Do you have to go to court and spend thousands of dollars to get security in your donut purchase?

The court is never for everyday, small interactions. Neither will the base layer be.

To suggest we cannot extend its trust because fees are too expensive, is to say we can’t have a sustainable society even if we have a just and incorruptible court system, because not everyone can afford to dispute every transaction in front of a judge.

It simply means the cost will be relative to how bad the conflict is, which seems natural to me.

And even that conclusion assumes there’s no better tools that we haven’t discovered yet on how to batch/combine “settlements” across separate networks. I don’t think such a wall exists. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Layers are the only way to scale a networking system. Every previous monetary and networking structure in history has done this same thing.

There is no reason L2 or L-whatever has to be an IOU. Sure people will use them because trust is the foundation of society. There isn’t anything wrong with IOUs, the problem is **systemic, fraudulent IOUs** that are counterfeit into the market indistinguishable from the money itself.

Fractional reserve is a systemic structure of our money. Fractional reserve in a bitcoin world is explicitly external to the money. MtGox was fractional reserve. FTX was fractional reserve.

It’s not a matter of “we’re gonna get fractional reserve.” We’ve had it from the very beginning, and we have seen the results 100 times. They implode and go out of business. The systemic problem of fiat is that they do NOT impose, but grow like a cancer because the money itself is cheated to keep them alive.

In short, your concerns are not really relevant, because the base layer is always present to prove existence, validity, and ownership of bitcoins. That will make it behave like a global decentralized incorruptible court for who owns what.

Thus we will extremely likely (and are already doing) build 10,000 networks *on top* of #Bitcoin.

But there are a literally limitless number of way to extend the trust of the base layer, up to any and all other layers. Ark is a great example, all transactions off chain, every single user has unilateral exit ability.

Bitcoin will have no problem scaling because it’s an open, permissionless protocol. The base layer simply needs to be reliable, solid, and radically neutral, and there will be nothing that we cannot do with it.

Human ingenuity doesn’t have a hard cap.

As mints compete with lower fees and more services, the incentives lead to lending out more ecash than available in the reserve. Yes, this is theft and will be aparent when people run off the mint all at once.

Hey, anyone going to NostRiga and Baltic Honeybadger that would like to share an AirBnb with a stranger?

For what's worth, I promise I won't kill you in sleep.

Arkoor doesn’t have as bad of liquidity requirements but it has zero-conf security tradeoffs

Ark is cool, but the biggest concern for me is the capital requirement.

To put it into perspective, to achieve Visa scale, the ASP has to anticipate 1 month of payment volume, which is roughly $1T.

In the case the state is weak, Ark can work, but fedimints work even better: scale much better, are more private, and high competition keeps everything in checks.

In the case the state is oppressive and strong, Ark is fucked because only a few companies can have that much money, which means the state can go knock on their doors.

hacking on ark 👀 there is actual code. only a month old. The protocol is orders of magnitude simpler than lightning and doesn’t require inbound. Exciting times ahead.

Sounds like I need to do more research haha

I thought the main benefits were offline receives, frictionless onboarding, cheap intra-ASP payments, and stronger sovereignty, which sounded perfect for zaps. But I need to spend some more time wrapping my head around this 😄

I think I'm confused... Reading through the docs, trying to wrap my head around how offline receives work. I don't understand what an ark address is.

If someone is working on eCash zaps, they should backup and try to make the spec flexible enough to adapt to Ark tokens

stablecoins may strengthen demand for USD as Paul Ryan said, but they do so at the expense of your ability to control capital flows

just sayin…

What is a Virtual Bitcoin Account?