This thread needs more air in the public arena.

There is no chance of scaling self-sovereign BTC usage to a billion people with current tech.

I don't think even channel factories could do it.

On-chain fees are going to be stupidly high when a double digit percentage of the world's economy is bidding for block space. Only institutions will be able to afford to take the risk of opening Lightning channels that could be shut down by someone else.

The banks could probably run Lightning nodes and use e-cash protocols to scale extremely private but custodial BTC to the whole world, but would they play that nice?

Even if they do, this might be better than the current system, but this is not the vision.

Well... his mind was changed.

I think that if BTC and Lightning take over the world in their current state, Lightning will mostly be an institutional tool.

One reason I think this is what you're pointing out. The other is that if you think ordinals have made transaction fees high, buckle up, cause you ain't seen nothing yet.

The average pleb won't be able to afford an on chain transaction fee when bidding against the entire world's economy in an open auction. Period.

I personally think that banks could just run fedimint software and BTC would scale in a custodial manner to the whole world easily, and though this would obviously not be the world most Bitcoiners hope for, it is very important to remember that it would be way better than the pure fiat world we live in.

Channel factories and other future ways of sharing Lightning channels between many people without compromising your ability to hold your own keys are very important for scaling Lightning to the average pleb in a self-sovereign way.

And maybe we'll find another solution that doesn't use Lightning. Who knows?

What's this picture from?

Hey! I'm tryna stack here! Quit buying so many sats! You're making it hard to grow my savings!

Yeesh. A couple banks blow up and everyone flips out.

They're just banks. They only hold your monopoly money for you. The Fed is just gonna print the difference anyway, so I don't know why your panties are in a knot all of a sudden.

Stick your heads back in the sand and let me DCA under $20K in peace.

I don't understand the left-right divide on this one, I gotta be honest.

Would make more sense if the guy on the left was a traditional conservative, and the guy on the right was a more of an anarcho-capitalist.

Now that you mention it, I haven't heard anything from those guys in a while.

No, but seriously. I want a refund.

Bitcoin is NOT bitpower. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger whose canonical history is secured by an open bitpower competition. Saying that bitcoin is digital violence because it requires someone to expend a huge amount of watts to find a new block is like saying that gold is analog power projection because it requires people to expend watts to physically lug it around.

You do have to expend watts to move gold and bitcoin. With bitcoin, that cost gets outsourced to someone who was always going to do it anyway in exchange for a monetary fee. A bitcoin pay wall imposes an economic cost, because I only need bitcoin to pass the pay wall, and I acquire bitcoin via mutual exchange, not raw expenditure of watts. I'll never have to do the mining myself, and the people who do were going to do it anyway.

Bitcoin is NOT violence. It's internet money that you can use to purchase violence. In the sense that armies need to be paid and weapons need to be bought, military power is underpinned by economic power, and bitcoin will dramatically change the monetary landscape. Yes, even militaries will need bitcoin to do their thing. No, that doesn't make it a weapon any more than it makes food a weapon.

I'm a 2A guy. I love guns. If bitcoin actually was violence, that would be a plus to me, not a drawback. It just doesn't make any sense.

I can just tell my client to not look at replies. I'd never know the difference.

Algorithms are you digital eyes and ears. Nostr opens them.

I believe you are right. Reputation will likely be very important on Lightning.

You're probably right that the open nature of L1 makes abusing L2 much harder. The more pressing concern I have is that if an individual doesn't have the future equivalent of a good credit score, the large institutions may not wish to take a risk on them. This isn't malice, it's risk management.

Eltoo channel factories would probably make reputationeven more important. They do allow for even cheaper payments in theory, possibly alleviating the burden of holding your own keys, but now the trust model expands to more than one counterparty. One person could refuse to sign new balances and potentially force close a channel factory with twenty individuals.

The politics of managing nested multi-party payment channels is even more messy.

I generally agree with this sentiment, but there is a concern with Lightning.

Your funds should always be safe on Lightning if you are diligent, but your channels can be closed at any time.

The counterparty risk isn't in losing the funds, but rather in losing payment paths.

Because I'm stupidly bullish on Bitcoin, I am somewhat concerned about on-chain fees getting so high that opening even a single Lightning channel becomes out of reach for most people.

Losing that channel once you do have it could be devastating, and so who is going to take the risk of opening a channel with you? Who would you trust to keep a channel open?

At some point, the expense might render running a self-sovereign and well-connected Lightning node a privilege of very large institutions. Less well-connected nodes may rely on having a channel with one of these large institutions to have access to reliable payments. That reliance could obviously be abused.

I'm sure more scaling layers will come, and there are a few here already. It'll probably work itself out. But we do need something more than the current state of Lightning.

I wouldn't be a millionaire if I sold the million sats...

The world around us is more fragile than it appears. We need to be aware of this and make our own personal worlds more resilient.

You don't have to know how to build or fix everything, but you should know people who have the skills you don't.

I don't mean have acquaintances who know these things. Ideally you would have family members with these skills. If it would be weird to invite them over for dinner, you need to be closer to them.

You might not build a personal network with all these skills, but try to find as many as possible. If all else fails, learn the skills yourself.

Obviously, you should be able to run a node and hold your sats in cold storage.

Find someone who can raise crops and livestock.

Find a person who can fix cars.

Find someone who builds houses.

If you aren't a plumber or electrician, find them.

If you don't carry a gun, get to know someone who does. Learn how to handle guns safely. Buy a gun. Wear it.

Find someone who makes furniture.

Etc, etc. You get the point. Find out how many of these people you could have dinner with, individually or all at once. Collect the ones you're missing. Become the ones you can't collect. If you have kids, have your kids and their kids play together. Share some burgers or steaks. Invite your next door neighbors.

You might have to go to church or something to find a community like that. I'd recommend going, because it'll be a lot easier to find a community that already exists than it will be to build one from scratch.

That is definitely true, but we need better payment models on the internet.

I nearly quit watching YouTube entirely because of ads. Brave is amazing.

Paid subscription models are almost as bad. It feels fucking awful to pay a subscription that I don't end up using much. Micropayments via Lightning are a cool idea, but they still interrupt what you're doing, and if zaps are any indication, it's easy to pay a bunch of seemingly small payments and then choke when you realize how much you're spending.

I want a way to pay for data in real time instead of paying an ISP once a month. That payment can get sent to the relays that pass along the data, in real time.

I want to set a rate I'm willing to pay, and deal with the service people are willing to give for that rate, and never think about it again.

I've never even used Twitter. This beats the hell out Twitter's nonexistent network effects.

Twitter has a network, but a network effect is defined by a network being made stronger by every new participant.

I don't think Twitter has that anymore.

Also, Nostr isn't a single network. There are many relays, and while they are interoperable, they aren't necessarily on the same network.

This is important because people have private communication networks already - dms, private group chats, etc. All of that can be on Nostr, but not all of it has to be. It's modular. But the more stuff people have on Nostr, the easier I'll be to just use Nostr for everything, because all Nostr clients can talk to each other easily, but not all social media apps can talk to each other.

Nostr actually has a network effect. Twitter doesn't anymore.

The proper response the the question is confusion.

I am what I am. I didn't choose it, but I happily accept it.

Pride? I'm confused. I didn't do anything.

Leverage is risky. Your advisor is correct.

I'm not sure I want that message permanently associated with my pubkey.

21 million?

I guess I misunderstood what a hard fork actually is. Point being, there would be two chains until the more restricted updated chain one outran the legacy one.

I think that if a small minority of users activated the fork, and a block that violated the new rules was confirmed, the minority would either reject it and a hard for would occur, or they could be stolen from.

If 51% of miners activated the fork, they could successfully reject and reorg any blocks that break the new rules.

If less than 51% of the miners accept it, it becomes a hard fork.

I might not have this all correct, but this is where my thinking is.