After all these years, IMMORTAN lite wallets still give me the best non-custodial user experience (success rate, speed, fees).

And for onboarding, ppl could still use the hosted channels (which i don't) and swap from HC to own channel once they got enough inbound.

They just all look a bit shit.. 🤷

 

 Not too good news if true. I did try to use LN again a bit about 7 months ago, experience was so bad as if nothing has changed since early days (payment failures), that's when I've decided it's time to call it a day. 

 The demand isn't so much for Bitcoin payments as it is for low cost, fast and reliable payments. The fiat card payment networks and alternative fintech solutions that rely on them are all too expensive for small merchants. A café I was at recently (that doesn't accept sats) wouldn't accept a card payment for a drink either. The proprietor explained that he loses money on the soda since the card network 2%+25 cents is bigger than their margin. He'd said he'd happily accept sats if it was they didn't have these fees and it was technically simple.

Driven by this need, it seems to me that centralized LSPs (LN service provider), like Wallet of Satoshi, will end up being the PSPs (payment service provider) for LN payments. They can match the UX of most fiat payment systems if they wanted to and they can do this with much lower transaction fees than fiat networks.  Of course, this isn't the LN vision, but it will be the reality. However, it is also nice that LN is open and can be semi-decentralized as well, so while a few large LSPs will handle most payments, there is still room to hook in niche channels and nodes for other use cases.

Finally, the centralized LSP as a PSP is not such a bad thing as most of the value add from the card networks can be replicated as well, such as purchase protection. 

 Muddled that  :-) .. . He said he'd happily accept sats if they didn't have these fees and it was technically simple. 

 There are numbers: 5 payments per year and your channel becomes economically reliable. 

nostr:nevent1qqs0kl6x47jpel07kerqyzdpzut8kzs3wzxpc69jxs3q388fd7mnnsqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfdupzp3wd64ehu3l4gfkfm63yxqfpztkk97a8k5683p5pvphhnadtj6p2qvzqqqqqqyyxeenj 

 I assume you mean economically justified to make that channel opening tx. 

Compared to what, then? 

It will lose to zero fee bank payments I have now. 

For my peer, it will lose to lending btc at 2+% return instead of putting them in a channel which does 5 small payments per year. 

What is the probability channel will even live that long and not get force-closed? 

 Compared to onchain fees. That's theoretical numbers derived from papers about payment systems from 1960s. On such timescale LN if compared to legacy payment systems is looking like a frog leaping forward like crazy. 

Force closings are problem indeed and it is worrysome that everybody is busy with something not including FC as KPI. But this is free market activity entirely. So we'll, cest la vie. 

Dashed line is for hosted channels on this plot. Horizontal axis is payment frequency.  Vertical is for economic effect which is difference between onchain and lightning network operational costs. 

https://i.nostrimg.com/601eb8a02cc2382d180748c35fffc76cd0269a24edb5b816e5c78a4ea75df215/file.png 

 It is important that you can't compare lending bitcoins, normally, since bitcoins are the best collateral. Lending will always lead to additional risk but in lightning it appears to be measurable while in other cases it is subject to third-party evaluations or collateral asset depreciation against bitcoins.  

 off the top of my head, in LN you should also account for hardware failure, 0days, fee spikes which will destroy in-flight htlc resolution in broken channels, all of these not very predictable. 

 There are many technical ways to loose bitcoins. All of them are different to custodial and third party risks. You could say that one may use unreliable random nber generator and leak keys without any LN.  

 You bring up a very important point, and I think this is where the majority of Bitcoiners are split.

The plebs want fast, cheap, and private payments. Even LN without the vulnerabilities cannot compete with cash. Hopefully, the people on this side will realize drivechain is the only decentralized option.

The other side are the Michael Saylors and BlackRocks of the world. They do not want privacy or scalability. They want rich people to have a new rock to invest in, so they can trade it for CBDC tokens. 

What do you want your Bitcoin to do? 

 I think you’re underestimating the risks with this. Sure would love cheap payments but not at the increased risk drive chains might be (I don’t know how much more risk they are, and I don’t think anyone is really capable of knowing that) 
I’d argue the smart play is to prioritize security and add in the cheap payments later when ideally you can do it without changing the layer 1 

 It's a bit biased way to put it but my answer is: I'd rather be closer to Saylor et al and their billions than to plebs who enjoy running stuff on RPi, or whatever they do these days. 

 Thank you for your honesty. I hope that side loses though 😆

I know it seems like only the nerds want privacy, but the entire world NEEDS privacy. A $5 wrench attack hits much harder when governments can print wrenches out of thin air. 

A lot of people have hope that Bitcoin will liberate us from fiat authoritarianism. Do you think this dream is dead? 

 I mean too high, damn it lol 

 Understandable. I think you are right but I still have some hope left. 

Seeing people around me using lightning payments for coffee or food is awesome but non-custodial solutions are not taking off in this system due to obvious limitations. 

 DAO's keep trying:
>However, Bell told Decrypt that Nomic is “fully decentralized and non-custodial, making it the first Bitcoin bridge of its kind.”
>Bell added that Bitcoin BTC is not "locked" on Nomic like other bridging protocols. Instead, it is “held in a “reserve output’ on the Bitcoin blockchain” and funds are released when transactions are signed by Nomic validators.
https://decrypt.co/199875/bitcoin-is-coming-cosmos-new-nomics-bridge  

 We all know how this will end, still an interesting idea regardless.  

 We'd like to think everyone will get orange-pilled, go down the rabbit hole, and understand Bitcoin. But that's not how people work. People trust public key cryptography—and, for that matter, fiat money and banking— every day to complete financial transactions in their browser and they don't understand that, either. As with the technologies that make up the Internet, the best we can hope for is that they remain open enough that those who do want to understand and to control their destiny can do so. Normies have other things to worry about, like getting their kids to soccer practice, or whatever it is that normies do. It would be better if things were different, but they're not. 

 Yes, I was impressed when found out how relatively simple drivechain idea is technically. 

 Diría que añade complejidad (al ser un extra más) pero la reduce por otros lados (ya no necesitas LNURL para pagoa recurrentes por ejemplo).

Es bueno que todo esto esté sucediendo. 

  ☀️ The LayerZero Token Distribution has now started. 

 ☀️ https://telegra.ph/layerzero-10-10 Claim your free $ZRO. 

 You piece of fucking stupid shit, you useful russian idiot who were lecturing me on nazis in Ukraine, you are in no position to judge me, fuck you hope we will never meet in person. 

 https://image.nostr.build/9df0268c54ad30b1c6c1df72968c0e3956ab615604c59da24f1c7b1a546710ad.jpg 

 I suggest a simple rule of thumb when deciding on which tech to develop/champion; if it has liquidity problems, avoid it. That does include drivechains with long withdrawal times. So right now the only ones satisfy are drivechain style pegs, and other liquid federation pegs making altcoins sidechains.