pull down to refresh
3316 sats \ 0 replies \ @petertodd 23 Nov \ on: BITCOIN CORE'S LOSS OF FOCUS bitcoin
Right off the bat James gets something wrong: the leadership of Core right now is mostly not "legacy". They're newcomers like Chow and Zhao who got involved relatively recently.
Good mempool policy is essential to making L2's work; L2's are the only viable solution we have to scaling self-custody to more people. While I disagree with Core on some of the detailed specifics of the mempool policy that has been adopted, the reasons why so much work has been done on mempool policy are correct.
Bitcoin can open about 1.1 billion channels/year with the existing Lightning protocol, with fairly simple changes to existing wallets. Tens of millions is not a big deal.
The irony here is that James has been wasting a bunch of time on an unimportant proposal that does nothing to scale self-custody: OP_Vault. In fact, OP_Vault makes the problem worse, by encouraging a particularly inefficient way of doing self-custody, approximately doubling the amount of chain space needed.
Meanwhile we have good reasons to not want to rush into multiple user per UTXO systems.
No-one has flushed-out proposals that let the world population DCA to genuine on-chain self-custody with minimal fees. Sorry. But we just haven't figured out how to do that. Ark is one of the things that comes closest. But holding a true self-custodial balance on Ark will require fees to pay for liquidity.
The most straightforward way to do DCA with minimal costs is to DCA to a trusted token, eg ecash, and periodically use the accumulated balance to resize a lightning channel. We have about enough on-chain capacity to resize about 470 million LN channels per year.
The world population with a cellphone is estimated to be roughly 4 billion people. So that gets us reasonably close.