Phoenix is really good and I recommend it to people, however:

- extreme form of "non-custodial centealizarion"

- very very bad privacy

- actually super expensive

I think it's smarter to use Zeus with your own Lightning node on a server at this point.

>says while thinking Monero heads to zero

news flash from the real world: Monero is money. it is not investor or government friendly so the price is supressed. hard to get adoption from normies as well, so it stands well with only a handful of nerds, hackers and cypherpunks around the world. but when privacy and anarchy is the top priority, Monero is the number one choice, not IOUs of a potential high performing asset.

this scenario is still better than the promise of an asset, yes. like schrodinger's cat a promise is at the same time already at zero. asking permission = seeking denial

Self-custody

>says this while advocating for someone else holding your money

It seems most of the issues you outline are resolved by simply using monero :monero: .

I've been thinking about how Lightning was designed for payments, but for donations (zaps) we don't need some of its defining properties:

- instant. It doesn't have to be instant. It just needs to pay out within a couple weeks. We can still have instant gratification - a promise of it - but you don't need the ability to spend it instantly.

- foolproof. This is a donation, not an exchange for goods or services, so there's no reason for someone to double-spend. And if they do, oh well, it was a donation anyway.

So my first thought it, for zaps, instead of Lightning why don't we just send regular Bitcoin with very low fees?​ You should get it eventually, and in the wallet UI we can show it instantly with a "pending" state.

Though I'm told this won't add up, and low fee transactions will be dropped. I don't know. Someone should investigate the lowest fee transactions that do eventually succeed to see if it's viable.

Basically I'm wondering if we can use Bitcoin directly and just work around it as a UX problem.

Lightning is in a very sorry state. Alby is the only thing that works, but when even Alby doesn't work there is no alternative. LightningTipBot was the only thing until it shut down. Is there any other option? We have dozens of clients with zap support but users who can't access it without getting a PhD in Lightning.

Is this valid for all L2s? 🤔

L2 can be destroyed even if L1 isn’t.. So destroying an L2 solution doesn’t equate to destroying Bitcoin operationally. L1 remains secure & functional regardless of the state of L2...

yes we need more governments creating social media platforms

sorry missed zeros here say 30-50x.

still not a lot

If you want trustless ZK rollup you must use DA on Bitcoin.

This does not scale by default. You still need non-witness data therefore you only get 5-10x increase in the throughput depending on who you ask.

> AFAIK it's well understood that rollups actually do a poor job of actually scaling though they have undeniable utility advancements.

What ? ZK rollups using state diffs (as opposed to sending compressed tx data) scale extremely well! It's the opposite, the more traffic you have on them the more efficient they are.

> Using Bitcoin as a DA will make tx onchain strictly more expensive than on Bitcoin today the moment any sort of scale usage shows up.

Yes but in this scenario you assume that most of the traffic will still happen on L1 directly ? Assuming most of the traffic move to L2s then it's not the case.

> All of the gadgets you refer to are underexplored and add new layers of complexity that I don't think are fully appreciate because they've never been tested in real world environment.

Fair enough.

> What we know of rollups is that they are permissioned, likely very expensive to operate and consolidate into few service providers that can capture network effect. (observations from ETH).

Yes this is the current state of affairs today, I wont deny it. Everything is about the credibility of the path to decentralisation and to fix those aspects.

> Precisely, yes. It's just another blockchain. Blockchain decentralization doesn't manifest in and of itself and every attempt other than Bitcoin are looking like failure so I don't see why it would be different here.

With validity proofs it's trustless. You're only giving up censorship resistance (up to L2 consensus), but gaining: scale (like lightning) and functionality. In fact, the latter also gives more security because you can do DeFi and self-custodial applications.

> Too expensive

It's less expensive than Bitcoin today. Bitcoin stores all tx on chain. This will store state diffs in the worst case which is much cheaper.

> That's an option but I'm not sure how it would play out in practice. Overall it just seems overarchitectured. Another example is I have no reason to believe at the moment that fraud proof economic games are actually sustainable. They seem quite capital inefficient and I've read pretty serious concerns around the long term game theory.

Validium prevents escape hatches, but it's not related to fraud proofs. Unlike fraud proofs, validiums make it imposible for operators to steal funds.

There is also the option of self-DA like Adamantium (it needs users to be live, but IMO, it should still be strictly better than Lightning).