10 sats \ 4 replies \ @k00b 17 Sep 2023 \ parent \ on: SLP513 Next Generation Lightning with Phoenix – Bastien Teinturier bitcoin
There is a tendency in both of Bitcoin’s official layers to avoid relying on external dependencies not limited to but including the web. You make it seem like a childish position to hold though. For money, might it be desirable to avoid inheriting the threat model of less threat-conscious systems?
That makes sense with the money protocols themselves, but the things mentioned above are applications over the money layer, not money protocols.
There is rightly a chorus of shriek when people propose doing things on Bitcoin that should be done at other/higher layers, the famous "you don't need a blockchain for that".
The analog here is, you don't need to bloat Lightning for that.
The web is the standard for applications, with its threats well-known and largely accustomed to and mitigated. It's also unavoidable, as in for all of Bitcoin's security efforts I would wager most nodes have implicit trust somewhere along the line of an SSL cert.
Nostr is an ideal application layer, it takes web commodities and makes them more ad-hoc network friendly with with relays and keys. Putting applications here is not only like practicing good QoS, it's simply meeting the world we want to get onboarded where they are: the web.
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When stated plainly, your broad point is fair.
What you're proposing and what you oppose aren't mutually exclusive though afaict. The best Rube Goldberg machine will win. It seems worthwhile for us to try building both. One could argue each existing meaningfully informs the design of the other and I'd predict we end up with a hybrid of the competing systems.
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I think you're right as a technical matter, but in networks it goes beyond tech into narratives, optics, and their effects on people. As such, and combined with several personal anecdotes, I see these proposals and the entities behind them as hostile to the mission.
The principles here so different that they repel each other. Maybe you're right in that's positive entropy, as order comes out of chaos. It has it's made me prioritize a protest build.
But on the other hand, it's disrupting momentum elsewhere. And these self-congratulating, self-annointed experts, projecting a consensus of the future of Lightning must be met with overwhelming resistance if we're to benefit from competition.
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The proposals are competing for scarce resources on some level for sure.
I think the principles are different because the winning principles are yet unknown.
If the side you oppose is competing unfairly, that sucks and I hope it changes.
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