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Your expression of the rules is only as strong as your demand for the coin that follows those rules. [...] Holding bitcoin isn't enough to enforce the rules. You have to demand bitcoin that follows the rules. And the only way you can express this demand is by trading other stuff to people in large enough quantities that they are willing to give you bitcoin.
I really like this phrasing. Makes me think differently about the value of lightning routing nodes, in particular, and the leverage they exert on the network, mediating all the transactional demand.
The Lighting Network definitely makes it harder for me to think about.
For instance if we use a big LSP as an example (like Phoenix): They do a lot of payments, but their bitcoin node only sees these payments in aggregate when they open or close a channel. I'm not an expert on LN, but it feels like the tx that really matters is the open (because in a channel close, the two parties aren't introducing any new coins, but rather deciding where to apportion the sats that are already in the channel). So, it makes sense that Phoenix exerts influence over bitcoin consensus rules every time they someone opens a channel with them. But if we think about a long standing channel they have with some other major LSP, perhaps that doesn't exert very much influence? Then again, if there is a fork, the LN network would split based on which LN nodes were on which side. That's the part I find difficult to think about.
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The LN would split based on which nodes were on which side
Its also likely that many LN nodes would support both sides of the fork. At least at first...
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