Nostr Web Client

Not a popular take probably but:

I believe Lightning will continue trending in the direction of higher fees, and I believe that's a good thing.

When it works properly, it's a payment network of spectacularly high quality. As fast or faster than a card payment, perfectly location neutral, no fraud risk and no TTP/censorship risk. Given this excellence, it can bear higher fees.

And its UX is *extremely* good, everything except 'make the payment' can be hidden; the only difficulty is the non-LN (onchain) part.

It needs high fees because when it's basically free, the DOS/jamming risk is huge, and people aren't incented to maintain the infrastructure needed. To be clear, channel jamming doesn't magically disappear with higher fees, but I think they might be a necessary *part* of the defence.

I do think L3s will emerge (or have) that will keep the ultra low or nearly free payments, with slight tradeoffs

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Discussion

JACK SWEENEY(NEW ACCOUNT) 2y ago

interesting!

<old>cypherhoodlum 2y ago

I don't see a reason for bumping the routing fees on my own node, though. And I don't think I will.

6bc8867d... 2y ago

Are you willing to speculate with numbers? imho, 0.1% no problem; 0.5% seems like too much

waxwing 2y ago

You spotted my sleight of hand :)

I really don't know. It would be crazy if it rose to above credit card fees for typical consumer transactions, but I wouldn't rule anything out - it's a free market.

Your numbers seem reasonable for normal situations.

6bc8867d... 2y ago

I appreciate your perspective. I haven't upgraded to Phoenix v2 yet, but it's my understanding there's a 0.4% fixed outbound lightning fee. I have v1's prefs set for 0.1% max. I agree it's a free market, and look forward to that playing out 👍

Max 2y ago

Also consider the onchain cost required to open and close (cooperatively or even forced) a channel, these costs will have to be amortized across each routed payment.

It seems to me, that using base money will always occur higher demurrage costs than using a money substitute. Thus bitcoin backed ecash is the already deployed short term solution that gets us to scalable and affordable anonymous transactions.

waxwing 2y ago

Yes, a reasonable viewpoint. We've yet to see a full fledged success in ecash tokens, though. I'm still skeptical about that.