How far out are we from having large pools of capital come in to supply liquidity to lightning?
Large exchanges adopting bitcoin and needing channels could clear out magma in a day.
How long is it until whales with millions can deploy large swathes into lightning for earning yield?
While you may not have a perfect answer would love to hear general thoughts around this idea.
Predicting timelines is always a guessing game. But I'm actually of the opinion that in the near term, liquidity on the network is not a bottleneck for Lightning. We can still scale to way more payment throughput and success rate with exactly the same amount of liquidity we have right now.
Liquidity is a good that will be present as soon as sufficient demand is visible. When people want to use Lightning, the liquidity will be there. When large exchanges adopt Lightning or new merchants come onboard, they will bring the liquidity they need themselves, or attract it by exerting demand.
I'm not convinced that Lightning will be a great place for "yield" in the near future either. It may be a good place for "risk-free rates", but not for earning substantial yield, compared to shitcoin schemes, bonds, or the stock market.
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I think in 2024 we'll see more of large new players in providing liquidity. There's definitely interest from folks about this. I think the challenging part is the demand side. If we had $20 million dollars of liquidity pop into Magma (or other service) tomorrow would it get used up? It'd take a while to actually get that deployed out. To counter argue myself, I think demand will increase as well in the coming year+.
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If we had $20 million dollars of liquidity pop into Magma
Why do you keep talking about $ on LN when we are using only sats over LN? $$$ are meaningless.
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Haha, ok sorry. Substitute that with 800 BTC.
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👍👍
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We first need to increase the demand for LN payments before any huge capital will flow in. Capital follows demand. The best way to do that is to keep improving the LN experience and keep onboarding users.
We already have Bitfinex, Kraken, and other big companies with LN nodes. They are there and ready to supply when needed.
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Yield is fiat, Lightning fees are just ROI. I think we'll see whales entering the space in 24'.
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what's the difference between yield and ROI, especially in the LN context?
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There must be some kind of return. Why would people/businesses risk their capital?
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