313 sats \ 1 reply \ @vnprc 9 Jan 2023 freebie \ on: Is LND (Lightning Labs) ruining the Lighting Network? bitcoin
You forgot about that time LL deployed keysend payments with no spec. C-Lightning devs had to reverse engineer the feature in order to write the spec and a compatible impl.
Labs was made in the Silicon Valley mold: raise a shitload of VC money, hire the biggest and best engineering team, race to build the best developer tools, lock out the competition, and capture the market. Once you have captured the market (they have) leverage your monopoly power to squeeze out other impls and expand your monopoly. Embrace, extend, extinguish.
If you are a lightning dev ask yourself if you want the future of decentralized payments to go the same way as so many other markets that have been captured with this model: email service provider, internet search, web browser, video sharing, etc.
Monopolies are bad for free markets but good for monopolists. Which one do you want to support?
Labs was made in the Silicon Valley mold: raise a shitload of VC money
FWIW, Blockstream has raised 3-4x (over $300 million, not counting the round the did late last year) what they have. I don't think VC money has much to do with it, given all the other teams have VC money (other than Spiral since they're the research arm of public company).
I hear that keysend anecdote a lot, but keysend is pretty simple. It's just putting the pre-image in the onion, couldn't imagine it was terribly arduous to workout.
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