3258 sats \ 12 replies \ @SqNr65 7 Jan \ on: Rethinking Lightning bitcoin
I have an annoying complaint about this post, if you don't like petty rants, move along.
OP, there are 13 paragraphs in this post. The first 10 repeatedly describe the problems we already know about. They are redundant and tedious to read but I got thru on the hope that, as the title implies, you would outline a new idea later on which attempts to solve these issues and how. The next 2 paragraphs give a frustratingly small amount of information on covenants, but don't actually explain how they solve the problems outlined in painful length in the 1st 10. The last paragraph is a commercial for your business and talks about fedimint which is not "rethinking lightning"
You should have condensed the 10 into 1, and written another 10 about covenants explaining in excruciating detail how exactly they address any of the issues, because it is very far from clear as it is. You gave 6 examples of soft fork proposals and gave exactly 0 information on what they entail, what they do, how they do it, nothing, just some letters and underscores.
I appreciate that you're working on scaling Bitcoin, that's brilliant and I hope you become filthy rich from the fruits of that labor. Truly the Lord's work, and I commend you for it.
But this post is garbage. It made me much more pessimistic about lightning, it was frustrating as hell to read, repetitive, redundant, meandering, and ultimately uninformative, I learned nothing at all.
Was this post about lightning? About fedimint? About covenants? The vast majority is about trashing lightning in ways we already know lightning is trashable. And then you just said "covenants are the answers" but didn't explain covenants or how or why they are the answer. And then you said Fedimint. Yea we already know about fedimint. I'm very frustrated having read thru this.
It's possible that you need a more savvy writer to communicate your ideas to a broader audience. Or maybe I'm too much of a noob to understand what just happened here. Idk. I may be an idiot, but I don't feel I've gained anything at all by reading this
You can always ask ChatGPT to condense any post to size of your liking. With a bit of training you can even teach AI the level of your current knowledge/expertise so it produces personalized outputs.
For example here is response asking ChatGPT4 to condense the post into three paragraphs:
The post discusses the challenges and potential of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, focusing on its evolution and current issues. Initially hailed as a decentralized payment network with cheap transactions and the ability to run personal nodes, the reality has shifted. Many users now rely on custodial wallets instead of self-custodial solutions like Mutiny Wallet, which aims to address these challenges.The author identifies two major issues with the Lightning Network: channel liquidity and the offline receive problem. Channel liquidity, unique to Lightning, confuses users due to its complexity and inconsistent fee structures, while the offline receive issue arises because users must be online to sign and claim payments. Attempts to solve these problems, like Zeus Pay lightning addresses, have led to more issues, like stuck payments. These challenges make self-custodial Lightning less popular, driving users towards easier, custodial solutions.Beyond these issues, the post delves into deeper problems like the impact of on-chain fees on channel liquidity and potential solutions like anchor channels and package relay. However, these solutions are not perfect and often require a compromise, like holding on-chain funds for fee bumps. The author suggests that large-scale lightning nodes might be a better focus, given that most users prefer custodial wallets for their simplicity and efficiency. The post concludes by exploring future directions, including the need for soft forks to implement covenants for scaling Bitcoin ownership and the potential of fedimints to dynamically share ownership over a group of UTXOs, offering a promising direction for Bitcoin scaling.
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I'm a dev, not a writer. This is the best you're gonna get lol
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Hey man, a while after reading this I realized that you prompted me to look into CTV, how it works, what it is, and how it can be applied to mitigate some of the issues in lightning. And I am much more knowledgeable about Bitcoin in general, and scaling solutions in particular because of it. In just a few days the value of your article has manifested in my life. I have a deep need to understand what is happening in Bitcoin, and what the limitations of the current tools are, and also what the mitigating innovations are and how they work, and your piece helped me to gain that understanding, so thank you. I apologize for calling the post "garbage". I wasn't able to see its value at first, but I see it now, and I appreciate it.
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much love, no hard feelings
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I disagree. As more of a noob I very much appreciated the explanation of the problems of Lightning documented here.
It was very valuable to me--
We need more of this--education of the non-technical--to help foster understanding of the issues, and ultimately solutions.
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I'm really glad it helped you understand the issues with lightning, I think it's incredibly important for us non-technical noobs to understand the limitations in the tech as much as we can.
But did it help you understand how to address these shortcomings in any practical way? Or did it outline how these issues might be mitigated in the future?
It did a good job (arguably) of outlining problems. Do you think it did a good job of outlining solutions?
Did it help you understand what covenants are, how they work, or how they can help solve any of these issues?
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The first step in a solution is to understand the problem. :)
And...I have faith that there will be technical solutions. When the internet was in its infancy, no one envisioned Netflix, or Amazon for that matter, but solutions were envisioned to solve those hurdles.
Creativity found a way...and so it will be with L2 and L3..
"How many times has a man thrown up his hands at a time, when a little more effort, a little more patience would have achieved success."
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Sure man, glad you understand the problems better now.
Faith means trust, don't verify. Not a fan. I prefer don't trust, verify.
I also think there will be solutions, but this article brought me no closer to understanding what those solutions might be.
Nice quote and all, but you didn't really answer any of my questions at all, didn't even try to.
Care to venture a response? Not tryna be a dick here. I'm really just curious, I wanna know if I missed something. There are a bunch of questions there, would love to get an answer for at least 1 of them
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Sure man, glad you understand the problems better now.Faith means trust, don't verify. Not a fan. I prefer don't trust, verify.I also think there will be solutions, but this article brought me no closer to understanding what those solutions might be.Nice quote and all, but you didn't really answer any of my questions at all, didn't even try to.Care to venture a response? Not tryna be a dick here. I'm really just curious, I wanna know if I missed something. There are a bunch of questions there, would love to get an answer for at least 1 of them
AFAIU, the way covenants solves this issue is by making the ownership of each UTXO shared by more than 1 party without hitting the chain. Which, for the layman, means that in the future all channels will be opened to multiple parties (instead of just one), which will save in fees. And given that covenants will allow, this way, for LN to scale to the whole planet (because, you know, LN as it is today can't scale to the whole planet as it requires at least 1 UTXO per person), then we will have lower on-chain fees. And with lower on-chain fees, we don't have all the issues that OP explained in the 1st 10 paragraphs of his rant.
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