Bitcoin Forum

In my understanding of how LNs work, the system would provide an opportunity to stake your BTC to provide liquidity to a market of people transacting. This opens up the market of receiving interest on your BTC in the form of fees levied in the LN in the form of BTCs. This means that like PoS, you can earn interest on your coins without custodial risk or risk of not being repaid. This incredible new opportunity for profit would be controlled by the faction that can provide the most liquidity and lowest fees on their LN. I would propose to make a ICI, or Initial Coin Investment, to setup a fund to make sure we as a community can create a LN channel as well and provide it with ample liquidity.

Who agrees or disagrees and why?

Thanks for reading :-)

Why are you mixing the Lighting Network and PoS? I don't think they have anything to do with each other. Bitcoin will probably get the Lighting Network implementation, but it will remain PoW. The objective of the lightning network is to create the possibility of instant payments, reduce the costs of fees, allow millions of transactions per second, which will be essential for mass adoptions and for bitcoin to be able to compete with paypal for example. This is what I know, and I never heard of any relation with the LT and PoS. Am I getting something wrong here?

I said like PoS, definitely not PoS indeed.

The mining algo will remain a PoW algo for sure, but the way the architecture is displayed for a LN, there would be a utility function for users within the system to act as ''liquidity providers'' and earn a fee this way. Now, as you can see, this starts to resemble the same economical realities as a PoS system. If you provide a lot of liquidity (ie Bitcoin) you can earn fees by allowing users to hop through your channel using your Bitcoin.

Now as you can see, it would be profitable to be the largest one of these hubs as soon as possible, since there is very strong network effect (easier and fastest to reach people in the largest network) and first mover advantage (most retailers / users will start using you and will not stop using you without a good reason to do so).

This naturally leads to my question: why not make a fund, supported by and funded by the community to provide this liquidity and earn the fees. This would be better than some whales earning all of the fees because they have the most liquidity in my opinion but that is just my personal opinion. There is no practical difference for the user.

Kind regards and thanks for reading and commenting :-)

I'm not fully sure of what you're trying to say here, but if you think that Bitcoin will ever turn to PoS then you're wildly wrong about what the community looks like at the moment. The people that would have to confirm this sort of change, is the miners, and with a change like this they'd be losing money -- so I don't think they'd ever want to move to PoS and lose all of their mining money and the power that they hold in the Bitcoin system as well.

Something like this isn't going to happen unless it's going to help the miners, or at least some really Bitcoin rich miners.

Plus I think it's better we actually have real miners, instead of just giving interest payments to the already super rich.

There may be characteristics like PoS but the Lightning Network is not PoS. If you want a closer comparison with PoS, try analyzing how the masternodes function. Its really becoming more and more popular now with some cryptocurrencies starting to adopt it as a marketing tool.

LN involves stake, but neither proof nor consensus so wouldn't compare it to PoS. Having bigger stake, providing more liquidity, more fee. Yeah, some major Bitcoin exchanges and wallets would be operating large payment hubs, central hubs, but since the whole security of LN relies on the decentralized Bitcoin Blockchain, LN causing centralization isn't much of a concern.

LN is open source and anyone can run a node. As more Bitcoin related businesses are launched, there would be more payment hubs. For example, users of Coinbase might prefer using Coinbase payment hub, similarly Xapo or any other service so individuals/businesses are incentivized for having a bigger stake, open competition.

LN gives more advantage to whales and big Bitcoin businesses, right, is it unfair? No, someone has heavily invested into Bitcoin or the other has been providing a reliable, trusted Bitcoin service. So I don't see why a community funded LN hub is required.

I do not want to sound like the newbie I am, but have you read what I meant with the PoS comment? I just put it in the title because anything that doesn't immediatly trigger people to comment is gone in about 10 minutes. The formula ''like X in certain aspects'' exists in this world.

Call it a liquidity rewards principle, call it a hubfee, call it floogacooga for all I care the point is that large BTC whales will be able to provide the best, most well connected and most liquid hubs.

@krishnapramod, I get that you would say that BTC whales deserve to be the ones to receive benefits from the system (I think your other argument of everyone being able to run a LN is really quite naive. You are able to run a search engine, think people are going to use you over Google?). However, it at least begs SOME discussion on why no one sees these economic realities as a problem in the cryptosphere. The only criticism that is allowed is about technical aspects. What about the economy? What about the rest of reality? I am seeing a lot of echo chamber behaviour in the cryptosphere and it's making me really cynical about the prospects of this whole ecosystem.

Thanks for reading.

As an extra clarification: if the next comments are all ''bitcoin is not getting PoS'' I'm removing the thread and losing all hope in Btalk ^^.

No need to. Your analogy is correct. LN will allow a "PoS staking alike" of sorts. It will be a cool way to get your BTC to work for you, so yes, I can see whales making a decent amount by using their funds to stablish hubs. Im not sure how it exactly works, but even Andreas used the PoS analogy to refer to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOYP4O4yetQ

And I recommend this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF_ZQ_eijPs

@BillyBobZorton

First of all, thanks a lot for the links, I am watching them now feeling bad that I could not make it to the conference because of personal issues. Also, thanks for the attention for the previous comments. I really think there should be some sort of section on the forum where you can kick people who do not read the comments or something like that. What do you think of the ''whales deserve the fees vs. the community should build something to distribute the fees'' argument if I may ask?

I do not wish to sound too cynical, but a lot of the content on this forum is way below the quality that it was just a couple of years ago. It is mostly either botlike questions or people not interested in discussion, but I guess their postcount and how smart they think they sound.

Anyways, thanks for reading and commenting!

edit: spelling

For a speedy PoS we need blockchain NG feature.
We will started to test Blockchain NG with waves in few weeks. Then get ready for PoS services

You don't sound like a newbie, but you're missing the fundamental point that Bitcoin isn't equally distributed, early adopters do have an advantage. Bitcoin isn't going to create a fair distribution of wealth. Like any other economy, economic/income/wealth inequality does create an unequal distribution of cryptocurrencies in cryptoeconomics. This is the reality and I don't think discussing it to greater extent would solve it.

I am a bit getting confused with the term community. IMO irrespective of their investment, be it 0.001 or thousands of Bitcoin every individual who is a Bitcoin enthusiast is a part of the Bitcoin community, right? Let's agree that the community built an LN hub and started distributing fees among members, would the fees be equally distributed? No. Members with higher stakes would get more fees, right.

Yeah, do agree that rather than simply running a search engine having even a small stake in Google is worth it. The concept of the community creating an LN hub is quite possible, after all it's free market, more competition, less fee.

LN implementation will take some time and probably the fees will be very low.

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-lightning-network-creators-fees-will-be-effectively-zero-1459955513/

Thanks for your reply!

I was not really talking from a purely monetary economical standpoint, but just for myself to put things to paper as well:

My problem was with the power this gives to probably a couple of LNs that might not have the bitcoin networks best interest at heart. We could build a LN with a limited buy in per person, no whales and try to go for as many people as possible. We could go for the many, many holders of a couple of coins max. But my main point for this would be that we would settle against the blockchain. Even though this is the moment when you pay the mainchain fees, I think it is required to keep miners motivated and the whole ecosystem converging. If a group of powerfull people try to maximise their profit in a LN and have no other interest in mind, it just sounds like an elaborate way to get rid of bitcoin altogether. My explanation and thinking are probably equally flawed and I feel comforted by the fact that there are at least many more coins, many more experiments :-)

Thanks for reading