3 ms·

It is as much an IOU as the US Dollar was pre-1971. That is a pretty good image for Lightning/Bitcoins relationship. Lightning is the dollar with a guarantee th

It is as much an IOU as the US Dollar was pre-1971. That is a pretty good image for Lightning/Bitcoins relationship. Lightning is the dollar with a guarantee that you can convert it to gold anytime you like by presenting it at the central bank. Very few people ever converted their USD to the underlying gold as a settlement transaction. The difference with lightning is, the government can't just rug-pull you and stop exchanging those paper bill IOUs - it is cryptograhpically secured that you can always convert to bitcoin. Since no one would consider exchaging dollars as settling in gold, lightning settlement is not tied to on-chain transactions.

rglullis 6mo ago
Payment channels are possible on other networks as well. Once again, there is no inherent advantage to Bitcoin here. I know because I worked on one (https://raiden.network/ https://raiden.network/). I also dealt with many of its failure modes: - insufficient liquidity on intemediate nodes - network partitions - uncooperative nodes - nodes that were liquidity sinks and forced other participants to bear the costs of deposits - insufficient market makers But more than anything: people do not want to use crypto for payments. It gives them no significant advantage over traditional credit/debit cards, it has no built-in solution for appeals or reversals and it forces them to learn a bunch of stuff to be minimally safe...
- littlecranky67 6mo ago
  > Payment channels are possible on other networks as well you are moving the goalpost in the discussion of this thread. User KaierPro said bitcoin would not be suitable because transactions takes to long, to which is responded lightning solves that. Now claiming that other cryptos can have layers-2 is correct, but adds nothing to the discussion or my initial point. Yes other chains have faster settlement times, and can have their respective payment channels - no one argued against that.
  - rglullis 6mo ago
    > which is responded lightning solves that Theoretically. In practice, it has shown that it is only viable if adoption by number of nodes and TVL grew by orders of magnitude, and both are very unlikely to happen because - like I said - spenders have nothing to gain from it and no matter how much of the UX friction is solved, it will never be as easy as paying with credit card. The only people who want to use Lightning are the ones who are invested in Bitcoin. Everyone else just want simple/safe access to a payment network.
    - littlecranky67 6mo ago
      You are just moving the goalpost again, without adding to the discussion. If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Nothing to do with my initial point which was comparing lightning/bitcoin to monero.
      - rglullis 6mo ago
        > If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Most spenders will prefer credit cards, but there is a non-zero group where absolute privacy is important and monero is the better choice, therefore more valuable to them. You are the one trying to make some false equivalency by saying that "bitcoin/lightning is good enough for most cases, therefore there is no need for monero". The problem is that you are starting with the conclusion that you want (i.e, "Bitcoin is the best") and you are working backwards from this conclusion to make all sorts of rationalizations. Try going from the use case first and then let's see where the reasoning takes you. You will see that for pretty much ANY use-case, Bitcoin is not the answer.

rglullis 6mo ago

Payment channels are possible on other networks as well. Once again, there is no inherent advantage to Bitcoin here. I know because I worked on one (https://raiden.network/ https://raiden.network/). I also dealt with many of its failure modes: - insufficient liquidity on intemediate nodes - network partitions - uncooperative nodes - nodes that were liquidity sinks and forced other participants to bear the costs of deposits - insufficient market makers But more than anything: people do not want to use crypto for payments. It gives them no significant advantage over traditional credit/debit cards, it has no built-in solution for appeals or reversals and it forces them to learn a bunch of stuff to be minimally safe...

littlecranky67 6mo ago
> Payment channels are possible on other networks as well you are moving the goalpost in the discussion of this thread. User KaierPro said bitcoin would not be suitable because transactions takes to long, to which is responded lightning solves that. Now claiming that other cryptos can have layers-2 is correct, but adds nothing to the discussion or my initial point. Yes other chains have faster settlement times, and can have their respective payment channels - no one argued against that.
- rglullis 6mo ago
  > which is responded lightning solves that Theoretically. In practice, it has shown that it is only viable if adoption by number of nodes and TVL grew by orders of magnitude, and both are very unlikely to happen because - like I said - spenders have nothing to gain from it and no matter how much of the UX friction is solved, it will never be as easy as paying with credit card. The only people who want to use Lightning are the ones who are invested in Bitcoin. Everyone else just want simple/safe access to a payment network.
  - littlecranky67 6mo ago
    You are just moving the goalpost again, without adding to the discussion. If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Nothing to do with my initial point which was comparing lightning/bitcoin to monero.
    - rglullis 6mo ago
      > If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Most spenders will prefer credit cards, but there is a non-zero group where absolute privacy is important and monero is the better choice, therefore more valuable to them. You are the one trying to make some false equivalency by saying that "bitcoin/lightning is good enough for most cases, therefore there is no need for monero". The problem is that you are starting with the conclusion that you want (i.e, "Bitcoin is the best") and you are working backwards from this conclusion to make all sorts of rationalizations. Try going from the use case first and then let's see where the reasoning takes you. You will see that for pretty much ANY use-case, Bitcoin is not the answer.