What happened to hosted channels? I'm interested to know more about why there seems to be so much more attention on Ecash.
Fiatjaf & Anton K have both been very critical of lightning recently. They both had worked on hosted channels in SBW & OBW and it seems both have pretty much given up on lighting.
Doing my own research I found this 2 year old podcast: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6YWywUzx9rpJVVJ61hvpN8?si=2qjPevbhTRmWvAvn9yh_oQ comparing the two but it seems Ecash & Fedimint (soon) have stolen all the interest in this semi custodial solution.
It seems these solutions have a lot in common. Both can:
- open a wallet without having any bitcoin to start with.
- depend on a back end LSP
- are relatively private
- be rugged by their host/issuer/federation
The main differences I've found are:
- that one has an advantage in that it holds the bearer asset (hosted channels).
- one can hold invoices for much longer periods (Ecash/Fedimint).
- perhaps privacy might also favor Ecash.
What else am I missing here? Is there another reason why these 2 well respected devs have given up on Lightning & Hosted Channels?
One use case: there's a way to use this mechanism to connect a Lightning network node on Liquid with other channels on the main chain. If I were to guess, i imagine all these tools can be complementary to each other. Perhaps if fees go really crazy in the future, there will be more incentive for developing these things.