there is a common nonsensical argument about #lightning - something that is stated very forthrightly and early in the documentation about it and put up front in most technical discussions
it's not scalable to the size of the global population to self-host because there isn't enough space in the blockchain
before we had credit card payment networks, which form the backbone of electronic payments these days online and in retail venues, we had technology for payments that was based on cash, and had a fundamentally similar architecture as lightning
you may have heard the expression "bar tab" this is a common one... there is two variants, the pay forward and credit variant, usually you can't do the latter until you have first done the former
it's been a thing in drinking establishments for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, because after you have consumed enough you are no good at doing math but the barman does not consume his stash while at work (at least, not very much) so he scribbles down a little ledger of your dispensed drinks and either it's taken as a single payment at the end of the night from the coins you sat in his custody or he demands you, drunk person, to pay stuff that he is pretty sure you can pay... and if not, he will nag you next time, because you do this regularly and usually have the whole amount in your pocket thus he extends you credit
you may or may not have also seen that similar schemes happen in small, outlying areas at retail establishements... i literally have twice now seen customers show up and check out items at the local supermarket, and then not pay, as they have an agreement going with the retailer to pay later, hell, i have even done it at a local establishment not long ago, several times, they prefer to just dispense the product and let you settle it next time you show up, and usually you will be there every day one time so they are trusting you
this is what lightning is
right now, lightning is a computer networked version of this, with the additional feature that you can open channels at the expense of a specialist payment clearinghouse known as a "lightning node" from your lightning node which you can use to forward payments out
you can also open channels to other lightning nodes by paying forward, just like you would with your early encounters with the barman or shopkeeper in your local area where you live a long way away from a bank or ATM
it is not going to scale
DUH
but it scales enough to the point where it will, just like Mastercard and Visa and Discover and American Express, become a large scale business, and the majority of movements through this method will be shunted through *custodial* banks, just as now, the card is connected to a bank account, and the payments are connected to the bank's channels to the payment network
bitcoin is like the gold, you don't move it around unless you really need to fix a big differential in transit of funds across a payment channel
ecash is literally like the physical cash - this is a growing area, and ecash clearinghouses are basically like banks
lightning is like credit card payments and paypal/etc they will run the lightning network, and most of it will be custodial but it already is capable of scaling up, today, to a size that would allow every town on the planet to have their own payment processor
and not only that, as far as ecash goes, this can scale up even bigger, and it's kinda ironic that it was invented first (by David Chaum in 1983) but it wasn't usable without a digital gold (bitcoin) for large scale balance adjustments and nation-sized scale payments, and for retail, we have the two options of ecash and lightning, the two schemes will coexist and be integrated into one simple terminal
people will still be able to hold their own "nation scale" bitcoin on chain UTXOs
there will still be block space for some amount of "uncle jim" payment processors (lightning nodes) and banks (ecash)
it's a massive improvement over the existing system and the best thing is that it can operate even under the threat of government oppression, unlike the current situation for payment processors and banks
the fact that it will converge to a largely custodial situation makes no difference to whether it is successful, but what makes it better is that there will always be some space for DIY and small scale, and none of it requires permission from the government and they can't stop it
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