A bunch of people have been shilling Liquid has a scaling solution with on-chain fees on the rise. I wanted to take the time to breakdown why this is a fool's errand and there are better ways to go about this.
Liquid is based on Elements which as they claim in their README is a collection of feature experiments and extensions to the Bitcoin protocol. Liquid is just another blockchain. It is a fork of bitcoin with a few fancy things added (Tokens, CT, covenants) and bundled together with a 1 minute block time, federated custody, and some blockstream branding.
Blockchains do not scale. As we are seeing today, the bitcoin blockchain does not have enough throughput for everyone's transactions. This is for good reason, keeping the cost of running a full node low is a priority, this was one of the main reasons the blocksize wars were fought.
So why does Liquid exist? People lately have been touting it as a way to ease fee pressure but in my opinion this is a fool's errand, no different than people back in 2017 saying to use litecoin because fees on bitcoin were too high. Liquid is just a fork of bitcoin, it has the exact same scaling problems and the only reason it has smaller fees is because it is never really been used. For now, it can work as a temporary stop-gap (essentially finding arbitrage for fees), but building actual infrastructure on top of liquid will run into the exact same problems as on-chain bitcoin.
The problem is that Liquid is trying to use trust as a scaling solution but did it in a completely inefficient way. When you are trusting the 11-of-15 multisig, you don't need all the benefits that a blockchain gives you, everything is dictated by the functionaries anyways. The problem is if liquid gets any meaningful amount of users it will also end up with huge fees and we'll be back to square one because Liquid's architecture didn't actually leverage any of the trust tradeoffs it took and just inherited all the same problems of on-chain bitcoin.
There are real solutions available. Lightning is the obvious alternative but it does have it's own problems, I think a lot of people have been seeing the problems with small scale self-custodial lightning, it is extremely hard to scale. This is why I am extremely excited about fedimint. Fedimint has almost the exact same trust model of Liquid (a federated multisig) but is built on a much better architecture that actually allows for scaling. Fedimints don't have a blockchain but instead operate as a chaumian ecash mint. This allows for them to do actually innovative things instead of just being bitcoin plus a couple features. There isn't a block size, instead the transaction throughput is just gated by the processing power of the guardians. Smart contracts are limited by having to do everything on-chain with bitcoin script, they are pure rust code and allows for all sorts of crazy things. And it all still interoperates with Lightning, essentially giving a Wallet of Satoshi with way less rug-pull risk, tons of new features, and is extremely private.
All this said, it is sad we aren't talking about self-custodial scaling solutions. Today the only real one is Lightning and with current fees, it isn't reasonable unless you have a few million sats. The problem is that this is just inherently a limitation with Lightning. Lightning is excellent when you have high value channels and can make payments across the network, but it does excel at "pleb nodes" where one guy puts 100k sats to try it out, this comes with too many limitations with paying on-chain fees and needing to have reserves to pay future on-chain fees. However, this is potentially solvable. Lightning has solved the problem of scaling payments, where if you have channels, one on-chain transaction can represent many actual payments. What lightning did not solve is that one utxo still represents one user, and this is the limitation we are running into today. Currently the only way we solve this is using a multisig sig (Liquid and Fedimint), but we can solve this in a self-custodial way if we activated covenants. Covenants essentially let us give fine grained control of what is going to be spent from a UTXO before the UTXO even exists. Currently, there are a few proposals (CTV, APO, TXHASH) all with varying ways to do it and different tradeoffs, but imo something like this is desperately needed if we want any chance to scale bitcoin in a self-custodial way.
What lightning did not solve is that one utxo still represents one user
Well...2 users
So it did solve it a little
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Liquid allows me to stack enough sats to eventually swap to the base chain and have large UTXOs in a way that lightning can't. For now, it works in a way that I need and I'm happy with that. It's just a tool in the toolbox. If usage of it were to grow, it could at least absorb some fee pressure from the base chain. You are right tho, it's not a long term scaling solution.
Really curious to see how Fedimint works in practice. Saw it was used this year at a conference and it looked pretty cool. Time will tell there.
As for covenants, still need to research it myself. Is there a covenant proposal that doesn't require a hard/soft fork? What about BitVM? Not technical enough to understand that stuff...
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You can't stack on lightning and then swap to the base chain and have a large utxo?
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Not without inbound liquidity. With Liquid you can just receive some btc to your liquid wallet and you're good to go. With lightning you need channels with inbound liquidity.
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Sure, forgot about that. However, on custodial wallets that's a non issue, and now on Phoenix 1Msats inbound liquidity sets you back $1 for a year.
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Definitely an option. Haven't used Phoenix's liquidity ad thing yet.
It's just a tool in the toolbox
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$10, forgot a zero heh
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Correct me if i am wrong, since i couldn't find a lot of info regarding fedimint.
From what i can tell, Fedimint doesn't have any way to punish or prevent or protect against a dishonest guardian.
With liquid you are trusting the majority of a federation of selected well known companies that have vetted security mechanisms in places.
With fedimint you are trusting your community, that in fact means that if i download a fedimint wallet right now, i am trusting random people or one random company at best.
If that's the case, i'd rather trust liquid, since fedimint is like a protobank of which i'd have to trust not only the present and future honesty, but also the competence.
Also from what i can tell, liquid records are public in the blockchain, while fedimint is entirely off chain, if that's the case i could be joining a community that is secretly involved in bad practices (eg. censorship) and i would have no way to know it beforehand.
Please tell me what i am missing.
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I cant speak directly to your fediment concerns because I'm simply not knowledgeable enough, but its a good question.
However, I would like to point out, that if we zoom way out, its clear that some type of federation is the only real solution for mass use. I mean imagine tomorrow 1B people decide that they want to use Bitcoin....how would those people even onboard? Even if LN is ultimately a solution, how do they even get into LN?
The most probable scenario would be that they onboard via some type of exchange that then gets them into fedimint / LN / whatever. My point here is: true wholesale scaling will require some type of federated approach at best - or a single custodian solution at worst (Coinbase). So given that choice, we should aim towards federated solutions....of which fediment and Liquid are both contenders.
As an aside, I know that Liquid is talking about launching their own LN solution, which to be honest could wind up being a "good enough" solution for 99% of the "onboard - scale" issues of mass adoption.
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Anyone can setup a liquid federation just like anyone can setup a fedimint federation. The community stuff is just global south marketing stuff that the fedi team is doing.
Also from what i can tell, liquid records are public in the blockchain, while fedimint is entirely off chain, if that's the case i could be joining a community that is secretly involved in bad practices (eg. censorship) and i would have no way to know it beforehand.
all of this is kinda irrelevant, you are trusting them with custodianship on both, it is either they steal or they don't. fedimints have such good privacy properties that they can't selectively censor a user, they can only rugpull everyone or no one.
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Thanks for your response. After doing more research, I now have a better grasp of fedimint. I agree that if it's scaled properly, it could be a promising better alternative to liquid, for the scaling and privacy part at least, i believe it is inferior for transparency.
However, I have reservations about the part you mentioned as irrelevant. While it's true that they may not be able to see your balance, my understanding is that they can potentially hold your BTC (not the IOU) hostage. This means they could restrict your trading outside the mint, impose KYC requirements for specific trades, or even compel you to "upgrade" the mint protocol to something else with different rules, as long as all guardians agree.
I recognize that this is a risk in liquid as well. However, the current state of liquid is a decentralized federation not under a specific authority or jurisdiction of entities that have a lot to lose if they were to attempt something. This stands in stark contrast to the PR campaign for fedimint, which encourages small secluded communities. These communities are vulnerable to government overreach or manipulation.
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Let imagine a future world in which there are a few "gold chip" fedimints that are widely trusted. What features would those fedimints probably have?
  • public known actors
  • known history and reputation
  • some sort of legal repercussion possible for bad acts
Its hard to imagine how - in practice - those "gold chip" fedimints are going to be materially different than current Liquid federation setup.
To be clear: I'm not against fedimints, far from it...I welcome the development.
Lastly, I think the "magic" of Liquid is the blinded / confidential transactions. I think this renders 99% of potential "censorship" ability of the federation moot.
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Confidential transactions are cool but I'm not sure if there's the risk/incentive of amount-based transaction censorship with regards to each federation (Liquid or a gold chip Fedimint). Blinded amounts mainly seem to help with maintaining privacy among peers while still having an auditable circulating amount.
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I think the most important thing about fedimints is how they verify the supply. What's stopping one mint from inflating the supply?
I'm sure there's a good answer, I just haven't heard it yet.
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you're trusting them with custody, inflation should be the least of your worries
it boils down to if you trust them or you dont
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It really isn't the least of my worries. If I run a business, I don't want to be accumulating sats that were never there. Even if I gathered up the federation members and forced them to pay me out, in this scenario they may not even be able to.
All federations are another flavor of custodial so there's some things we just have to trust regardless of implementation. Whenever you talk about Fedimint, the trust tradeoffs are minimized as if transparency is inconsequential if they can all federations can rug you. For me I'd like to reduce the number of way I could be rugged and Fedimint seems to be able to do it through the additional mechanisms of opaque server side modules and inflation.
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If they can't verify
They can't be trusted
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I find it ironic that to use Bitcoin (a p2p electronic cash with no trusted third party and verifiably limited supply) we apparently have to use a trusted 3rd party that can arbitrarily inflate the supply because it can't be verified. Are you sure this is the way and not an attack?
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Are you sure this is the way and not an attack?
We need some soft forks, otherwise current self-custodial infrastructure will not scale
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It's a bit strange to keep coming across discussions about trusting everything when dealing with a system that was actually designed to replace trust based systems.
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I've been thinking a bit about the non-global-south fedimint federations. If we were to embrace fedi instead of liquid at some large scale then surely all the federations aren't going to be extremely-trusted-in-meatspace community leaders. We need to find some liquid federation-like fedi trust solution for 'the masses.'
What if it were something like the very top bitcoin devs making a large fedi federation together? People who would harm their existing life's work if they rugpulled... How many people like this can we put in an M-of-N federation inside fedi? I might trust that very much.
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I think developers already have a big say in things, and they might not be completely neutral about the project. So, trusting them with something like that is not a good idea.
For it to seem somewhat trustworthy, it should sample a wide range of people so that their interests never align.
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Unfortunately, fedimints are not available TODAY. When they're out and ready there's still likely going to be a few "issues" in the early releases (as with everything). So really, we're a few years away from a safe and working fedimint option.
Liquid IS working today. I'm personally glad I have been making use of it for refilling LN channels and consolidating small UTXO's. In small amounts of course.
Make use of what's available today. Not what is coming in the future.
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okay when mutiny has fedimint support later this month then we can stop using liquid
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If it's working well after a few years we'll see
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Mutiny is a promising project but many of the early users/testers have lost sats. Liquid works now and I haven’t lost a single sat due to some funky bug that never got solved
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I haven’t lost a single sat due to some funky bug that never got solved
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The same can be said about this whole space. Bitcoin will always have a zero day bug risk that can Nuke all of us. It’s not 100% risk free
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That's true
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fedimints are not available TODAY
Liquid IS working today
mhh, something tells me what kind of time preference you seem to have 🤔
If Liquid also no longer works, will you move to BCH because BCH "works"?
The main point of @benthecarman's post was to say that L-BTC is NOT BTC:
So why does Liquid exist? People lately have been touting it as a way to ease fee pressure but in my opinion this is a fool's errand, no different than people back in 2017 saying to use litecoin because fees on bitcoin were too high. Liquid is just a fork of bitcoin, it has the exact same scaling problems and the only reason it has smaller fees is because it is never really been used.
What you're doing is basically the same as swapping into BCH, ETH, XMR or whatever new fork of bitcoin seems to suit your need for transactions and when you're done, you swap back into BTC to pretend what you just did never happened. Imo, there is no difference.
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The difference is that liquid is 1:1 BTC. Yes, its not actually BTC but like a BTC stablecoin.
So you don't need to worry about losing the purchasing power of your sats. IDK, its been through a couple of bear markets without rugging....
I have a longer time preference that most. But sometimes you need to spend some sats TODAY. Thats why I use the tools available.
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Okay, I see, fair points. At least you seem to know what you're doing. :)
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oh, edit timer ran out:
However, I give you one point: At least you can refill LN channels with L-BTC, unlike BCH, ETH, XMR, ... I am not aware of any other fork of bitcoin that makes this possible as seamless.
However, I don't have any first hand experience with it. So I don't really know how seamless it is.
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The fact that you don't see the seam doesn't mean it's seamless. Some provider simply accepts L-BTC and sends roughly the same amount via LN (minus fees of all kinds). There's absolutely no difference from accepting any other shitcoin and sending the converted balance via LN. For example, you can do that at FixedFloat.
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Yea basically Liquid is a temporary stop gap for me. I use it to balance channels cheaper. Yea you make a great point Blockchains do not scale and if Liquid ever got popular it would have the same issue of high fees. What projects are exploring fediments to keep an eye on that you recommend? I like this high fee environment because it brings some urgency and discussions around scaling. Self custody for plebs with low amounts definately need a solution because in high fee environment their utxos can't be moved on chain and their tiny lightning channel has the whole channel locked up for reserve for a channel closing.......
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I was just learning about Liquid as a way of rebalancing lighting and having a hard time squaring the cost/benefit. If you want to move liquidity out by swapping via boltz to liquid, there's a network fee of 428 sats + 0.25% (+ whatever routing fee or channel opening fee gets you to the Boltz channel). Then you have L-BTC that you hope to swap back to on-chain bitcoin later, but will have to pay whatever the BTC on-chain network fee is + 0.5% for the Boltz fee... seems like it's a paid hedge to assume that BTC on-chain will be cheaper later, but you also get stuck with your BTC as L-BTC so you can't just use it to open a new channel until the fees go down...
Maybe I'm missing something but it seems like a lot of extra work and side-storage wonkiness that could end up being more costly ultimately as a way of creating inbound liquidity...
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Sideswap charges 0.1% for L-BTC to BTC swaps. And btw Liquid has some privacy features that the OP didn't mention (admittedly they're not that relevant to the issue of scaling). It blinds the amounts sent, but you can still unblind them using your private key.
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Fedimint does NOT have the same security model as Liquid. A dishonest fedimint can debase their ecash and misuse user funds, recreating fractional reserve banking. This is impossible to do covertly on Liquid, because everything is public and visible on the blockchain. "Blockchains do not scale" is an obvious lie, since Bitcoin itself is a blockchain and we all expect it to scale. Every scaling solution proposed for Bitcoin: fedimint, LN, covenants, can also be implemented in a sidechain, cheaper, faster and better
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The first Ark prototype will be launching on Liquid. It’s designed to scale blockchain accounting methods.
Sure it’s different than ecash but it’s good proof that there are benefits to sidechains for pioneering new scaling solutions.
They’re able to build the prototype there precisely because Liquid is a blockchain. They’re doing it on Liquid and not on the mainchain because Liquid supports more opcodes than the mainchain, specifically ones that allow for spend commitments (covenants).
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good proof that there are benefits to sidechains for pioneering new scaling solutions
Just like litecoin huh? Or eth, solana, etc. It's funny watching everyone come full circle from the 2016/2017 days of shitcoins.
Ark has to launch somewhere not on bitcoin because they'd be completely rekt trying to make a transaction every 5 seconds to give the illusion that it's "instant".
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Biggest reason it’s not “just like X” is the covenant opcodes that have been added (plus the utxo model for most modulo litecoin)
It’s true, Ark requires capital burn until escape velocity (usage hits cost effectiveness). We had a good convo about this on Vlad’s podcast that Calle + I recorded back in October. It’ll be a real bet on bitcoin transaction volume for whoever funds its bootstrapping phase.
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Also don't forget that Ark tx has to be in every single block if there was at least one tx between them. So yeah, if everyone uses it then it might scale well (infinite number of txs squashed into just one), but if only few people use it the ASP would pay enormous fees to keep it all running. See the current fees and estimate how many transacting people it needs to split the anchor tx fee between them, cover the cost and maybe earn some extra? And if we want this thing to be decentralized, we need multiple such ASPs, and each will be sending their transactions trying to get in every block or else the whole vUTXO trick becomes unreliable.
In LN you only pay twice per channel, no matter if it's used or not.
For some reason this little technical quirk isn't highlighted on their website arkpill.me. Maybe I misunderstand something, but this is what I got from the twitter discussions.
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Re: Fedimint.
Tornado Cash devs are thrown into jail for just deploying code. But actually custodying funds and in return issuing "untraceable eCash" is just gonna go unnoticed?! LOL, gtfo.
Whoever operates these mints has already one foot in jail. And no, going dark is virtually impossible, since these mints require reputation for people to put their money there. They are an too easy target
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Yes, this is where I get a little stuck. We've already seen some pressure being applied to custodial Lightning services (notably WoS). Won't the same play out with Fedimints / e-cash banks, or are there different dynamics here that I am unaware of?
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I suppose that is why they focus on communities and families. Custodianship already happens there. Doesn't mean the state won't go after then, but at very least, they aren't themsleves holding or profiting.
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excellent point. They are basically banks and subject to the regulation as such. Or at least, they take contracts (lightning) for ownership of an asset (BTC) in exchange for an IOU for the same. Kinda like early silver- and gold-backed dollars I suppose. So, then again, it may just be outright illegal on the basis that they are producing "currency". Or maybe it's no different than gift cards.
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We desperately need CTV merged in at this point so we can get real L2s. It's getting ridiculous.
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There are no scaling solutions only scaling trade offs
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Liquid = Shitcoin
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Indeed it is. A Proof of Stake shitcoin. I cannot see any difference between the Liquid Federation and the Ethereum staking nodes or the EOS validators. If anyone can explain it to me, I am very curious!
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This is my sentiment as well.
And the bridges in any shitcoin situation is often overlooked. I don't fully grasp how my btc in a wallet not in my control could be guaranteed to be mine on a peg out.
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An important thing to know regarding Liquid is that the block size CAN BE increased to any practical size, without the need for the bitcoin community risking the base layer.
Since there is no fee pressure, the fees will likely not increase with more usage.
The blocks could be 400MB each in a few years, and since the block time is 1 minute, it could process 1,000 times more transactions compared to the base layer bitcoin. That's appr. 400M transactions per day.
And this block size increase won't affect the base chain negatively. The base layer decentralization will not suffer.
So, while Liquid has some added risks due to the federation needing to approve when you move from L-BTC to BTC, it still could be part of the solution for small and frequent amounts.
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it can increase the block size, it is just a bandaid for their shitty architecture. you don't scale something with just a copy of it self. We replaced horses with cars, not more horses.
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I hear you, but what about this: #356487
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I am also super excited about fedimint because of the ability to also create custom modules that allow communities that deploy fedimints to customize to their needs. I have been working on a fedimint module for prediction markets over the past few months. I think fedimint will become a super powerful tool for onboarding new users to bitcoin.
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this is awesome
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I'm not sure if Blockstream advertised it as a scaling solution. It's a tool with some useful features, which currently, coincidentally, I think, has low fee features.
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Fedimints don't have a blockchain
I think this is grossly exaggerated by marketing. Fedimints do run a consensus algorithm to agree on a global ordering of events and do have an ever-growing database of spent tokens to prevent double spending. This is for all intents and purposes a blockchain, and is even called so in the HBBFT paper.
I think the most useful way to think about it is that Liquid is basically equivalent to one mint, and therefore doesn't scale by itself but does when there's a swarm of those things connected through Lightning. Liquid is great as a real money testbed for covenants, which is useful since you do want to enable covenants on the mainnet.
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Liquid, lightning and stacks all are layer 2 implementations to be a stop gap. People will experiment to see what works. Can even get into cashu and stuff but all just implementations feeling it out.
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Stacks is an affinity scam. Nothing to do with Bitcoin.
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hi cornman just here to zap u a couple sats
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blockchains don’t scale exponentially but is the growth we need linear?
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Well said.
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Federated Custody is CUSTODIAL
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Congrats, you're on a custodial website. Great argument anon.
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To be fair, they posted as @anon so they might not have funds on SN.
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Ditch the federation and just use Cashu
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You're not doing cashu a service by shilling it without any arguments. Since it looks like you're shilling it and have no arguments that make sense.
Get involved with the spec if you want to help (like I am trying). Even just thinking about the spec and coming up with feedback can be of great help. You don't need to be a dev to help.
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Why go half custodial when you can go full retard custodial 🤣🤣🤣
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Privacy
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storage isn't the main concern, bandwidth a major one. Syncing a node over tor is currently takes a very long time
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Really depends on the usecase. Do you trust ETH, FED or Liquid?
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I agree. Rootstock is more secure
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Now that the fees are high enough for users to more to L2s, let the free market decide what works! :)
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I agree with you but until there are more liquidity on LN for 1btc tx for example liquid can be very useful
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People do > 2 bitcoin txs on lightning all the time
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I think the solution to scaling is to use custodians that are interconnected with Lightning.
It's like with traditional banking or Internet, We don't use FedWire (the central banking ledger) but instead use banks that are interconnected thanks to FedWire.
And for Internet nobody is his own ISP, still we can benefit from the benefits of the Internet.
I think if Coinbase started integrating Lightning Network it would be very great since it would give us a fully transparent publicly traded Lightning Bank in some way.
I find lightning more reasonable, it's fast and costs very little