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
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.
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Things will bifurcate but still nothing is stopping me and you from opening a channel to each others nodes and make payments. No government or centralized node can ever stop us from transacting. As long as you can accumulate capital and can run FOSS this is possible
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I can't host a node or open a channel for reasons I indicated elsewhere. My only hope would be for enough people to send me enough sats using alby or its ilk at the moment to then be able to get a different kind of internet service and be able to afford the new, higher price internet consistently. The FCC then is all ready stopping me from doing so, and everybody else playing rich daddy sats warbucks does the rest.
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Which brings up an interesting question...what are the duties of the sats rich in part because they are in areas where my above scenario isn't true to those who are maybe thinner in sats if the goal is to kick fiat? At the very least, if you are going to have privileged nodes, there should be "Broke ass" nodes where transaction fees are small to non-existent.
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