I’ve seen nothing to suggest Ark doesn’t have the unilateral exit it is designed to have. I know very little of Spark, but Ark has been built entirely in the open and I see nothing to consider it any less of a viable tool than Lightning itself. Many of the same primitives enable it.
Discussion
I haven't looked into Ark yet closely. But my concern is potentially the same -- this question of "unilateral exit" is so much less important than "is this this decentralized?"
Spark, as we've seen, is about as decentralized as PayPal. You have to use their web servers to do anything.
What about Ark? How many Ark service providers are there, and how easy is it to spin up a new one?
The great power of Lightning and Bitcoin is that there are THOUSANDS of nodes, of both kinds. That kind of decentralization brings enormous benefits -- privacy, and also fault-tolerance.
Anyone can be an ASP by running the software. Identical to the LSP model in that way, just far more efficient transaction and data compression on chain.
A user of one LSP can pay a user of another LSP trustlessly.
Two users of disparate Ark's have to go through trusted middlemen. Trust aside, the cost of Lightning swaps to these centralized providers will easily exceed that of just opening a channel.
If WoS (or their custodian), rugging all their users, would be absolutely BRUTAL for Bitcoin adoption!
I like phoenix, would be Amazing to have separate app, or software that watched the channel on chain, and could post a justice transaction if Phoenix tried to rug me.
Just run a real node, mobile nodes are pretty pointless... inefficient use of liquidity, can't make money while you sleep, and in most cases every bit as trusted as custodial.
Lightning.Pub makes it super easy to stand up a real node you can connect to and share with friends/family over Nostr.
The ASP has to bridge the transaction, but it’s little different than what an LSP does. If your LSP doesn’t want to fulfill your payment, all you can do is close your channel. They are required in your oath either way.
Ark transactions can be channels in the same way and can be paid with the same dynamic of having to go through the ASP, but still acting as a normal Lightning payment.
The bridge is trusted.
Users of the same Ark can pay each other similarly to Lightning, but to get into the Ark in the first place (either via Lightning or yet another Ark that has to use Lightning) the ASP is the spender on the inbound swap and can collude with itself.
A chain payment to the Ark may be trustless if you can afford it, but again that's pointless as you can just open a channel, which is why they have to scam and call it Lightning for poors.
A payment to a Lightning channel inside the Ark works exactly like any other Lightning payment.
Only the user in the Ark has a different trust dynamic with the opening/closing of the Ark channel. Which they can openly accept for the lack of onboarding fee or delay.
False, only within the Ark itself (assuming the poors they market too can afford the unilateral exit).
Payments TO the Ark, either from real actual Lightning or another Ark via Lightning, are trusted because the swap makes the Ark the payer such that it can collude with itself.
The chain physics are what they are and Ark is claiming to have a perpetual motion machine... they're scammers, don't be fooled.
If anyone else has a channel in the Ark and another outside the Ark they can be a bridge. If you are doing normal transaction in the Ark, *then* they are the payer. But if you open a channel to someone else who has a bridge out, then they are simply swapping Lightning with Ark channel balance and accepting that risk.
And the Ark can only collude with itself until the transaction has been “settled” in the periodic closings that allow the Ark to get its old liquidity back. There is a gap where there is a collusion risk, but the cost of closing that risk is split up among all participants.
It’s not magic, it’s just a huge batching system with a time delay to when the user is truly in control. I’d argue calling them scammers simply because it’s not exactly like lightning is a stretch, imo.
You are wasting time arguing with someone who is coping about his failed products
I mean I like Justin, he’s always been a good guy, but I don’t see the same on this issue for sure.
I also can’t see how Ark does anything other than provide a net benefit to the entire Lightning ecosystem either. It seems like it really serves the role of “channel factories” that we never got due to the sheer difficulty of coordination involved. Excited to see this in action on mainnet after years of quiet building.
It’s also not as if Lightning or Ark are perfect, but they seem to me to be very similar and very prudent trade offs to get different benefits that work fantastic when used together.
It's literally an attack on the Lightning system, to centralize it, and in so doing provide surveillance tooling.
Coordination is just centralization, people didn't like the centralization of LSP's batching, and the costs is so low it's already irrelevant, so these scammers just re-branded it and added-in some false narratives.
Neither are perfect because there are immutable physics of the chain, Lightning is emergent from those, and Ark just lies about it.
Keep fishing for those narratives scammer, you'll find one eventually.
You've never built a damn thing, just a shill for hire and not even a good one.
My stuff isn't even packaged for distribution, and you're only on Nostr because of the original ShockWallet I built in my spare time.
Welp, I'm out of this one, you guys have fun though.
You can't do a transaction *in* Ark until you trusted a bridge.
The trust assumptions are no different than a zero-conf channel that can be upgraded at any time.
Lightning already has batching, no one uses it because cost isn't the bottlneck.
It's very simple, Ark just adds centralization and trust with new branding, nothing more. The chain physics are what they are, there's nothing new here.
If you can afford a unilateral exit in the first place, you can open a Lightning channel.
The scam is that it claims to offer solutions, when in fact all it does is introduce trust and centralization as trade-offs
Lightning wallets can use trust and centralization to for better UX, but that doesn't get hyped up by hipsters and investment like the "current thing"
That’s not really relevant, because your argument would be applied equally to suggest sub chain-fee Lightning transactions can’t work or aren’t real because you can’t just send them on chain. It’s a layer, the unilateral exit is the cost of *enforcement.* That cost is exactly what allows all normal transactions to *not* require it.
It’s like saying that we can’t actually have retail payments unless every single person can securely pay for a wire and there can be no trade unless every single person can take every single transaction to court and be adjudicated immediately.
Individual payment amount have nothing to do with it, it's about the totality of what you have locked up to go to the chain to settle the sum.
Fake L2's claim to make Lightning affordable while being trustless, but trustlessness costs the same regardless.
The way to make L2s that scale far beyond what the base layer can accomplish is to align incentives so that users can exit without the provider’s permission.
You don’t need everyone to exit all L2s at once and the capacity to pay for that cost en masse, to properly align incentives for individual hosts/providers to be trustworthy. You simply have to make being honest more profitable than being dishonest.
The most important factor is unilateral exit, because without it the ability for the user to enforce anything at all regardless of cost just doesn’t even exist.
hey Guy, how's IT going with the fam & house stuff? been bizi with my own fam needs & haven't had time to keep uP/*
Slow and steady wins the race… I hope 😂
Fake L2's don't scale anything
There's two factors in scaling
1) Transaction throughput: Lightning already scales transactions infinitely
2) Ownership: Distribution is the real bottleneck, there's a minimum amount of Bitcoin needed to not be dust and even at sub-sat fees today there's not enough Bitcoin for everyone to trustlessly transact (unilateral exit)... a few hundred million people at most... likely less as big accumulators like institutions continue to accumulate
2) ownership also involves the ability to batch the creation and securing of more Lightning channels.
Lightning already has batch opens that reduce costs 80%, but no one uses that because cost isn't a bottleneck.
Ark batching also doesn't lower the boundary on unilateral exit.
Fake L2's literally solve nothing, Lightning for better or worse realizes the immutable physics of the chain. Fake L2's are just re-branding for smugglers of centralization and trust. Shitcoiners 2.0 
These posts are just shilling hopium. It should say "what this MIGHT bring to bitcoin" of course it would still require research, development and market fit.
The whole interaction of Ark with the rest of the world is through LN.
Yes, maybe they can send some bits and tits inside the ASP, but they will need to interact with the rest of the world to be able to make REAL payments.
Ark's wrong assumption is that people will just drop the whole LN and use Ark.
That will never happen.
That means Ark will be just a niche feature used by such poor users that cannot open a damn LN channel.
Fun fact: all those complaining that cannot afford a LN channel are the ones that for 15 years denied bitcoin and some of them used shitcoins.
If you would buy just 1000 sats/month during all these 15 years you would have enough sats to open a damn LN channel and do your thing.
I’ve not really heard people saying Ark would replace LN. I’ve always heard that the best use case for Ark was that each transaction could BE a channel without any of the delay or general liquidity problems that tend to come with it.
Basically that Ark makes a fantastic way to create giant channel generating hubs. And obviously if it’s not integrated into the rest of the LN ecosystem, it’s basically useless in isolation. Lightning is the glue that holds every one of these other systems together. Roy has a great article about that actually
Every chain transaction can be a channel already.
The workaround to the delay (a confirmation) is TRUST. Can do that with zero-conf channels already.
"Liquidity problems" aren't solved, they're centralized.
Their whole position is use Ark for payments not Lightning, granted they shift narratives like the weather because everyone they come up with is based on lies. We got the receipts, they're scammers.
funny enough... is 2025, after 7 years of LN being around and people still have no idea what are 0-conf channels and how to use them.
Ark will have the same "liquidity problems" like LN have today.
LN have liquidity problems mostly because its users are really dumb plebs that have no idea how to use it.
A little birdie informed me that the "DeFi" positioning some are doing is staging for ICO's they're planning for liquidity funds that promise yield to morons.
Completely trusted of course.
I doubt we ever have another ICO bubble like the first one. Everyone sees that as a scam coming from a mile away. But I guess we will see as all that mentality rolls back into Bitcoin as crypto stagnates and lags as i think it will continue to do generally.
We're already seeing it, fake L2's and covenants are it.
I'm sure ICO's will be re-branded as well and Bitcoin hipsters will eat it up