Main chain is a ghost town. Explanations?
Discussion
Something something layer 2
nostr:note1d3mzksene879wqjq3p5jwz4a7rmh99n34euhswx25csgxrp5lctqfwrp4e
Cc nostr:npub1hhczaensvm77hgj4uxk804n6m9gy3hk4p6ugtgqu4vu32mjzst0s83cz98
Simple. ETFs and Bitcoin treasury companies have scaled bitcoin better than any soft fork could have and people are waiting for bitcoin to pump.
Everyone joined nostr and started using lightning. 🤣
ETFs
Tether?
The answers can be found in Bitcoin’s historical records
Lightning works
Spammers moved on to MLMs
Miners are doing an April Fool's Day bit.
Podcasts and conferences are off-chain.
This is partially true. Onchain podcasts are cost prohibitive for poor people.
One of the dozens of us went too hard on IOUs like MSTR.
And another had his lightning node go completely corrupt.
Plebs are HODLing and not spend/refilling, need more of the latter, more parallel economy
ordinaltards sold all their corn
Most activities happen off chain now, lightning is sucessfull and used in most mobile wallet, especially by begginers. But also the sad reallity that a large part of the activity stays within large exchanges without touching the blockchain.
I wouldn't be surprise if big exchanges would use huge (unannonced) lightning channels between them to transfer back and forth the sats of their users moving between platforms directly. Or at some point also USDT on Bitcoin Lightning if it get sucessful.
Welcome to the age of custodial usage of Bitcoin.
Seriously examining the status quo.
1. Most people I know do not own any coins.
2. The majority of those who own coins don't use them.
3. The few who use them use it from one custodian to another or within a custodian like they would use fully KYC'ed PayPal
4. Then only me and some weired nostr dudes are left who (try to) use it non-custodially. Most of them use Monero nowadays (take a look at the stats)
Without non-custodial use BTC loses it's meaning.
If everybody in the system is optimising for off-chain solutions BTC will see a huge security problem in the not so distant future. That will create another shism between fixed supply coiners willing to sacrifice security and those who look for other solutions. The alternative is an exodus to a proven coin like Monero.
BTC doesn't exist in a vacuum and the pure existence of memecoins and pos coins should tell you that most don't know what this is all about. They don't care about decentralisation, they care about the lowest fees if the use it.
Sad but probably true. I still have hope that it changes but if you do the maths, we cannot onboard the world on the Bitcoin blockchain, we cannot even onboard 1 billion people (10% of the earth population I would roughly assume) to self-custodial lightning as just by channel openning/closing we would not have any block space for everyone.
But if a majority of people and daily transactions use custodials, these custodials must still from time to time settle on chain and more importantly it will always allow any new person or entity with the knowleadge and wealth to run a custodial for anyone they please, with the need to ask for permission.
This mean that if you don't agree with the terms and conditions of the big custodial player, bank or others, that you use, you can always and very easily migrate to another one, even a small private custodial that you trust. And this already give much more hope than the current closed system that we are in with fiat.
No more jpegs left to upload. Need to sell bitcoin for time machine to go back to the 90s and save it
The custidians now rule Bitcoin. Early adopters are far and few. Splintered. Many left for Monero.
Most people only want more fiat, not more freedom. They give a fuck about owning their UTXOs.
Now if by a future government demand custodians are not permitted to provide withdrawals to their IOU customers, that would be the final step before opening the price manipulation through fractional reserve Bitcoin banking. AI surveillance will make BTC an easy target for government exploitation and extortion.
Maybe lightning actually works
I can only speak from my own experience here, but I transact a ton in Bitcoin... on Lightning. Not just zaps, but purchases.
I have to do an on-chain transaction to throw sats into cold-storage a few times a year, or open a new Lightning channel once or twice a year, but that's all, and I am sure I'm not alone in that.
Also, if we look at mempool history, the last couple years of sustained high volume of transactions is an anomaly. Most of the time, transaction volume is low, except during times of high price volatility. Times when people are either moving their coins onto exchanges to sell them, or scooping up cheap sats and sending them to cold-storage.
That makes me think this is just the calm before another such storm.