100 sats \ 6 replies \ @elvismercury OP 19 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 2 bitcoin
You're right, it does seem intentional, now that you mention it.
From a 'deterministic' perspective, I wonder what configuration the lightning network 'wants' to be. I agree that hub and spoke seems the most likely, and I don't think that's bad -- nature is full of power laws for a reason. So if you believe that, I guess LSP becomes a growth industry? And then how can one support that growth?
It makes me think Maller's model -- bridging currencies using btc as the intermediate layer -- has more legs than I used to believe.
So if you believe that, I guess LSP becomes a growth industry
@MaxAWebster uses a transportation system analogy to describe the eventual layout of the lightning network and I can't fault it.
Much like our collection of railways, highways, and roads, channels on the lightning network:
- have unavoidable and high fixed costs
- the payload capacity scales in some proportion to fixed costs
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It's interesting to consider what other types of L2s might look like, and how different tradeoffs would produce different architectures w/ different consequences. At some point, "layers" and "institutions" start to blur together -- in a way, a bank is a layer, where transactions between bank customers update its internal ledger but don't produce final settlement -- a kind of scaling.
Some of these instutions/layers are starting to pop up in btc w/ Fedimint, Liquid, etc. I think that these will be really crucial in the end, and the ultimate means by which most people interact w/ btc.
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Some of these instutions/layers are starting to pop up in btc w/ Fedimint, Liquid, etc. I think that these will be really crucial in the end, and the ultimate means by which most people interact w/ btc.
When we do AMAs, I always ask the Theilism, "what's something you believe about bitcoin that no other bitcoiner believes?" The one answer I heard the most was "most people will use custodial forms of bitcoin."
Completely unrelated but the most surprising answer came from @ODELL which was something to the effect of "bitcoin will be used to pay for armies of autonomous drone assassins."
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This has me wondering what are bitcoin's boats and airplanes.
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I looked around for the "transportation system" source of @MaxAWebster that you mentioned, because I want to think about this boats / airplanes thing. I read a couple but didn't see one that was obviously what you referring to. Do you have a link?
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I'm not sure he's every written about it publicly yet. It was something he shared with me in conversation.
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