Oddbean

Great note. The grouping (with right incentives) that we can do right now is to open some channels on Liquid and bridge the payments. It's one network. The peg ins are essentially the grouped UTXOs. Here's how to do it: https://juraj.bednar.io/en/blog-en/2023/05/07/expanding-the-lightning-network-to-serve-billions-a-quick-win-strategy/

Liquid is a "trust someone" solution. There are precautions to avoid targeting particular users (confidential amounts and assets) similar to ecash, but it's still a custodian. We can certainly argue it's a "good enough" custodian, given the number, reputation and legal consequences of failure, but it's still a custodian.

Yes. A distributed custodian at least, which is very unique (basically I know of only Fedi attempting to do it this way, and Cashu doing multimint payments, so distributing the risk by amounts). And it's chain level compatible with Lightning and can be one network. You could even bridge your coins to channel backed by mainnet Bitcoin, or pay from both channels atomically. Or do things like "bump this mainnet channel when fees are low, but in the meanwhile accept through Liquid".

I know this isn't the conversation you're having, but this just made a question come to mind... Legally speaking, when you peg into something like liquid are you selling your Bitcoin for L-BTC or is L-BTC your receipt for them custodying your BTC. I guess the same question could be asked about Cashu/fedi? Or maybe we don't have legal frameworks for these things yet (most likely I guess)

Depends on the country, but in Slovakia, if the unit is the same, then it's not selling, just changing form. That is one of the best use-cases for Monero in entrepreneurship. Say you want to have a Bitcoin reserve in a company, but also want to pay suppliers with some crypto. Sale is a taxable event that goes to weighted average and triggers capital gains. So actually buying Monero and spending it at the same moment is a tax free event (buy and sale price are the same, minus the fees), but doing it with anything Bitcoin (does not matter if Cashu/fedi/lightning) would be taxable event. Of course you can also use stablecoins.

no, swap fiat to monero, just to not have to use banks for payments. selling bitcoin would be a tax event. buying something else and then immediately using it all to pay an invoice is tax zero. so you can both save Bitcoin as a company and use advanced third millennium payment technologies (i.e. Not legacy camping system)

Ah you buy just the right amount of monero at an exchange (plus a bit for fees) and send that to the person you are paying? Could also keep a balance in a stablecoin and swap what you need to monero then.

no, you can't. at least not legally without tax in most countries. if you don't want to pay tax, there needs to be no capital gain, so the exchange rate has to be the same. you have to buy and use all the monero for payment, holding zero at any moment.

I like to think of ecash/liquid as stablecoins pegged to bitcoin rather than custodians. They succeed/fail on the same basis, but with the huge advantage that issuers can fully settle with eachother in the backend over the lightning or base layer network, and can have shared custody of reserves accross jurisdictions.