pull down to refresh

Is Lightning Scaling Bitcoin in a Way Nobody Predicted? - Bitfinex blogblog.bitfinex.com/education/is-lightning-scaling-bitcoin-in-a-way-nobody-predicted/
3692 sats \ 12 comments \ @nicosey 23 Jul 2023 bitcoin
write
preview
related posts
276 sats \ 1 reply \ @notgeld 23 Jul 2023
At some point. We have rather free banking theory implemented in the wild than p2p scaling solution. Hovewer the barrier is almost non-existent with all non-custodial options around.
reply
635 sats \ 0 replies \ @notgeld 23 Jul 2023
With the recent announcement that Simple Bitcoin Wallet has decided to remove its support for Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, many critics of the Lightning Network have claimed that this decision demonstrates the shortcomings of the layer two payment network for Bitcoin.
If you want to know more about SBW context:
https://notgeld.scribe.rip/war-and-lightning-network-86f30cdc5c09
TLDR: it has almost nothing to do with Lightning.
reply
50 sats \ 0 replies \ @l0k18 23 Jul 2023
Shitcoiners are incapable of thinking outside the securitised assets box. And circa 1983 grade woo Chaumian cash.
You see, it took literally 40 years for everyone to catch up to Chaum. There's some other things that happened since then. Like his invention of mixnets, and the many that have been created, because chaumian cash you must identify yourself in some way to the issuer to pay unless you have an effective misdirection in your traffic you leak metadata that links between the issue and the spend.
And it really exaggerates on the point of LN's takeup stage. IMO it was only last year there was enough and reliable enough payment channels established to really cope with small numbers of users, the amount of funding and project startup going on in LN only also started to really move upwards last year as well. I know because I am a Go programmer and other than shitcoins this is another emerging area where we can be engaged in an enterprise as specialists in the LN and general P2P space.
reply
10 sats \ 5 replies \ @tomlaies 23 Jul 2023
This has led to the majority of current Lightning Network users to employ custodial Lightning wallets like Wallet of Satoshi, Tippen.me, or Blink. Many Bitcoiners believe that self-custody is central to Bitcoin’s value proposition, and see this development as less than desired.
I see this from both sides:
  • Yes, of course it's not the self custody that we want.
  • On the other hand, it isn't like people are having their life savings in custodial banks. Having your weekly expenses in a custodial wallet and some Sats in the account of a shop is like having paper in your wallet or a giftcard in your Amazon account.
Not self custody utopia but when the overwhelming bulk in number of transactions is a tiny amount of money in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really matter.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undergotten 24 Jul 2023
Seems to me that a custodial lightning wallet is the ONLY option for the vast majority of humans on planet earth. I certainly can't afford to open lightning channels up, and I can't even understand how it's feasible for me to have to open channels as large as the payment I intend to receive in order to receive payment.
If someone wants to give me 1 million sats but I haven't got a pot to piss in, what am I supposed to do? The obvious answer is for me to use a custodial lightning wallet of some kind to receive the payment, then I can self custody to my own on-chain wallet.
reply
0 sats \ 3 replies \ @clownworld 23 Jul 2023
And what happens when people come after you? Haven’t you seen all the censorship and debanking perpetrated by governments, banks, payment companies, smears by political groups, etc.??
Oh, so you can hold your bitcoin, but even though LN is taken everywhere, you can’t use it because all the wallet and node operators and exchanges have to ban you to comply with their overseers…
This is not a small problem. Self custody is a huge and fundamental problem.
reply
5 sats \ 1 reply \ @notgeld 23 Jul 2023
You should know that bott.ly were the first who started censoring LN transactions and whitelisting node pubkeys.
They filed bankruptcy recently.
I agree the situation is not ideal but the bar for competition with banks and payment services is really low.
reply
6 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undergotten 24 Jul 2023
You should know that bott.ly were the first who started censoring LN >transactions and whitelisting node pubkeys.
If a node does this, can we not also blacklist them for this behavior? Seems like an easy and democratic solution. Anyone in favor of censorship should be censored themselves. See if they don't change their mind rather quickly.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies 24 Jul 2023
Haven’t you seen all the censorship and debanking perpetrated by governments, banks, payment companies, smears by political groups, etc.??
Imagine you're in the stone age and want to exchange the fruits you gathered for a tool someone made. This someone doesn't like you for whatever reason and doesn't agree to exchange.
Does it matter how you pay? Bather? Physical cash? Centralized fiat? Onchain Bitcoin? Lightning? Custodial Lightning? No, it doesn't. If they don't want to they don't want to.
Oh, so you can hold your bitcoin, but even though LN is taken everywhere, you can’t use it because all the wallet and node operators and exchanges have to ban you to comply with their overseers…
The option to use custodial Lightning doesn't mean paying with self-custody Lightning is impossible.
Also, again: if they ban you, they ban you. No matter how you pay. Stop trying to break the laws of logic.
reply
21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Undisciplined 23 Jul
This post was featured on This Day in Stacker News.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @nym 18 Apr
Yes, good article.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Craze 23 Jul 2023
Only one of the world's weirdest predictions are going to be considwred by the world something, like that Balaji prediction of BTC to $1M in around 90 days. Most world dont give a fuck abiut logic, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency world, no wonder why we have so many scams around the space.
reply