Yea 40 sats is just the output, the input costs are socialized in the batch, and while channels can be opened for years and re-used infinitely there is a reserve within that channel for closure. IIRC an anchor reserves 20k, even if it could be gotten down to a 1/10th of that you're still not economically viable with less than 5-6 digits in sats.

This is why the most important thing we can do is personalize custody away from institutions, because there's less than a billion households and businesses in the world Lightning scales just fine for that, hense Lightning.Pub

People share homes/cars/refrigerators, they'll share nodes too.

Ark's and other VTXO schemes are being pushed by neobankers that want to be a central coordinator at-scale, creating a number of privacy, censorship and rugpull vectors.

"As a matter of mathematics"

I'm taking another stab.

Let's call world population 1e10 (10 billion) to make the napkin math easy.

Total bitcoin supply is 2.1e15 sats, so let's say half of it is lost or locked up in deep cold storage that never transacts, again to make the napkin math easy, and work with 1e15 sats that is mostly transacting in lightning. For purposes of this thought experiment, we will posit that in our hyperbitcoinized future everyone will want self custody if they can afford it, even though present behavior might suggest otherwise (most now keep funds on exchanges and are afraid of self custody).

With no wealth inequality, that's 1e5 coins per human. 10k usd net worth at our hypothetical 10mm btcusd hyperbitcoinization scenario.

But there is always wealth inequality, so let's call it a lot of people with 1e2 to 1e3 sats (essentially no savings, $10-$100, actually probably in debt), and a few fat cat 1%ers, with hopefully a healthy middle class sandwiched in the middle with 1e5 coins, actually transacting on lightning. The very poor (1e2) will use custodial lightning and hopefully won't mind it too much because if they get rugged they can rebuild their savings buffer in days or weeks rather than years or decades. The striving poor (1e3-1e4) may use a combination of self-custodial lightning for savings, and bank-custody lightning for transacting. Occasionally the self-custodial lightning moves on chain for more secure savings.

You would like the middle class (1e5) using self-custodial lightning and on-chain for savings, without sweating too much about the cost. As I said in the other post, if fee rate rises to 10sat/byte (good for long term security budget), this won't really be possible and even the middle classes will tend to use custodial lightning or centralized clearing to save on costs.

Even with 1 sat/byte (>100 sat transactions), this is spending >0.1% of net worth for every channel ops (without shared utxos), maybe that is too much.

So that is my argument for why we may want to move towards a shared utxo model even if a case can be made for YAGNI. Maybe you aren't going to need it, but maybe you are going to need it. And soft forks are hard. So might as well allow it, if the downsides aren't too horrible. Will hopefully also make bitcoin more attractive to investors if it is clear that there is a well thought out scaling path that also keeps miners fat, happy and hashing, without enabling turing complete shitcoins.

ok, lower wealth bound of 10k not 100k, my bad. So with me saying "why not 1k" now we're only an order of magnitude off. But I wonder if in your path the true wealth minimum might actually be much higher than 10k due to

"You cannot use Bitcoin if you cannot afford layer 1 transactions..."

sure. but how to get a more precise bead on "afford" ?

iiuc there is no technical reason for 1 sat/vbyte floor, it's just an arbitrary node 'minimum for relay" setting that could change at whim. It could be 0.01 sat/vbyte for all bitcoin cares. that being said, I actually prefer higher fee rates for reason of long term chain security when block rewards dwindle and fees have to pay for it all. so I won't quibble about 1 sat/vbyte and would actually prefer much higher feerate. So I will take 10sat/vbyte as my preferred feerate for a hyperbitcoinized future. 100 byte Transactions now cost over 1000 sats (I know it's really 200-300 bytes, just keeping it simple for napkin math). In 10mm hyperbitcoinized world, that's $100/transaction.

I don't think it's just under 10k sat net worth users being excluded from channel ops anymore.

I am having trouble making this notion precise, I wonder if anyone has done more homework on this. For instance, for determining a minimum net worth to afford channel ops, do estimators take into account bad channel partners who try to rip you off by broadcasting an old transaction and outbidding you when you try to contest it? Or does the model assume LSPs are mostly honest? If you know of any work that goes down the rabbit hole on this, I'd appreciate a pointer link.

All that being said, I want maximum batching and factories if possible to have a high security budget, amortized over many users who ideally still have self custody, and who DO NOT require their own personal utxos but can share utxos securely to achieve economies of scale (shared utxo concept).

If the whole argument boiled down to "YAGNI" because of no current scaling bottleneck, I would go ok, I can see what the root of our disagreement is.

But you don't seem to be sauying "YAGNI."

I understand (from your post history) you don't like shared utxos concept. But why not?