pull down to refresh
I'm not criticizing centrality or custody, just centralization. Could a model similar to CASHU, where the user chooses the ASP, be an option in the future?
I know there are not many ASP atm, just wondering if it is something you have in the roadmap or is it just not possible by design?
I'm not criticizing centrality or custody, just centralization. Could a model similar to CASHU, where the user chooses the ASP, be an option in the future?
I know there are not many ASP atm, just wondering if it is something you have in the roadmap or is it just not possible by design?
Bark already supports using a different server, it's just nobody runs one. Maybe one day there will be. There's not much incentive for us to push people to run a competing server since we are trying to build a business however the code is open source. If someone can fund the liquidity then they can run a server
You can also choose between Bark, Wavelength, and Arkade. If these three are successful, more people will run ASPs and more options will be available.
Would have responded sooner but I was driving my kids home. I appreciate your viewpoint here and it is helpful. Also, I use Noah and really like it!
here is one of the things I'm struggling to understand about the trade-offs with Ark:
With lightning I can open a channel to anyone who will have me, whereas with Ark my choice is limited to which Ark I want to join. Once in an Ark, paying others in the same Ark works great, but I'm less convinced about paying out of the Ark via lightning.
It is my understanding of the way gateways in Ark work that an Ark user cannot force a gateway to make a payment. So if the gateways in my particular Ark refuse to let me send out, my recourse is go back to the chain. That's fine, but it seems to me to be a step down from the "trustlessness" of Lightning.
I'm happy to make such tradeoffs because I can't stand managing liquidity and dealing with liveness, but when users want to know whether something is custodial or not, this moves the needle a little bit for me.
What do you think?
If a user can run their own lightning node, manage liquidity and the liveness requirements then they should. Ark isn't going to replace that, however for people who don't want to then ark can be quite compelling.
Yes the server can refuse to sign any payments you try to make but that's why storing your VTXOs locally is so important because it allows you to unilaterally exit without anybody's permission. Bark clients store this by default for this very reason. You do still have to contend with the reality that it might not always be economical to exit however that's much less of a problem for the average bitcoiner imo due to refreshes resetting how many transactions are required to exit.
If I may, the centralized server isn't what makes something custodial. Before ark there wasn't really a way to spend bitcoin in co-operation with a central server without the server being the custodian. That's the problem which ark solves. There are tradeoffs, 100%, I would never deny that but the centralized server is one potential option for scaling solutions. I don't see a future in which every bitcoiner with a spending wallet is using ark, nor do I see one ark server being the only sheriff in town.
Ultimately the reason I see ark as self-custody is because your coins all have a direct route onchain through presigned multi-sig transactions. It's not like Liquid where you are holding the keys to L-BTC but the underlying value is tied up in a potentially hackable contract. There are asterisks but without sounding too wanky it's a bit of a new paradigm, like how "trust-minimized" became a thing.
I agree with a lot of what you say regarding the language being diluted to fit marketing, it's been rampant in recent years and bitcoiners need to take a stronger stance on what terms mean. Obviously it's harder for me to engage in that debate now that I work on bark but I'll still give my 2 cents.