3092 sats \ 9 replies \ @anon 6 Jan \ on: Rethinking Lightning bitcoin
Very happy Mutiny+ user here. Thanks for your amazing work. Start by patting yourself on the back a little. Seriously.
My pleb opinion is at least half of the LN issue is education/expectations. I love Mutiny and use it constantly and have personally "felt" zero downsides. This is because I took time to research, at least high pleb level, the pros and cons of lightning and thus I expected the channel liquidity and on chain fee limitations. You just writing this up and posing these questions to the public is helpful education for the masses, and needs to be elevated and repeated by others.
Fedimint, imho, is for sure the best immediate term step forward.
Beyond that an OP_CTV only soft fork is the best next step, again imho. The Mutiny team is EXTREMELY well respected and influential, I think more than yall realize. If you publicly, especially if jointly with other influential devs and/or influencers, come out in favor of a OP_CTV only soft fork it could be here in a few years (lightning fast for a soft fork). My wild guess if that if Mutiny, another big wallet, Odell, and a few well known devs came out for a OP_CTV only soft fork we could get it in a year. We need to build momentum on what is in reality a fairly small and deeply analyzed change but would have enormous impact.
Just one plebs opinion. Maybe I'm too optimistic and dreaming. I just feel and fear a general jaded malaise coming over the dev community that scares me. We have to get out of: 1) treating all change as a 10 out of 10 huge deal we should naturally resist 2) influential devs saying if it isn't a big soft fork with exactly what they want in it they're adamantly opposed - this is childish and needlessly holding us back. Not going to dox or shame but people saying "if I dont get at least X, Y, and Z soft forks I'm opposed to all soft forks" need to somehow be cajoled or convinced to chill tf out and get on board with a little incremental progress and momentum. CTV has been around a long time and has been super thoroughly analyzed by a lot of people and its a relatively small change, just an op code. Let's get it done, find common ground, and keep building.
Love yall, love Mutiny, long live lightning.
Appreciate the kind words <3
This is because I took time to research, at least high pleb level, the pros and cons of lightning and thus I expected the channel liquidity and on chain fee limitations. You just writing this up and posing these questions to the public is helpful education for the masses, and needs to be elevated and repeated by others.
Yeah I think this is a lot of bitcoiners current situation, lighting works for them because they know all the nuances, but education doesn't scale, things need to be intuitive
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education doesn't scale
While I'm sympathetic to the idea that things should be as intuitive as possible, it is pretty impressive what humans will learn how to do when they have an incentive.
Think of all the crazy weird things we do to be able to drive a car (multiple foot pedals, controls of many sorts, an entire genre of laws, insurance costs and fine print, gassing it up, tire pressure, oil changes, roads, signage...). If you presented a new tech and told an investor these were the things that needed building out, no one would go for it. But people wanted to go faster.
Lightning and bitcoin in general just have to keep being useful enough that users have a reason to figure it out. We need to keep plugging bitcoin use-cases into the wider world and people will figure out channel management if they need it to do what they want.
For me, the focus is on what bitcoin and lightning let people do that they couldnt before and really want.
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I'm gonna take this analogy further than it probably goes:
I have to manage my gas tank. 100 years of car technology hasnt solved the problem away from me. I have to make sure it doesn't run out. If it does I get stranded somewhere miles from where I need to be and it is a huge headache.
Sure, we have warning symbols and gauges, but we don't have a great solution that makes it so I don't have to manage my gas tank. We just built a really big infrastructure to help me do it.
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Great analogy. Unfortunately payment apps and online wallets never had gas tanks before bitcoin came along. They just had account balances so that's what laymen understand.
Getting them to understand that they'll need to keep up with a 'gas tank' will always be a hard sell because it just inherently feels unnecessary.
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This is a good analogy, I might use it.
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Agreed with the current best path being Fedimints (soon) -> CTV (within next couple years). Reassess where we are after another halving or two.
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