Nostr Web Client

Kick-starting #Bitcoin #SkepticismSundays 😎

One of the things that showed me the intellectual honesty of the Monero community and helped to force the community to stay grounded in reality and always laser focused on their core ethos was their weekly "Skepticism Sunday" Reddit threads. These threads allowed the community to come together, ask hard and skeptical questions about the design of Monero, the privacy provided, the economic approach, and much more.

In my time in Bitcoin I've never seen anything similar, but the nuanced and high-signal crowd on Nostr seems like a perfect fit to fire things up and see how it goes.

The goal of this thread (which I'll post weekly on Sunday's) is for discussing the uncertainties, shortcomings, and concerns some may have about Bitcoin.

NOT the positive aspects of it.

Discussing things with a critical thinking approach and level-headed discussion helps us learn where Bitcoin and it's community can improve and go from there.

I know this is late on Sunday, will post earlier next week but would love to hear y'all's thoughts on the concept or skepticism 🙂

counterweight 2y ago

Sometimes I worry because:

1. To use Bitcoin as a day to day currency, Lightning is absolutely fundamental. Whoever proposes on-chain transactions as the day to day transaction engine clearly does not pay a lot of things with Bitcoin and has never set up a retail store with it.

2. Using Lightning in a sovereign way is anything but easy. We can't expect the common folk to graduate in Systems Administration just to have a reliable payment medium.

So, combine 1 and 2 and we are either unable to scale Bitcoin as a currency or we can only do so through custodial options. I think this is a serious problem.

I'm hopeful that technology will appear to enable great experiences that are sovereign at the same time, but for now we can only throw people into Wallet of Satoshi and the likes.

Curious to see more points of view on this.

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Discussion

Seth For Privacy 2y ago

I do think sometimes the difficulty of Lightning is overblown because people think they need to be a routing node, balance liquidity, etc. when they really just need a couple inbound channels for receiving and a few unannounced outbound channels for sending and call it a day.

I setup my channels once and haven't touched them in months!

counterweight 2y ago

Even a simple wallet node like the one you describe requires a lot of work if it has to support the day to day payments of someone.

It's not a nice experience to be out in the wild and find yourself not being able to pay because your LNbits instance silently went off, for example. Keeping the uptime and liquidity up and ready always (99.9%) instead of mostly (95%) is difficult for normal plebs in my opinion.