Lightning is a hot wallet. It must always be connected to the internet to work.
When Bitcoin L1 transactions are too expensive to practically send to cold storage, are we expected to keep our entire life savings on hot custodial Lightning wallets?
Discussion
Its always going to be cheap for on chain.
That depends on the L2 direction Bitcoin goes in. If it’s Lightning, fees will become too expensive to cold storage. Saylor actually talks about this a lot, and says L1 will be the final settlement layer that few have access to
https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-scaling-and-consensus-changes-2023/32
Good question, I want to know too
LND nodes can turnoff once in while but too long can close channels. can be run in mobile or pc - nothing is most secure than mainnet
Wait, why would your life savings be on LN?
Unless you're in the 3rd world it seems like you meant sometimes the Bitcoin you are stacking takes longer to move to cold storage due to fees?
You could just wait to stack until you have enough funds &/or fees come down & then buy + transfer to cold storage in one motion.
When Bitcoin scales to a billion people, transacting on L1 is going to become very expensive. Bitcoin has always had a scaling problem. That was the point of the blocksize wars. Lightning helps a lot, but I don’t think it’s the best long term option for scaling if the majority of people cannot afford L1.
When Bitcoin is being used by 1B people the ecosystem you're operating in will look different.
I'm more worried about the next 1M Bitcoiners promoting good tools that support Open Source collaboration.
> the ecosystem you're operating in will look different.
this gets at the original question, but then doesn't answer it. how will it be different?
we *should* be skeptical of Bitcoin related tech. we *should* verify our understanding and dive into the details. we *should* ask the "obvious" questions and and it seems reasonable to expect more than handwaving from the community.
Great question,I’ll offer my understanding, Bitcoin layer 1 (“core layer”) is fundamental, incorruptible, the base global decentralized monetary system for a new world.
It can become expensive for common payments, maybe.
So for for regular people like us to use it to buy groceries, gas, etc, there is what’s called a Layer 2 built on top of it. That works crazy efficiently for paying for small purchases. If other “Layer 2’s” are built that are better, we’ll use them. And that will likely happen.
But in the meantime, Bitcoin is working as the digital money of the future.
I think this is a great question that we don't have answers to, which show in the comments.
I think we'll be using custodial solutions with a high degree of auditability. When I want access to my funds they'll give me a lightning channel that they create from a channel factory (handwaving). Of course they'll offer me on-chain too, but I won't afford to use it
So kill me.
Yes.
Also, talk about layers is a bit confusing, wich results in the fact that people dont realize that 'L2' only makes trustminimized tx for high value actors more efficient; it does not make trustminimized tx for low value actors possible.
There is some slight nuance here and there, but thats the gist of it
Not sure I see how on chain tx’s would be so expensive that moving life savings into cold storage would be impractical.
Rich bitcoiner may pay devs to build PoC scaling solutions and talk to core devs and communicate to the node runners, miners
I think life savings shall be rather on non-custodial lightning, until you don't send it to cold.
Layer 2’s like Stacks will be used. Secured by Bitcoin. This is a logical choice. #bitcoin