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Of course grants distort the market, that is their purpose. People giving money have preferences, or at least grantees try to guess them and act accordingly, even subconsciously.
I really like this trend of people thinking more deeply about it. There is an important control given to the granters.
Philanthropy is tainted with money/power dynamics, even with good intents, which I don't assume.
Unfortunately the more funded bitcoin projects are in the spotlight, the less non-funded projects are.
There is also the possibility of hiring great talents uniquely to keep them busy so they cannot create a rival project.
If they are successful, bitcoin will be successful but also become just another fiat currency, managed by central banks.
Spark is a walled garden, not only custodial but they could easily cut access to lightning and onchain without their users realizing, as long as most people are using spark.
Is this so different?
Yes very different.
A watchtower that doesn't have access to your funds can protect your funds for you. You can pay them for it, you can swap watchtowers services etc.. If you are serious about your money it's protected by at least one watchtower.
An ark server takes no risk stealing your funds, a lightning partner takes a big risk.
The modern techniques of improving the shelf life of milk like UHT pasteurization and homogenization consist of killing everything inside the milk. Read about them and be horrified.
In general, studies are paid by biased parties and cannot be trusted. The processing of the food industry is almost always the problem, not the food itself.
Spark and other centralizing technologies are the only possible outcomes given the constraints of LN design.
The main problem of spark and other "trust me I will not use my keys" protocols is not the technology which can be improved, it's the bad faith marketing as well as the funding from bad actors like david marcus (meta/libra) for spark and howard lutnick (tether/usdt) for ark.
The lightning payments come from the lightning node of the server. After each round the vtxo comes from the server, what prevents double spending? The server has the forfeits.
There is also the delegated signing and the out of round possible collusion.
You think having three big banks is better than everybody being their own bank? If we have three big banks they can just refuse to talk to the independent lightning nodes.
I think you greatly underestimate the dangers of fake L2, once they are the dominant players they can even make bitcoin another fiat currency.
IPv6 was designed by very very smart people and in terms of a stand-alone protocol its great.
I doubt it, ipv6 is overly complicated.
In fact it seems the smart way would've been to expand A.B.C.D into E.F.A.B.C.D, that is prepend the new octets to beginning then infer that 12.1.1.1 is really 0.0.12.1.1. to help with backwards compatibility.
Sounds smart.
That "extension" proposal was rejected because it was seen as a hack and they wanted to expand the space so much that literally nearly every grain of sand could get its own IP address, but its created lots of migration issues.
Sounds dumb, maybe even done on purpose to facilitate user surveillance.
I take "comms" as meaning "invoice negotiation". I get your point, I also think it is better done as an overlay outside lightning.
Something like RTC for web addressability makes a lot of sense in the general case, I also envision close range comms (nfc, blutooth...) for physical transactions.
Thanks for your explanations.
Can you detail what you mean by web spec?
I don't consider p2p slop, it is also how fiat banks work. If two banks don't have a partnership the payment can go through a third party bank that have partnership with both banks. There is a need to go through trust/liquidity links.
On the other hand, onion messages are a big mistake (onion routing is great though), no objections there.
I appreciate the article, it seems like blink is taking spark seriously, not all wallets can say the same.
The all-in cost of the exit is ~18,700 sats
So they recovered 82% of the value in a low fee environment. The 90% they mention several times is not considering the fees.
The bundle they build and backup needs to be refreshed to take the fee into account. I think the wallet managing the bundle is necessary to make the exit credible, it's a shame it's not part of the spark protocol. I hope Blink will show in the UI how much is recoverable taking the fees into account.
Operators can never spend your funds. [...] Theft would require every single operator to collude. One honest operator makes it impossible, even an offline one
Meaning... they can spend the funds.
All it takes is being on a sanctioned list and the operators will be forced to collude by law. A merge acquisition, operators going bankrupt, a lot of scenarios can lead to operators colluding, no evil intents required.
From the github readme:
off-chain sends are co-signed by the Ark server [...] but it can never spend your coins
That is not how Ark works.
Wait on the website, section how it works:
The server can never take your money [...] a wallet left untouched past expiry can be swept by the server.
A wallet swept means coins can be spend, money can be taken.
No mention of sender/server collusion (the sender can be the server by the way), no mention of the frequency of required user interaction (or delegated signing).
I think the documentation needs some work to not mislead the users.
I have no hope in this project. It's so obviously ai generated. You say no sign up but the sign up is the first thing on your website. Please read what you've generated before posting.
I can point out multiple other inconsistencies. I was not surprised to see the Spark wallet (spyware).
If it's a protocol, publish a cli not a self hosted website. The whitepaper is overly complicated. Get inspiration from other p2p protocols.
I don't understand blip 32.
Does it really deserve to be inside the lightning network?