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Tim Bouma | 3 months ago (raw) | export | reply | flag +3 
 Bitcoin is a fixed-gear track bike; ecash is a multi-gear road bike. Both translate my power to motion but are designed for very different conditions. I would never dream of taking my fixed-gear bike on a ride through the mountains; likewise, I would never take my road bike on to the track for a 200m sprint.

My point is this: both bitcoin and ecash work well together and separately in different circumstances. I would never bring my cold storage wallet shopping, nor would I store my life savings in an ecash wallet.
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Vic | 3 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 In this analogy, what is Lightning and Liquid
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Tim Bouma | 3 months ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I consider Lightning/ecash the same ‘layer’ where Lightning is the clearing mechanism for any ecash token. For simplicity of the post, I just focused on ecash. 

The usefulness of the analogy is that while you have certain limit of power output (base layer), you may need different points of ‘leverage’ to best meet different conditions. The analogy shouldn’t be interpreted beyond that comparison.

I view ecash not as ‘money’ (Bitcoin is the money) but more as a payment instrument (gearing mechanism) that enables you to take advantage of different transaction requirements and payment conditions. In the end, it should all be settled back to a UTXO. As for Liquid, I’m not that familiar with it, but I suspect similar concepts apply.