31 sats \ 1 reply \ @MaxAWebster 10 Jun \ on: Don’t Sleep on Lightning bitcoin
I haven't read this in a while! @south_korea_ln, you're absolutely right that this deserves a longer follow-up examining what I got right/wrong and how my opinions have changed.
I did write another LN post in Oct '21. But even that is now dated.
A few high level points that come to mind immediately:
- I wrote OP paper in 2020 when I was working for another fund which focused on Ethereum and DeFi. At the time I was mostly into BTC, but did not yet have 100% conviction as I currently do. I was also trying mightily to get my fund interested in LN development, which was surprisingly challenging given how well they were doing (on paper at least) with DeFi projects like Uniswap
- I eventually developed enough conviction to go all in on BTC/LN and launch my own fund in 2021 dedicated to investing in the ecosystem. Since then I've invested in >40 companies in the space and have never looked back :) At some point soon I'm planning to launch an updated website with all of my portcos. It's been really rewarding to invest fully in what I believe in
- I'm still super bullish on LN though growth has been a bit slower than I imagined. I now see it increasingly as the glue between many different BTC neobanks (e.g. Cash App)& mints. I'm particularly bullish on ecash mints (Cashu and Fedimints) connected via the Lightning Network. @rodarmor was the first person to turn me onto this idea. Note I still do hold hope for non-custoidal LN scaling to the masses at some point
- I'm particularly bullish on Nostr Wallet Connect (NWC) as the messaging layer for LN payments. I should have a new post on this soon
- An area I've changed my mind on is how LN will interop with identity/data. Originally, I thought an LN pubkey would be universal identity for the Internet. And that BTC would grow in layers: BTC > LN > data. Similar to what @dhruv & @ryanthegentry discussed at the BTC Conference in 2021. I now think that Nostr will provide the pubkey identity and that the data will be transferred via Nostr with attached LN payments. Or as Dhruv explains nicely, I'm now more bullish on putting the payment inside the data rather than the data inside the payment.
Although in the long run, who knows?
Longer piece necessary, but TL;DR, I'm now bullish on a stack where:
- Bitcoin is value
- LN (+ ecash) is payments
- Nostr is identity + data
Here's more on why I'm so bullish on Nostr as the identity/data layer: https://hivemind.vc/identity/