Coldcard* can I ask what is useful/beneficial/interesting about liquid btc?
Discussion
Fees very very low, always.
And the keys are yours.
The keys to normal BTC are yoursā¦
Whatās the point of low fees if no one uses/accepts the currency? L-BTC requires you to deposit your bitcoin to blockstream, if they go under the keys and fees donāt matter if you canāt get out? Normal lightning doesnāt require a trusted third party, just pay the fee and you get your bitcoin backā¦
I use L-BTC as a temporary wallet when I receive large sums in lightning that I cannot swap immediately.
When Mutiny is more reliable I will probably move the sums in lightning there
L-BTC, as I understand it, you deposit bitcoin into a federated entity, of which blockstream is one amongst many and that list is continuously growing. All of these companies would have to disappear for this network to stop functioning. L-BTC acts exactly like bitcoin, but with lower fees and faster blocks.
Lightning still requires that you deposit your bitcoin with some entity, whether that be an LSP or otherwise, a trusted third party is still in play. And there are many different implementations of lightning, which can cause issues.
I use all three .. lightning for payments, L-BTC for utxo management, and BTC for cold storage ..
I donāt have to deposit my bitcoin to anyone to use lighting, I simply transfer it to my nodesā on chain wallet and proceed to open channels to send sats. No third party at all.
Looked into liquid, there are 15 functionaries that have the power to peg out L-btc to btc, 11 of the 15 must agree to sign the transaction that allows btc to peg out. So while you are correct it is more then just block stream, if any 5 of the 15 functionaries were to go down, no bitcoin could be removed from the network. Also, the actual functionaries seem to be obfuscated by the overall membership numbers, so for some reason they arenāt very transparent with who actually has the control over the network.
So now you know more about Liquid, and I know more about Lightning .. every day's a school day š¤š¼
When all is said and done, Lightning and Liquid are tools to help utilise bitcoin for our purposes .. the Bitcoin Network is better for having layer 2s š«”