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Lightning is a remix of the correspondent banking network. If it grows it will devolve into a small set of large centralized nodes that act as gateway for most
by silverlake 4y ago
Lightning is a remix of the correspondent banking network. If it grows it will devolve into a small set of large centralized nodes that act as gateway for most transactions. Think JPMorgan and Citi as nodes. The reason is funding channels is expensive: you can’t leave $10M sitting there doing nothing. It’s got to earn it’s cost of capital. This is why Western Union charges so much for transfers.
- gregwebs 4y agoLightning is an environment where all the nodes have to compete on cost (or speed) and everything is digital. The costs of transactions are currently near zero now, is there a reason you think it will increase? There are a lot of people that want to just hold onto Bitcoin right now. Maybe the cost of a Lightning transaction will go up dramatically if that changes? But if such a protocol evolves to support swapping coins in and out of the channel lockup from different owners than potentially anyone holding Bitcoin for any duration can contribute.