Ark is cool, but the biggest concern for me is the capital requirement.

To put it into perspective, to achieve Visa scale, the ASP has to anticipate 1 month of payment volume, which is roughly $1T.

In the case the state is weak, Ark can work, but fedimints work even better: scale much better, are more private, and high competition keeps everything in checks.

In the case the state is oppressive and strong, Ark is fucked because only a few companies can have that much money, which means the state can go knock on their doors.

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Interesting perspective 🤔

i think that ecash is going to be a given, it has some big advantages in that it's offline... it's not much different to the old days of USA before the fed, when multiple banks were allowed to issue greenbacks, mostly they are fungible but occasionally one or two might get a bad rep after doing stupid shit, and then they'd get bankran and their license revoked

Totally agree. I refer it as 'out of band' versus offline because you can transmit ecash independently of any one system. The other systems are really 'payment instructions' versus bearer tokens.

What happens during a mint run and the mint is not solvent to make everyone whole? Looks like a fractional reserve system.

yes, it can be! this is the downside of it

but they don't have a legal tender law to protect them from bank runs

isn't this the risk of all layer 2 solutions? A 3rd party(a) will always control the gateway to the Bitcoin reserve. This is why banks and corporations are getting onboard.

no, on Lightning you can unilaterally exit, but there are fees to consider

yes, lightning makes it a more graduated rugging, which protects both sides from mischief better

it makes it so it's better to act in good faith, truly a genius design and actually grew out of a deep study of the architecture of the bitcoin scripting language

Plebs won't be managing their own lightning channels

There are interesting workarounds to this issue.

which ones?

I don't understand it well enough to explain...

can you give a link?

My comment is based on a recent conversation with nostr:npub148jz5r9xujcjpqygk69yl4jqwjqmzgrqly26plktfjy8g4t7xaysj9xhgp, so unfortunately not...

I would like to know too, if anyone knows.

There are numerous ways to mitigate this problem.

Ark allows you to re-balance Lightning channels which is something fedimint cannot do. They are complementary.

Arkoor doesn’t have as bad of liquidity requirements but it has zero-conf security tradeoffs

I think it’s a perfectly valid tradeoff in the context of Ark

You can also reduce the vtxo timeouts pretty significantly imho if people are going to use it as a payment platform.

agreed