Per popular demand. Xβposting here.
Lately, there's been more debate around the value of the #BitcoinΒ Lightning Network. Based on the work we've been doing @Lightspark for the past 18 months, I will share my honest view.
First things first β Bitcoin is the only viable neutral settlement asset and network that can usher in a new era of global real-time payments. Everything else is either too centralized, not secure enough, doesn't have the required regulatory clarity, or doesn't have the required depth of liquidity against the (fiat) currencies that people and businesses want to use for everyday transactions.
Once you believe the above, you must make Bitcoin move faster and cheaper than on L1 to make it competitive and valuable. But, you need to achieve this while retaining Bitcoin's trust and security principles. In other words, no new consensus paradigm. You also need to introduce privacy, while not sacrificing compliance.
Once you add up all the above, the only way forward β at least for now β is to use the Lightning Network.
Now let's talk about the challenges. Lightning used to be complex, failure rates for higher value transactions were relatively high, managing liquidity, rebalancing channels, and keeping a node up and running, were all things that got in the way of adoption. To the greatest extent, this is now a thing of the past. We β and others in the industry β have addressed these shortcomings and complications with good software and services. On Lightspark's stack, you can get up and running in no time, without ever having to learn about channels, liquidity, routing, or any of these different concepts.
To be clear, the above works exceptionally well for enterprises, and custodians. It allows them to settle BTC in near-real time, at a very low cost, in a private, compliant, and reliable way.
Add to that the newly launched and open-sourced UMA (Universal Money Address) standard, which extends LNURL to add compliance and FX capabilities, and any consumer or business can send and receive any currency of their choosing in real-time with a human-readable address between participating institutions without ever knowing Bitcoin or Lightning was involved. Just as someone sending an email doesn't think about SMTP and TCP/IP. It just works.
So we're done? Is it all great? No. It's not. We collectively have much more work to do. I agree with @Leishman, Lightning with the above advancements works well in custodial/institutional settings. This is why at Lightspark, we started our development journey by focusing on enterprise solutions at first. This is where most of the volume is, and where we felt we could have the most impact in the short and medium term.
Let's now turn to the work ahead:
- Non-custodial Lightning: as much as custodial LN is now fully ready for primetime, self-custody on Lightning presents two distinct challenges: (1) offline receive; and (2) channel open fees for smaller transactions. About (1) β if you're running a node on your device unless your app is foregrounded (iOS), or if you have bad connectivity, you won't be able to receive an incoming transaction. And (2) β opening channels with higher L1 fees is currently cost-prohibitive. Some solutions are being worked on to address these, from @lightning labs to @spiralbtc, and of course @lightspark. But to be blunt, if you want full support for non-custodial Lightning with offline receive and want to make it economically viable, you have to accept some form of compromise on the trustlessness level of the solution. With some solutions, you have to trust an LSP, with others, it's a bit better with more distributed trust across different entities/service providers. This will be for consumers to choose between usability, cost, and full trustlessness. There's a lot more work and research that is taking place to improve these solutions and find non-linear breakthroughs, but for now, tradeoffs are required.
- Pushing identity / addressing to be fully self-sovereign: LNURL, and by extension, UMA, is fantastic when it comes to user experience, but users rely on their custodians to provide the addressing service as it relies on DNS. Again, it's probably fine for most people, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't push harder to enable people to own their identity and money address and make that portable. Some exciting work we're tracking is what @TBD54566975 has been building with DIDs. We're also wondering β and to some, it'll be blasphemous! β whether there are interesting bridges to make with ENS in the future.
- Issuing other assets on Lightning: bringing stablecoins and other assets onto the network to make it more efficient for a subset of transactions will be critical. @lightning has been working on Taproot Assets and making good progress, @bitfinex is working on RGB, and we're working to help make this a reality across the board.
Lightning is seeing more talent flock to it rather than leave it. It's ready for primetime and mass market for exchanges, custodial wallets, banks, and institutions. It needs more work for non-custodial wallets and applications, and to bring stablecoins to the network. But let's take a deep breath. We're about to see #BitcoinΒ become the standard protocol for money on the internet with mass adoption on the horizon. It'll require tradeoffs and collective efforts, but I'm more bullish than ever on our odds of success.
