Over time, there seem to be more new layers being conceptualized and built on top of Bitcoin. I wanted to list all the ones I know here. Some of them everyone is pretty familiar with and are quite old. Others just recently came into being within the last couple of years. What do you guys think of each of these layers. How scalable are they? How private are they? Which ones are likely to win out in the long run? Which are you most excited for?
- Lightning Network (obviously)
- Liquid Network
- Chaumian Ecash (cashu, fedi, fedimint)
- Mercury (Mercury Wallet, Mercury Layer)
- Ark
- Layer 1/Prime
Feel free to post about any other layers projects/concepts I may have missed.
I'm still excited about the improvements to Lightning to come. Splicing will be game changer for user experience, and async payments ("offline receives") as well. Hopefully later this year.
Fedimint for ease of onboarding should be pretty powerful too.
wen eltoo?
I'm not holding my breath or getting excited about anything that requires a soft fork. It's hard enough waiting for things that could be done today to actually hit the market.
Two weeks ago, in a episode of the @kr show, Maxim Orlovsky (not sure if he is on SN) mentioned why he thinks "Lightning takes so long to adopt all the new things".
What do you think about this?
Link: https://youtu.be/Zbk9714iBUc?t=623 (Timestamp: 10:23)
There's some truth to that. My opinion:
There's tons of competing priorities with those mostly* in charge of maintaining the popular lightning implementations. And part of that is normal maintance, improvements on existing features, bug fixes, and non-protocol related features. Normal stuff you'd find anywhere, not to mention many other priorities not directly related to the specific lightning implementation. Like supporting services like Loop/Terminal (lnd), greenlight (cln), and phoenix (eclar). There's existing stuff with existing users to support at a pretty large scale as lightning is already.
It's not about ossifying, nobody wants that and they all improve things on the protocol level at the pace they can support, taking into consideration their level of interests in any few of the many enhancements that exist.
One of the exciting things about LDK's role in this is that they at least can take a step back and not have to maintain user-side binaries. Libraries focused on the protocol work and leave user support to developers. There might be some trade offs but I think in general it's the right approach letting protocol experts in this space focus on protocols, especially if that's where they find the most enjoyment. It's such a gift to have them and for them to excel in that area, and I think we'll see some great protocol enhancements we've been waiting for come out of it soon.
Well said. Thanks for this great explanation. As always.
Which is why I'm so excited about Hierarchical channels. It's a proposal that could add channel factories/multiparty channels without a soft-fork, while still keeping penalty transactions (unlike LN-symetry on eltoo).
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2023-March/003886.html
now it's "LN Symmetry"
Ah so there's one thing that changed about it in the last 5 years
Don't forget state chains, softchains, handcrank, drivechains and omni lol layers on layers
What I look for in Bitcoin scalability layers is:
Rug pull risk
Rehypothecation risk
Attack vectors
Then the very last thing I look at is convenience. Why? Because I firmly believe convenience can be scripted out even if the spec seems inconvenient at first glace.
Right now, lightning on top of Ark seems to be the way to go.
I'm coming around to Ark for lightning nodes (with less frequent pool transactions)
Ark would be really expensive, calculate the cost of on-chain tx every 5 seconds...
5 seconds is a suggestion Burak made because he wanted it to feel as fast as lightning, but I:
And there is no bigger mistake than that... ;)
"Technology pioneer and guru Steve Jobs had a profound understanding of the importance of UX. He held the belief that technology should either be beautiful or remain invisible."
https://cointelegraph.com/news/from-barrier-to-breakthrough-solving-ux-can-catalyze-mass-adoption-of-crypto
But UX matters for widespread adoption though
Do it right first.
Its like I was saying, I'm of the belief if you do it right first, the UX stuff can be scripted out.
Most excited for what's working today and which has clear trust requirements. Lightning is best for quick payments and Cashu for easy onboarding with bitcoin-denominated value.
I will always remind you this...
https://i.postimg.cc/sXmH6BvR/vader-power-dark-side.jpg
There's also sovryn, rgb, and taproot assets. I'm sure there are others depending on what we mean by layers.
any layer gonna to change the consysn f*ck it , we had enoght from tapwizard ,faciliting the ordinal sheet ,the dev are failed in the tapwizard
Inscribing info into blocks was possible from the genesis. "Chancellor on the brink of the second bailout", you know.
I know ,I said taproot facilities the ordinal shit , so the taproot was a failure so the dev making this failure by implenting it in the consys
Do you know what the benefits of the taproot upgrade were?
To understand layers deeper (and how bitcoin is superior to gold), Layered Money by @NikBhatia is an excellent read. (linked in case he ever joins)
Good list. Also bullish on RGB.tech and Carbonado.io. Arguably, Nostr is a social layer, similar to Venmo, Cash App, or Strike (for sending and receiving payments to identities)
Blockstream's ElToo is an interesting one. It goes between L1 and others like lightning, Making them L3. It's whole purpose is just boosting scaling but it would do a great job at that.
https://blockstream.com/eltoo.pdf
Of those I only knew Lightning Network and Liquid Networkπ±
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I read it as Lawyers
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