Lightning Network Observer

[fillippone]

freshly tapped lightning beer at the btc22 conference in innsbruck/austria�👌

I think these Rube Goldberg machines are indeed really significative because demonstrate the improvement on the Bitcoin UX, empowered by Lightning Network.
To the average user this is really just paying with a credit card.
This is what is important for the bitcoin adoption: making life easy for the average (or sub-average) user.

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[fillippone]

Usual wisdom and and tech expertise from Jameson Loop:

Lightning Liquidity Management Guide

Lessons learned from running a routing node on the Lightning Network.

He tries to answer this simple question:

Ever since people started running Lightning nodes on mainnet in early 2018, some have asked the question: what is a reasonable ROI to expect for placing my capital in a routing node?

The article is dated back in August, but I read only today because of a retweet by Jameson Loop himself.

[cygan]

the next good news regarding BTCitcoin adoption
there is not only the BTCitcoin beach in el salvador but also an island in the philippines (boracay island), where over 100 stores with lightning can be found ... maybe i should plan my next vacation there soon


https://pouch.ph/bitcoinisland

[fillippone]

I had completely missed an important statement by Micheal Saylor, as everyone was focused on the astonishing price projection (500K) he made on the very same panel.

The news is the following:

MicroStrategy, With Bitcoin's Price Depressed, Looks to Lightning to Boost Usage, Saylor Says


Micheal Saylor has announced he will leverage Microstrategy R&D to deploy products on the Lightning Network.

This news is important for a series of reasons:

• Microstrategy will slowly transform into something very different from what they are today.
  
  Microstrategy basically was a dead company, with no actual products, dying sales and a customer base. The "bitcoin Strategy" made me think they would have been the XXI century equivalent of Berkshire Hataway, which started as a textile company (who did know that?) and slowly transformed into a financial conglomerate.
  
  Similarly, I thought Microstrategy would slowly lose its industrial part and become relevant only for the "financial" part of the company, with all other operations more and more irrelevant on the balance sheet.
  
  With this news, Microstrategy makes us understand they are still focused on the industrial part: not developing generic "intelligence software" but developing software favouring the Lightning Network adoption, leveraging their expertise in programming skills and their massive R&D department.
  
  
• The involvement of such a big corporation in the Lighting Development means that they will also dramatically impact the developer scene. Long gone are the times when the Bitcoin Developers also were early adopters, meaning that they could withstand not being remunerated for their work because of the ludicrous amount of money they made with their bitcoin investment.
  
  Today skilled developers are concerned about the food they need to put in their dishes, and remuneration is any more optional (rightly so). There already is a good series of resources, grants and sponsorships for many of them (check some of those here)
  
  Having yet another firm committed at deploying huge resources on the Bitcoin Lightning development can help this process of "industrialization" of bitcoin development.  Smartest developer will be more confident about their future prospects in the LN, without being lured in some other more financialy viable (in their interest) like shitcoin development.
  
• If Microistrategy is successful in developing a successful LN integration on a wide scale environment, this will massively boost LN adoption, and thus Bitcoin adoption for Bitcoin agnostic application. Strike is only an example for this: to use Bitcoin as a network, you don't need to trust bitcoin as a coin.

Hope that we will hear more on this from Micheal Saylor about this initiative.

[cAPSLOCK]

I had completely missed an important statement by Micheal Taylor, as everyone was focused on the astonishing price projection (500K) he made on the very same panel.

The news is the following:

MicroStrategy, With Bitcoin's Price Depressed, Looks to Lightning to Boost Usage, Saylor Says


Micheal Taylor has announced he will leverage Microstrategy R&D to deploy products on the Lightning Network.

[fillippone]

Lol! Not once, but even twice!
I could blame the new device I was typing in, that probably still doesn’t possess all the bitcoin related lingo, but the reality is I completely overlooked this funny typo.

[n0nce]

Lol! Not once, but even twice!
I could blame the new device I was typing in, that probably still doesn’t possess all the bitcoin related lingo, but the reality is I completely overlooked this funny typo.

Actually, you got a triple!

Hope that we will hear more on this from Micheal Taylor about this initiative.

• Having yet another firm committed at deploying huge resources on the Bitcoin Lightning development can help this process of "industrialization" of bitcoin development.  Smartest developer will be more confident about their future prospects in the LN, without being lured in some other more financialy viable (in their interest) like shitcoin development.
  
• If Microistrategy is successful in developing a successful LN integration on a wide scale environment, this will massively boost LN adoption, and thus Bitcoin adoption for Bitcoin agnostic application. Strike is only an example for this: to use Bitcoin as a network, you don't need to trust bitcoin as a coin.

On-topic, though: more firms committed to Bitcoin and Lightning development is definitely great to see.
I sincerely hope we see more investments and development dollars going into Core Lightning, rather than yet another LND supporter, project which is still somehow connected with WEF and pushing weird things into / stopping great ideas from being integrated into Lightning protocol.

Regarding MicroStrategy; until now they're just a big investor in Bitcoin. I'm not sure why they're so idolized by many; their investment doesn't really help Bitcoin in any significant way. Further, in fiat world (where businesses operate), putting all your eggs in one basket is generally not a great idea. While with personal long-term savings, you may be fine with a 4 year bear market, your companies' investors may not be thrilled seeing your company value fall by 50% and stay there for years. Especially if they don't understand Bitcoin themselves (which most people generally don't).

I don't care too much about most companies, but I do believe that it makes sense for them to start working in the Bitcoin field, if they try to 'sell' this 'Bitcoin company' image and want to actually help Bitcoin instead of just buying large sums (for fiat maximization / as an investment - not to use it as P2P electronic cash, how it was originally intended..).

[franky1]

i doubt saylor will just want to become yet another node of the existing LN network weak policy guidelines, nor want to just make another wallet based on current LN weak policy

i think he will get developers to look at all the flaws of LN and develop another network that is a hybrid of LN but with less flaws and less ways to break pegs, less ways to create false balance and have less ways to cause liquidity bottlenecks without people having to set up multiple channels of X value each when they only want to spend X total in LN. and then have to try to shuffle funds around which causes more bottlenecks

but hey i think most people in this topic are just salivating and getting hormonally excited that someone of big name influence mentioned their brand of altnet

[fillippone]

Something moves on the TARO front. Today Lightning labs released an initial code for TARO



Here is the direct link:
Hello Taro: Building the (Tap)Root of the World's Financial Network with Bitcoin 👋�

Today we're excited to announce the alpha release of the Taro daemon, enabling developers to mint, send, and receive assets on the bitcoin blockchain. In April, we first announced Taro, a Taproot-powered protocol for issuing assets that can be transferred over bitcoin and in the future, the Lightning Network for instant, high volume, low fee transactions.  We are grateful to the bitcoin developer community for their valuable feedback, and have incorporated it into the draft Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs), which specify the protocol, and the Taro alpha daemon implementation.

It’s nice to see how much LN is contributing to the experimentation and competition on innovative solutions in the Bitcoin ecosystem. Now that the vbase protocol is almost ossified, the development is moving fast on the upper layer. There, the risk of breaking things is much lower, so also lower is the consensus required to deploy new functionalities, asd every protocol can compete with the others.

[n0nce]

It’s nice to see how much LN is contributing to the experimentation and competition on innovative solutions in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Sure, it's nice to see. Just sad that RGB was kind of thrown under the bus in the process.
As well as very dubious 'bitcoinizing the dollar' (tethered assets? ugh..  ) claims. Nothing against 'virtual assets' on Lightning, but something like Tether on LN? That means introduction of a 'bank'...

[fillippone]

It’s nice to see how much LN is contributing to the experimentation and competition on innovative solutions in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Sure, it's nice to see. Just sad that RGB was kind of thrown under the bus in the process.
As well as very dubious 'bitcoinizing the dollar' (tethered assets? ugh..  ) claims. Nothing against 'virtual assets' on Lightning, but something like Tether on LN? That means introduction of a 'bank'...

We are so early. I guess that being able to reproduce what we have today on a decentralised way on the Bitcoin upper layer would be and incredible feat. Then moving to more sensible project would be the next logical steps.

As I just said, this is not the base layer where you must be extremely cautious when developing. There it’s reckless experimentation.

[fillippone]

It’s not so common to see statistics on the usage of LN, actual usage, not static measures like capacity or channels, so I think it’s important to report those here:



More than the absolute measure, I think the growth it is important.

[cAPSLOCK]

It’s not so common to see statistics on the usage of LN, actual usage, not static measures like capacity or channels, so I think it’s important to report those here:



More than the absolute measure, I think the growth it is important.

Matt Odell, the lovable curmudgeonly idealist and privacy buff is making some fairly good criticisms of this stat.   And I think he has a great argument as far as the land of perfect goes.  I have long been the Bitcoin Fundamental Iconoclast (not even counting my interest in Monero) because of my nuanced opinion on "Be your own bank™" as an ideal.  It is just not possible.  There are too many of us.  There are too many who are technically challenged. Not to mention being your own bank is risky as hell.

The error, in my opinion is the idealistic thought that because Bitcoin removes the absolute NEED for a trusted third party that we should only build structures that also eliminate that need.  But the nuance is that we have the choice.  To employ however little or however much trust we want in whatever scenario.  Having a "bank", which is what WoS really is, is a helpful bit of trust for many.  The UX is better with WoS, no one has to run a node, or even worry about using a compromise wallet like Muun, Breez or Phoenix etc which generally have less smooth user experience.  

On the other hand Odell is right.  WoS is a huge target for the powers that be, thieves and accidents.  And essentially an unregulated bank that could steal all the funds whenever they want without any help from any governments at all.  So my 20k sats I have in there are a risk.

But therein lies my nuanced answer to the problem.  WoS is truly a WALLET.  In the sense that I am not usually going to be walking around with $20k USD stuffed into one of my back pockets for a night on the town, I am also not going to carry much cash in my WoS.  I have already decided, that if I were to visit El Salvador, for example, I would likely load up two (perhaps three) lightning wallets.  I would use Zeus with some funds on and off chain, enough for the trip. But I would also have WoS with maybe $100 in it at any time for using when we are out buying pupusas, coffee and renting boogie boards.  If using Zeus worked well enough?  Well, I could just use that.  But if not, I would be glad enough to have WoS work for fast, cheap, trouble free payments.  Perhaps if I were feeling adventurous I would try a middle road like Muun as well.  

But this is notable in my opinion because it istrue for someone with reasonable skills at "being his own bank".  Even in spite of that I would want to make certain compromises to my mix of convenience and sovereignty.  In fact that is part of what sovereignty is.  The ability to control ones own destiny and decisions.

So people using Wallet of Satoshi as a BANK ACCOUNT are making a big mistake.  And perhaps that is the meat of Matt's argument.  That folks in El Salvador and Africa using it as their primary financial storage system are at risk of the eventual rug pull...  Me losing $100 on vacation?  Not exactly the best thing to happen in a day... but a person in Nigeria losing most of their savings?  Kinda a different ballgame.

One last though before some grump I have on ignore takes up his usual canard.  ALL of these statements are ABSOLUTELY as true with BTC on the base layer as they are with lightning.  The Lightning part just adds some spice to the meal, so to speak...

I also think this stuff gets sorted out over time...  but it might take a while.

[fillippone]

One last though before some grump I have on ignore takes up his usual canard.  ALL of these statements are ABSOLUTELY as true with BTC on the base layer as they are with lightning.  The Lightning part just adds some spice to the meal, so to speak...

What can I say.
You are right.
Using bitcoin intermediaries (wallets, exchanges etc) as bank accounts will have dire consequences, sooner or later.
But the. reality is that we are so early, and not everyone has the required technical skill, or even the cultural skill, to proceed on a trustless, privacy respectful line of action with bitcoin.

It's very difficult for everyone starting to use bitcoin in the correct way. The most common approach is getting some choices, some of them horrible, and then working out to fix them one by one.
Using custodial wallets, it's one of those horrible mistakes, but it will also be one of the first where users usually realize they are going down the wrong path.

[cAPSLOCK]

What can I say.
You are right.
Using bitcoin intermediaries (wallets, exchanges etc) as bank accounts will have dire consequences, sooner or later.
But the. reality is that we are so early, and not everyone has the required technical skill, or even the cultural skill, to proceed on a trustless, privacy respectful line of action with bitcoin.

It's very difficult for everyone starting to use bitcoin in the correct way. The most common approach is getting some choices, some of them horrible, and then working out to fix them one by one.
Using custodial wallets, it's one of those horrible mistakes, but it will also be one of the first where users usually realize they are going down the wrong path.

Absolutely true!

I have often said this:  The revolution is not that you HAVE TO... but that you CAN.

We will get there.  I am sure.

[fillippone]

Absolutely true!

I have often said this:  The revolution is not that you HAVE TO... but that you CAN.

We will get there.  I am sure.

You’d be amazed of how many people I do argue about this.

People telling me you are not a true bitcoiner because you don’t self custody, you don’t run a full node, because you don’t safeguard your privacy.
Those are beautiful things. But the point it is an option.
You can choose from the wide spectrum. That’s the beauty.

[cAPSLOCK]

Absolutely true!

I have often said this:  The revolution is not that you HAVE TO... but that you CAN.

We will get there.  I am sure.

You’d be amazed of how many people I do argue about this.

People telling me you are not a true bitcoiner because you don’t self custody, you don’t run a full node, because you don’t safeguard your privacy.
Those are beautiful things. But the point it is an option.
You can choose from the wide spectrum. That’s the beauty.

It is refreshing to speak with someone of a similar mind on this.  The community is so polarized in so many ways.  Sometimes justifiably.  But often just because we are still immature.

I think if you took all the people who do not care about decentralized consensus, or define it too sloppily (ETH, BCH, shitcoiners in general,) and add to them all the hardcore MAXIs (run my own node.  Only use cast iron to cook etc) Then you have 98% of the VOCAL "crypto" people out there.  I do not know how many like us there are who see the nuance.  The ones who see it is not the BANKS that Bitcoin challenges, but the CENTRAL banks.  The ones who might run a node, but also use Wallet of Satoshi. And the ones who realize the vast majority of people who use Bitcoin will do so without understanding deeply why it matters.

But in this case common sense is the key.  People will trust others with their money, simply because there is value there that (hopefully) outweighs the risk.  Just as people will self-custody because of the value in that!  But let us not pretend there is no risk there either!

I buy you a coffee, sir.

[cygan]

we have broken through the 5000BTC🥳🤩

[fillippone]

I buy you a coffee, sir.

Please, be my guest next time you are around in Italy.
I will buy you a coffe using satoshi's.
Just for having the fonder memories of the most expensive coffe ever, when we will be old(er).
/J

[n0nce]

Michael Saylor decided to organize a Lightning Network meme contest on Twitter. Prize for 3 winners: 0.01 BTC each:

Memes to post here: https://twitter.com/saylor/status/1577413642437349377

Cool! I like these:

Lately, in discussions such as here, I started thinking again about second- or higher-layer on- and off-ramps, second-layer settlements and stuff like that.
It's actually possible that in the future it will be very uncommon to use the blockchain directly. That's why I like this one a lot.