i think if we include the caveat of "custody and UX dont matter"
you can basically do what monero does with LN.
Discussion
That is an actually productive statement for ME. Most of the arguments I see here on the issue are overly complicated and asinine.
But it also highlights a couple things for me and educators to consider: what do people have to do to get that level of privacy on Lightning and how can we make the UX better and running those systems easier? How do we protect people who use things like cashu (which I've heard should have near perfect privacy within that system - I don't know)? Education on the tradeoffs will be key here.
The semantics arguments and running in the on chain ability circle is usually what I see and I get nothing from it.
well... the devil is in the details.
which is why all the discussion about tradeoffs and nuance happen.
people have been working on lowering the barrier to entry for these technologies for years.
which is great.
for context
me and the rest of the monero bros have been hearing that LN is going to make Monero redundant for over 7 years.
still waiting for that to happen.
That's fair. But 1. A lot of progress has been made in that 7 years. 2. It seems to me as a noob (and I'm trying to discover the truth) that LN and ecash are making Monero irrelevant for most people.
I'm not being convinced on why I need to run an entirely separate thing with it's own tradeoffs and UX issues when Bitcoin has so much more going for it on the use and adoption front.
I don't store my wealth on Monero at this point. I have cooler product options for Bitcoin.
I just don't see it winning this race, so for me, it makes more sense to get those benefits in a Bitcoin compatible way. That's just how I see this ending.
I have nothing but love for the Monero philosophy. Its community members have always treated me well. I ran Monero before Bitcoin. But I left it. I don't run it anymore and using it was more cumbersome and seemingly pointless given adoption. That's just my intermediate noob perspective.
seems perfect reasonable to me.
although I'll point out that LN and ecash are NOT used by people who require strong privacy assurances.
not becasue they dont theoretically provide them
but because they're still experimental and it often isn't known what privacy guarantees you are getting.
to put it another way,
LN and ecash give normies a way to opt out of default dragnet surveillance.
but they aren't (yet) a proven replacement for private value transfer in a highly adversarial environment.
That is entirely fair from my understanding. But has Monero met that standard? If it has, I would absolutely want to have the Bitcoin layers tested in the same way.
Monero has certainly met that standard.
part of the discussion also about the environment the technology is being used in. Bitcoin was plenty private until CA started mapping the entire utxo set and KYC became the default.
Right now LN is probably plenty private, what happens if the top 50 nodes are required to log and report to the feds? would we even know if that happened?
Moneros approach is too continue interating (read "forking") to adapt to the changing environment.
so that "standard" isnt static. technology exists in context and needs to adapt to that context.
there are known weaknesses of Monero that need addressing and the project will improve to remain the standard for censorship resistant private transactions.
Interesting. Gives me some more to learn about and consider. I appreciate it.
Sincere question. What made you stop running monero?
It was cumbersome. Adoption seemed weak. The products around it seemed weak. The ecosystem seemed weak. I didn't like some of the fundamentals either.
That was years ago though.
how did you find the software you were running?
Any "challenges" ?
I ran whatever was promoted on the website. It felt clunky and unreasonable at the time.
Its no different today!
Wallets won't sync or get stuck.
Yesyetetday I ran the official wallet on 5 different laptops and desktops, all of them stalled, fresh install.
Always buggy with hardware wallets too to the point of not wanting to use it at all.
This is the meet of the issue. It has so many issues that it's a waste of time.
You're not missing anything 🙏😂
Carry on with Bitcoin brother!
Wallets update on first attempt, with or without a node! 😂🙏
Its laughable.
I think some of them have public node options, which would probably help. Requiring my wallet to be a node with the full or I believe even pruned (1/3) was clunky as hell. You may be able to run a node and connect to it similar to LN. I just got fed up with it at the time and it didnt seem worth my full investment given how little it was adopted. I'm all for them improving it, but the ecosystem still seems as small as it was. Meanwhile, the Bitcoin ecosystem has so much shit within it that I can't even know it all.
But in fairness, I do run a Lightning node/wallet combo on my phone these days. Clunky, but not that clunky.
Yup that was happening with full node and remote node options. Issue wasn't with syncing blockchain but retjet with syncing wallet blocks.
Monero is garbage software.
I'm not quite so harsh toward it. It just doesn't have the adoption and therefore resources behind it. I just never see that changing. At least not anywhere close the the level of Bitcoin and compatible software. I do want Bitcoin compatible options that deliver on the promises of Monero though. Their ideals are sound.
And I don't mean that they don't matter at all. Only that I want to remove them as distractions for what I care about in this never ending debate.
We can improve UX and tradeoff education.
In that case, all I'm really seeing is that Monero packs all of that into a single base layer (even though someone said they're making a Lightning equal - why if Monero has all the answers as it is?)
It seems like having everything in one layer was just never going to work. You can't technically have it all. I'm just trying to isolate the actual debate. There's way too much convolution for me to ever take away anything useful.
Theres certainly a limit to how much you can pack into a blockchain. blockchains dont scale. which is why theres been talk of a batched payment network for monero (its just talk).
but the debate is
what exactly ARE the tradeoffs in moving to an L2?
can we expect those tradeoffs to be stable in a changing surveillance environment?
etc...
it is totally neverending and completely relate to just wanting to figure it out and be done with it.