Lightning question: not your keys not your coins, so you shouldn’t store too much in a lightning wallet. If lightning takes off you might have to top up your lightning wallet daily from a Bitcoin wallet. Aren’t those transactions on chain? What happens if 1 billion people want to top up their lightning wallet daily? Bitcoin only supports about 200k tx/day.
Discussion
Hmm..good question
Even if 1 billion people only topped up once per week that would be 140m on chain transactions per day.
If they topped up once per year that would be 3m on chain transactions per day. They would only be able to top up once every 10 years, which is basically never.
Am I missing something?
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Doesn't have to be on chain. Just balance sheet. I have a getalby wallet. They might expect $1M a day incoming from 10,000 users. They do a single 1M onchain to load their wallet, and then send those sats to people as the fiat arrives.
Intraday hedging (swallowed in the spread) and golden.
Because you only use fiat to load your LN spending wallet. Y'all HODLing the BTC :-)
I think it will end in a large fraction of the total bitcoin stack being on the lightning network. It must result in that, don’t you think?
It seems that way. But may be I’m missing something. I’m not sure how Bitcoin maximalists can parrot not your keys not your coins and support lightning.
Won’t that mean that the big lightning nodes will also own all that Bitcoin? So basically the public will hold no Bitcoin and it will be transferred into the large lightning operators. Someone is going to like that.
I got into Bitcoin so everyone could be their own bank.
Don’t you think that the blockchain trilemma is real? That you actually have to sacrifice speed on the base layer to gain security AND decentralization? And if so, why?!? To be stuck with a slow moving money? What have we gained if we don’t find ways to speed up things without sacrificing EVERYTHING?
But why not allow it to support the world’s population? It is a finite number. It’s not like the world’s population is growing. At least support weekly transfers or even monthly. Lightning is going to concentrate all Bitcoin into the hands of a few. Now you have the old banking system.
To be clear the issue here is Bitcoin rather than Lightning. It needs to support more transactions per block.
Exactly how many more transactions per block? 10 times more? 100 times more? And what is the COST of that?
What is the cost of not having it?
I’m shure that your intentions are good. But there are things you’ve not completely understood.
Even from a simple Moore’s law perspective, shouldn’t the block size be able to double every 18 months? If not, why?
Originally you needed a multi thousand dollar computer to run Bitcoin now you can run it on a $20 computer.
Worry about it if it becomes an issue and layering is not succesfull. For now 300k blocks would do just fine.
even if you have to use a LSP, your funds don’t need to be with a custodian. you can use funds on lightning from your own wallet w a LSP. ie phoenix, breez
it’s somewhat similar to using metamask with the default infura or whatever node
lurk more
Would you advise to keep large amounts in a non-custodial lightning wallet? Like say $100k?
yes
and similar to if you were managing $100k of BTC on the mainchain, i’d say invest 0.1% of that into setting up your own node. bank yourself
So the future of Bitcoin is lightning, and only lightning, because there is no way a billion people can access their Bitcoin wallet?
Didn’t realise this when I bought Bitcoin in 2013.
We should empty our Bitcoin wallets now because there is no way you’ll be able to access them in the future?
And you do realise that all that BTC will be held by large lightning providers? Concentrated into a few, which are essentially banks, sitting on almost all of the Bitcoin.
do your research
use bitcoin on the mainchain, no-ones stopping you.
if you don’t like lightning, and you want to see a nostr client that only uses standard bitcoin transactions, feel free to make one and propose a NIP.
nostr doesn’t enforce the use of LN in anything, so instead of crying, make something that suits what you want out of nostr
My point is that if 1 billion people adopt Bitcoin the network won’t handle it. It’s not about whether I want to use it, it’s whether there is capacity for a typical social media audience which is typically in the hundreds of millions if not billions.
wrong, lurk moar
Okay I’ll be generous. Let’s say Bitcoin can do 500k tx per day. It would take 5 years for each of 1 billion people to make their first transaction.
Are you saying I am wrong?
lurk moar, you’ll figure it out
Here’s another question for you, you are happy keeping $100k+ on the lightning network which doesn’t have a proof of work immutable ledger?
do you understand how LN works? 😂
I’ve been in Bitcoin for years, completely new Lightning. You aren’t giving me any confidence whatsoever I would want to store my funds there.
It is more insecure (more custodial wallets, more complex node’s, etc…), but its purpose is to serve for daily payments and therefore maintain a lower balance in your wallet. Anyway I agree 👍🏻
Yeah lightning is less secure but it is pretty damn secure. The only way you’d ever have your funds stolen is if your channel counterparty happens to collude with 51% of the hashpower for weeks to censor your justice transaction. Pretty unlikely imo
Yeah, you're wrong and I have a feeling that you want to stay that way because looking at your notes tells me that you just hate Bitcoin.
If you want to know how computer network protocols scale (all of them) then look at the internet. It couldn't scale at its base layer so it needed a second layer and a third, and so on. We are at 7 layers now.
But, again, I suspect you are just here to hate bitcoin and I further suspect that you're just a fucking shitcoiner so fuck straight off.
The future of bitcoin is drivechains after we activate BIP300/301. Check out https://truthcoin.info/blog/thunder
I would not. Keep that in cold storage. In the future there will be fully validating lighting signing hsms. then it will be quite safe.
LN wallets IMO are for spending and I wouldn't put on them more than $500 which is not one day spending in normal day to day scenarios.
You could configure LN channels and feel more confident to increase the amount, however, currently, that requires knowledge and skills to do it right with low risk in terms of security and privacy. And still, I wouldn't risk over $500...
While sending sats with LN, if you attempt more than $400 it will be difficult, most channels will not have the capacity and therefore will use a swap to main chain and back to LN to complete that tx. In this scenario if not a large quantity, you could divide your transaction in chunks of $400 and be done in few minutes, inconvenient but better than 10-30 min waiting for a L1 tx to clear if you are in a hurry
LN is evolving and quite probable, in the near future will become more robust and reliable for anyone to open channels in a safe and private manner, meanwhile , other people is working in other solutions on L2 that will compete and may become the most used. The solution that offers more decentralization and control to the user will win, and LN is currently the alpha
For me the best part is that the more L2 solutions for spending are created the less transactions in L1 and therefore low fees and less issues
There are couple details missing in your question, which is a decent question that many folks also asked before you.
First, there are many self-custodial lightning wallets where you hold your keys, like Blixt, Breez, Phoenix, OBW, or Muun.
Second the rate of "topping up" (or withdrawing) will balance itself based on current onchain fees. Third, we are still in the beginning and there are many possibile next steps in scaling. (Note that scaling is a never ending game, it's just about getting to the next step), some examples are fedimint, opening many channels in a single transaction, channel factories, PTLV saving on bytes, etc.
Don't be confused by WalletOfSatoshi, which is indeed custodial and you don't hold your own keys. There are other wallets...