@DarthCoin show this one the way
Having run many nodes and lost countless sats I still run a node because it’s money i actually own and control. I can make all kinds of payments and receive payments. If you back it up if your node dies and you have the recovery seed you will get your corn back. You might pay a lot in fees but this is the price of sovereignty!!
Those LSPs can go down or be forced to close your channels at any time due to outside pressure or governments
When you have your own node they have to physically target you to shut down your node.
It’s super early and super frustrating I get it but as the space matures hopefully you don’t have regret
I said many times: Running a public routing is not for everybody. And is nothing wrong with that. My POV about LN nodes is here: #486306
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Except the original design of bitcoin was for all nodes to be public and private which made sure no node was "special".
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You are confusing bitcoin core nodes with lightning nodes. Lightning nodes are about liquidity and payment network. Bitcoin core nodes are about final settlement and verify the security of the network. LN cannot function without a secured base to settle. The mainnet cannot scale to a payment network without LN.
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No. I am discussing the PURPOSE OF THE INVENTION OF BITCOIN. If lightning isn't within that scope and makes certain nodes special, there is a problem.
The mainnet scaled fine. It just became a victim of its success.
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But it’s open source software. The people who developed lightning is their attempt to solve a problem. Where it goes from there it’s up to individuals. So far lightning works. Stacker news proves this. I can send you 5 million sats right now over the internet with no 3rd party risk or involvement
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Yeah, so was the original financial system. Making the same digital mistakes all over again isn't going to go anywhere new.
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Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Even if LN becomes hyper-centralized around a few major routing nodes, it's still many times more decentralized than the legacy financial system.
I'm not saying we should be okay with a hyper-centralized Lightning network.... I'm just trying to bring some balance to the conversation. We ARE NOT making the same mistakes all over again, even if some of the tradeoffs do look similar.
We all need to be cognizant of a potential Slippery-Slope-Fallacy, cuz it can happen at both ends of the debate.
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We are starting to, at the very least. We are all ready more tight-fisted over all than we were when lightning first came into use. People are starting to "hoard it" a bit more, and now "privileged nodes" are becoming a thing.
Both products I described are nodes that run on my phone.
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Unless I make my own software, I'm still trusting others.
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You're trusting others whether you make your own software or not. There is no trustlessness in a world where you interact with other humans. The question is who, when, and how much.
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Well I've been using Linux since 1999 and I'm familiar with FOSS.
I trust a lot of things. I don't trust that my lightning skill set is very good at all.
It's no fun. I want things to work and I'll pay developers but using their products and if they do a good job I will keep using their products and pay fees. Just like people keep paying me to build piers for them.
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Fantastic
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