Replying to Mindaugas

If I open a channel to my cafe, how am I not able to pay for coffee regardless of what the rest of the world does or does not with lightning?

Or even if we both have Blink accounts? How are we not able to pay each other?

The same as with credit cards. You either both have visa, or the russian brand, or you go look for the right coins in your purse, or use silver.
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TheBitcoinManual 1y ago

In its current form yes you are right, once you have your channel up and funded you're golden

But I am thinking about what if we're billions of people trying to get in and out of LN, rebalancing channels based on what we have now, some users won't be able to afford to move in and out

They would have to use custodians of some kind, because closing into a dust transaction/closing a transaction that miners would take up all the fees would be pointless

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Mindaugas 1y ago

When it is too costly to open a channel, then yes, custodians to some extent is probably the answer. But I think that is far away, because you do not need to be opening and rebalancing your channels all the time, especially if you live a sedentary life. You just have the right size channels with your major clients/employers and your major vendors forever. It is a bit like LinkedIn is now. Try to pick a random person from your hood you never met before, and you will find out he is your 2nd or 3rd connection in LinkedIn.

You can even inherit lightning nodes. Or your father can setup a wallet for you on his node.

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TheBitcoinManual 1y ago

For sure, I agree there are people that will just always trust a company or someone to do it for them, thats never going to change, but I don't think that even if 1% of the worlds daily transactions moved to LN that the network would be able to cope

Yes there are proposals that can improve LN

But I'm basing it on today, LN is not a set and forget, for example for me, I had problems because locally we have power outrages, if my power is out too long and my UPS can't run everything for the lets say 6 hour stint, my LN node was down, and I had to do a back up and it was a pain in the arse and cost me a fair bit

It can be more complicated than that, what if the person needs that liquidity for something else and has to close? What if someone physically grabs your node and runs off with it?

I think if businesses alone would adopt LN it would be enough to traffic to start making plenty of transaction sizes obsolete, never mind compounding of individual users

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Mindaugas 1y ago

Yes, valid points. Lightning nodes as they are now are generally not for people who have never run another type of server at home. Lightning needs constant innovation and improvement.

But in general, I don't think the problem is 100% solvable. If you look at bitcoin miners - they are totally nicely plug and play. But then the hardware is not universal and very much centralized. We depend on the few producers. So to achieve decentralization, there must be a significant element of "do it yourself with nails and a hammer".

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Mindaugas 1y ago

But also a thing is that there still are millions if not billions of people who do not know how files and directories work, and even Excel. They have never even had a bank account nor had any savings in any form. They will need some form of custodians forever.