The blockspace fee market will swing for any number of reasons. Stay steady, be wary of drawing straight lines from two points extremely close in time.
Proclaiming the death of lightning in the context of the fee market last month is getting caught up in a frame of mind I don’t think many subscribe to, it goes like this.
1) Fees are high
2) Opening / closing channels is expensive / difficult
3) lightning is broken because as bitcoin grows, blockspace demand increases
This seems perfectly logical on the surface, but consider for a second what you’re accepting here.
You’re accepting that blockspace demand from bitcoin’s success is driven by silly pictures, as this is what’s driving the current fee market. Is this the wild success and blockspace demand you’re thinking of?
If you think bitcoins killer use case is NFTs (even the people who created these ordinals say they are a fad), then yes this is a logical conclusion, and lightning does not scale NFTs (tho I think taproot assets does fwiw).
But, and I think this is the majority of people, if you think bitcoin block space demand is driven by payments and usage in the future, this is exactly what lightning was designed for.
Lightning is a shunt for bitcoin payments. As payments increase, incentives to get off chain do as well. The entry fee is a Bitcoin transaction, from there you’re paying a fraction of the cost on lightning.
GARY
nostr:npub1t0nyg64g5vwprva52wlcmt7fkdr07v5dr7s35raq9g0xgc0k4xcsedjgqv this feels like such a steep onboarding fee. I understand it’s job, but I wonder if there isn’t a way to lower the cost of entry for someone new to try your product? 
The fee is minimum 10k sats, the payment minimum is so you don’t try to receive a payment so low that it all goes to the channel open fee
This album was 1994, game came out in 1997. This video based in Japan, someone must have been a fan over there :)
When I’m talking to other engineers now, of course I’m interested in what they know, what they’ve done, how they think and communicate. But what really gets an engineer’s experience across for me is the war stories of battling X issue or Y bug.
Engineers with experience like that are the ones you want building your products. They’ve seen pitfalls, navigated tough situations, and made things better honestly by doing the shit work. That is character and experience that can’t be taught, it has to be lived.
In hardware, my first engineering jobs were basically to be the full time fixer. Find issues in the field, diagnose, make necessary changes and ship it. I was the guy who didn’t like fixing other people’s mistakes, but with what I know now, those experiences were foundational.
Fixers see what can go wrong so they are more informed on how to do it right.
Fixers understand the Pareto principle, what we need to do now to fix what’s in front of us vs what’s better left for when we have three luxury to put a bow on it.
Effective fixers work professionally under pressure, communicate well, cut through the BS.
There’s this archetype of engineer I have a lot of respect for, it’s not a permanent state for most but I’ve seen too many who’ve had this role and succeeded under appreciate how valuable they really are
The fixer
A group of fixers is a cleanup crew, and I think if you’re around any org long enough you find out who these people are— There are the engineers who blaze trails and make new things and when they’re successful it’s great, but when they muck it up a new opportunity appears for someone to prove themselves.
The fixer gets pulled off their work and plunged into the middle of whatever disaster they’ve been volunteered for. Effective fixers learn new skills on the fly, stay cool under pressure, communicate well and avoid the blame game. A cleanup job is the ultimate engineering trial by fire, and at very least people who take up this duty come out better engineers. At best they show themselves to be exceptionally valuable.
The beauty of the current state of lightning tech is you don’t need to know how to run a node to use it in a self custodial way. Breez or Phoenix are great starts, you just see a payment app, the node and all the complexity of lightning is underneath
This is not to say we shouldn’t try to keep thinking about new ways to scale bitcoin. Lightning is not the end all be all.
But I do think a lot of times bitcoiners can overvalue fantasy land and undervalue the staggering amount of real work that has been put into bitcoin and more recently lightning. This is real technology that is scaling bitcoin now
nostr:note1vykpcz0wvfrcs5rjhvsf2jgrkjml5vh08vnsapwup5p0f7yg0anssrsyqs
Lightning is very much living, it is more alive than any mailing list or Twitter post about scaling bitcoin. It has 100k+ channels over 5 years of main net, btc-at-risk miles on it.
We know the flaws of lightning intimately because we’ve been using it, and testing it and improving it.
X miracle bitcoin scaling solution is in fantasy land and due to not existing at any scale is as good as dead. They’re fun to think about though.
Those years of work are necessarily toilsome and ugly, because in the process of bringing something to reality you do the real work, you test your assumptions, you find out what the real issues actually are. You start with ideals, create something ugly and iterate. I value an idea with miles on it much, much more than the latest hotness that hasn’t gone through the rigors of the real world.
Reality is what matters, and an idea is the start of the work that makes it real. Ideas are a dime a dozen, real things that are useful start as ideas then get years of work put into them
It’s really easy to get on these marketplaces of ideas and weight an idea with many engineer years of development and miles on it the same as a new concept that someone just cooked up