I'm only following peer pressure. Truthfully I think the best solution would be to do away with Lightning and integrate Bitcoin natively. Everyone I've told about this seems to think it's a bad idea. But you know what, I don't want you to zap me 2 cents, I want you to zap me $5, so I think this would actually solve everything.
Discussion
Bitcoin fees would skyrocket if you tried to put every zap or coffee purchase on it, then those things would become uneconomical and people would stop doing it. You need a system that is noncustodial and isn’t tied to bitcoin fees. This is what lightning is for.
Speaking of Lightning. Fix your node. I wanted to zap this comment 🤣
Here's my controversial opinion. Firstly, Bitcoin Cash was right - their solution would have at least stopped the bleeding temporarily.
Secondly, I send Bitcoin all the time and pay less than $1 in fees, and it confirms within the next block. You can even choose to pay lower fees, and who cares if it's slow, it's a donation.
But if nobody else would support doing it on Nostr, there's no point. Or maybe I should just do it and prove everybody wrong. 🤓
They aren’t right, they just delayed the problem instead of fixing it. Their solution severly harmed decentralization and would have undermined the entire project once you could no longer run nodes on consumer hardware.
You can get a 24TB hard drive off Amazon for less than $500. The blockchain is already nearly 1TB - I had to upgrade the drive in my laptop to use it anyway.
I think delaying the problem would have been good, since Bitcoin still isn't even close to hitting the point of being used as an actual currency. But that is a lost battle.
The point is that Lightning is a premature optimization. If people were using Bitcoin to buy coffee so much it congested the network, then it would be a great problem to have. We would be a great shape in terms of adoption. But people are not even ready for that yet. We're like 20 years in the future, and sometimes I think we have to step back and look at today.
There are so many vectors in which this is wrong.
1. You need to be conservative as possible with changes if you’re trying to create sound money. Moving complexity to second layers makes a lot of sense because modifying core is too risky
2. You would lose all privacy. Having every transaction that can ever happen on an immutable public ledger is just dumb and will eventually fail.
3. Larger blocksizes screws up a lot of networking and mining., and so many other things. It increases IBD and makes it harder to sync with other nodes.
I could go on but this has already been gone over a thousand times
#Bitcoin is currently an optimum balance of transaction cost, security and speed. Making it immutable. Don’t mess with the balance. We do need more nodes however:)
The centralization doesn’t just come from having to purchase more storage space. That’s part of it, sure, but there’s much more to it.
For one thing if the blocks were significantly bigger then it would take much longer to sync then chain and we’d have fewer people willing to wait. Adversarial actors at the ISP level would also be more likely to detect bitcoin traffic and throttle or drop the packets entirely. It also takes more computational resources to verify larger the larger blocks so CPU could become a bottleneck.
Is it scalable to expect everyone on Nostr to self custody lightning or are you assuming many users will use custodial lightning?
almost everyone uses lightning through a custodian. not using it through a custodian creates an unsustainable onchain footprint since every noncustodial lightning user must periodically do L1 transactions to fund and rebalance their own channels. you run into the same exact problem as the L1 for coffee scenario, just a little bit later. lightning should be scrapped in favor of other L2s.
But nobody would. Nobody is going to zap $5 plus on chain fees for a social media post. or I should say very few would.
Maybe all 3 is the way. on chain zap, ln zap, and cashu.
Depending on if you are zapping, buying, sending, using robosata, etc... you could choose which method you want to use.
Almost nobody is using Nostr, and even among the people using Nostr a very small percentage actually send zaps. The reason is because it's too hard. So if you're argument is that nobody will do it, that's already the current situation.
Well, let's look at it a different way.
Zero people zap on xitter, Instagram, threads, reddit, or others. And by zap, I mean send monetary value of any kind besides a like, share, etc... not just Bitcoin.
There were 45k active users yesterday on NOSTR, 11k zaps were sent. many by the same people, but let's say 25% of the actives zapped.
That 2500 more people that sent money for reactions to posts than was sent on all the other platforms combined.
Seems worthwhile to build on to me.