etfs (who I imagine don't care at all about centralization or fungibility) involved.
This is the main concern for me. The more addresses that get sanctioned by govts, the more it puts pressure on the main value proposition of bitcoin.
We already have some loss of fungibility but it's mostly at the off-ramp level.
Would ofac adding every output from a whirlpool coinjoin to their list bring the matter to a head? It certainly would be a big mess. How far away from a coinjoin output could they argue is "connected"?
If I have a mint and my server gets seized by the govt, the people holding tokens from my mint will have a very hard time exchanging them for tokens from any other mint or for btc.
Cashu is not centralized, but my Cashu mint is centralized.
provided they aren't actively being rugged, or have enough notice before the mint closes down.
Isn't this the problem though? They dont give you warning. You just suddenly hear that the mint is down.
They don't ever have to come back to the gateway if people really didn't want them to
But whoever is running the gateway won't run it for long if it's a one way trade. If all they do is hand over btc and receive that particular mint's ecash, they will run out of btc. How do they turn the ecash back into btc? They go to that particular mint which created the ecash.
They all have their keys, so I don't think there's any issue with "moving it out." It should be just a matter of importing the seed to a new wallet (because they really shouldn't keep using Samourai). How they feel about their privacy is another matter.
lightning is peer to peer routing
What do we think of LSPs? The way Phoenix does it where a wallet only has one channel and that is with ACINQ?
Boltz might be another example of this. A centralized coordinator taking a fee.
As to mints, if I spin up a mint, the people who mint tokens park their btc with me. And if they want to redeem those tokens, someone has to bring them to me (the mint) to do it.
If there is a third party offering a lightning gateway, the tokens still have to come back to the mint to get redeemed even if it is the gateway operator who brings them back.
Also: isn't every ecash transaction actually reported back to the mint with the "sent" tokens being burned and the "received" tokens being newly issued? Sounds like a centralized coordinator to me ...
Are we just hoping that all these services talk politely and don't piss off any government agency?
This is a good argument for the "they made a semantic mistake" side. I hope it's true.
Do we end up with Bitcoin can be censorship resistant money as long as we don't brag about it?
When I next have a couple hours, I wonder how easy it would be to compare the btc addresses on the ofac list with recent blocks. How many sanctioned addresses have made it into blocks in the last 365 days?
(I guess it's possible that none of the owners of those sanctioned addresses have wanted to move their btc, but surely some have...)
I am afraid that we are all getting distracted by Samourai's loudmouth online persona and missing the reality that a mining pool providing a block template or an ecash mint with a lightning gateway are not so different.
If we accept that coinjoins are only okay if they aren't intentionally used for bad things is it different than accepting that bitcoin transactions from someone in North Korea should not get mined?
If by "they" you mean Russian oligarchs, I do not know whether they are doing what they want or not.
If you by "they" you mean Samourai, my post isn't about what they are doing now.
I was trying to point out that bitcoin needs to offer censorship resistance or else it loses a good chunk of its value proposition.