It occurred to me that another overlooked factor is future evolution of lightning node reputation, which is possible even with nymous nodes hiding behind tor.

I think routing nodes are unlikely to cheat because it violates their business model, like miners are unlikely to help double spend cheaters even if there is a short term benefit. These are human beings behind the servers, with morals (some without but still with reputation) and if the game theory INCLUDING human factors and psychology works, lightning will work. Just like bitcoin works, even if you could argue some cockamamie goldfinger attack scenario where miners should 51% attack bitcoin and profit with defi shorts if they were rational, but somehow they don't.

So the minimum safe capital to defend a channel under 99.999% probability conditions, may be much lower than a cold blooded mechanistic analysis that ignores human factors and reputation, might suggest.

Peter Todd's view of the basic math is laid out here:

I neglected to include the alex bosworth scaling commentary in the top post sorry, here it is:

The same thread contains a discussion of why I now distrust the ark push for a covenant softfork:

quoting peter todd

""On-Chain Fee Payment In Unilateral Withdraw Similar to Lightning, the economics of on-chain fee payment and the actual value of a V-UTXO after fees determine whether Ark usage meets our definition of an L2 via unilateral withdrawal, or fraud failing to benefit the ASP. We’ll discuss the specifics of this further when we discuss the txout tree design pattern.""

justin_shocknet: "I think its fair to say if someone with Peters grasp on the fundamentals has done a review of L2's, and can't conclude whether something is definitively an L2, then it's not an L2."

also, proud stacker news user

"I onboarded 12 people to self custody." "Great job!" "Thanks, cost me 3 years of my life."

want to orange pill someone? demand payment for something they want, in Bitcoin.

bad for business? oh well, quit being annoying and live your life.

this isn't snark. darknets orange pulled LOTS of pharmaceutical opioid addicts.

give things time, don't be annoying. best in class products eventually grow to fill their niche, Bitcoin is no exception.

I completely agree.

it depends. The faster it goes, the more violent and shitty for society.

Also the better for those who only care about NgU. Then again, NgU doesn't do you much good if you and your family wind up enslaved by some local warband, after multiple family member kidnappings and extortions, the police don't answer the phone (or maybe they are the ones doing the extortions), and having your wealth expropriated of course.

A slow collapse is best, imho. Gives everyone time to process what is happening and reallocate, so only the most stubborn dollar diehards are ruined.

For color on the fast collapse scenario, just look at history.

"When money dies" by adam furgeson is good.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_of_Yesterday by stefan zweig may also be a good guide.

Also check out Berlin Diaries by christopher isherwood. This was the novel that inspired the musical Cabaret.

IMHO it will be a slow collapse. This basically looks like... what we are already currently experiencing. Give it another 12-15 years.

The slow collapse is sometimes called hyperbitcoinization, to distintuish it from hyperinflation. Hyperbitcoinization ain't that bad.

"Hyperbitcoinization will not disrupt the economy to nearly the same degree as hyperinflation. The currency is the instrument of the division of labor, and hyperinflation makes it unreliable and forces people to use worse alternatives. In a hyperbitcoinization event, people switch from a fundamentally inferior currency to a superior one, whereas in a hyperinflationary event people will only switch to a new currency once the old currency becomes worse than the next best alternative, such as gold or detergent. Hyperbitcoinization should be accompanied by a rapid improvement in productivity and wealth."

The unhappy path (hyperinflation) happens if society determines to oppress bitcoin by driving it underground and imposing capital controls and censorship, and other dystopian bullshit. You still get hyperbitcoinization eventually but it's a bit more grim along the way.

just post cool stuff and send them links. it promotes itself.

to me makes more sense to lobby miners and exchanges to use non-bitcoind software, just for diversity's sake.

or just kiss the ring and fight for the bitcoin you want around and about bitcoind.

maybe relevant:

summarized: https://bitcoinops.org/en/newsletters/2025/03/07/

"In the third post, he recommends splitting the existing project into three projects: a node, a wallet, and a GUI. This is within reach today thanks to the multiple-year effort of the multiprocess sub-project (see Newsletter #39 for our first mention of this sub-project in 2019)."

if nothing else, reducing the project scope to (just) a node would at least decrease the noise and the blast surface of the debate about consensus changes.

I think the culture is not a bitcoind thing, but a bitcoin thing.

To change the culture, is by definition to lobby, perhaps a pejorative word so let's say to communicate honorably and effectively.

There will always be bad actors doing bad lobbying, the medicine is to counteract it with better more honest and effective communication (better lobbying).

But there's no getting away from lobbying.

If bitcoind somehow falls in prestige and userbase, some other schelling point will be found and same dynamics will eventually emerge.

Perhaps winston churchill would say that bitcoind is the worst possible bitcoin client, except for all the others. ("Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.....")

initially I thought APO enabled eltoo, without being a covenants softfork.

but after diving it now iiuc apo enables covenants after all, just badly

source for this iiuc

alex bosworth tweet "We can onboard a billion/year to LN using just batching..."

another take:

"there are no PoW coins that survive on fees alone" (peter todd)

Personally I disagree with this, but just reading the room.

I think things change when there is pressure to change.

With $2 transactions, there simply isn't much pressure to do much of anything, from real users.

From shitcoin dreamers, sure there is pressure for a scaling softfork.

This isn't the fault of the bitcoind monorepo. Bitcoind as the reference client has been under attack for years and everyone has ptsd and paranoia I guess, largely justified.

Things will change when there is fee pressure, if that ever happens.

IE, people will switch from bitcoind to other clients to get their relay policies, or bitocind itself will get more flexible, or however.

But there just isn't the pressure now. So we spend all the attention and energy arguing with the shitcoin on bitcoin defi douchetards, who are the only ones applying any pressure now.

The dilemma as I see it revolves around "relative miner revenue" when fees replace block subsidy. This is estaimated at 0.004% by the btcsecurity tool.

BTW I think drivechains are dumb, and this estimator is by the drivechain guy, but it's still a very useful tool for the current task.

Anyway an interesting question is, what is a reasonable security budget? IE, why is 0.004% too low for our 2140 future?

Another key factor: how many chanops/year will a typical self sovereign lightning user need. I'm thinking one a month is probably generous upper bound, to be reasonable and to not get screwed in unafoffordable justice transactions.

Another question, assuming hyperbitcoinization of 10mm btcusd current purchasing power, what percent of planetary energy use is monopolized by bitcoin? CBECI estimates current percent at 20GW (10 hoover dams, sounds about right), working on getting total energy consumption. (Note, total energy not total electrical energy)

And there are probably some other factors I haven't thought of yet.

Gini coefficient is probabbly one, but I think we can take current world gini coefficient for sanity.

noice