"Apple’s P/E is 23 and growing. Microsoft’s P/E is 24 and growing. Google’s P/E is 16 and growing.

Ethereum’s “P/E” is 195, and its revenues are shrinking, with protocol revenues near multi-year lows.

The crypto market is still giving ETH simultaneous credit as a monetary asset (relative value to bitcoin), a computing platform (cloud startup multiples), and a yield generator (financial stock thanks to staking). If any of those three narratives cool, it will face headwinds. (Long Bitcoin dominance?)"

The mempool PR and these articles are great links, thanks for sharing. And the opening/closing channels and re-deploying liquidity - and the privacy required - are great background.

The privacy considerations of Lightning should always be taken into account.

However, there is a spectrum between surveillance and auditability. Without auditability, Bitcoin (and Lightning) does not serve its purpose.

Without auditability, Bitcoin loses its value.

Lightning offers the best of auditability and privacy. The tools and platform that @Layers or any others provide are a window into public network data. If the network is to continue its growth, and become material in the financial world, this kind of data is table stakes for any decision making.

If we want material capital deployment onto Lightning, it has to be audited. There may end up being a small "private" Tor based network running a fully decentralized manner - but some enterprise nodes are already subject to specific financial regulations.

Unlike a Bitcoin node, running Lightning - as you all know - requires an always-on, sophisticated setup. And to do this at scale is a professional operation. And to do anything at scale, requires capital investment.

Visa processed 192.5 Billion transactions in 2021. Per their report, River processed 115k LN transactions in September.

Extrapolate it out and compare it, and it shows just how early it is.

There are many technical challenges to run LN - again as you all already know. And there are also many legal and compliance challenges as well - for LN to reach material success, many things need to happen. The ability to audit and corroborate data that is private to a node is just one necessary piece.

Thanks for all the details - very cool to see everything you all are doing to push forward the Lightning ecosystem

Looks like I may be overdue on some podcasts you all have - will take a listen here as well.

Congratulations on your funding and success so far! This is very exciting to see. And thanks for taking time for an AMA.

I am curious more about how this does or would work, and what you see as the biggest drivers for network effects and adoption on LN?

If I have 1 MWh I wish to sell as a supplier (lets say for $100), it sounds like I would currently have a pre-arranged contract and either have received the money upfront or have a collection process after the energy is delivered?

Pardon my lack of domain knowledge, but who currently 'owns' that contract (eg 1 MWh for $100)? Or audits the sending/receiving should there be a dispute?

Is this contract something that Synota eventually "creates" and "custodies" for the two parties - and in a sense acts as an exchange for?

Does your solution involve an LN node on both sender and receiver to get funds as the energy is transmitted and received (and accounted for on Synota) in near real time?

I welcome any insight, and of course am happy to read up on any resources you may have already published

I really enjoyed Citizen 4 - looks like very similar in topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenfour

Any centralization or decentralization of the LN is not relevant as some sort of showstopper IMO.

As others have alluded to before in previous threads and essays, there may end up being two sorts of networks - one focused on privacy, more decentralized, and with more nodes - and another with more centralizing factors, higher capacity, and adhering more to things like AML, KYC. I don't see any issue with this, and as everything can be custodial, anyone can enter or leave the network as they see fit.

The technical scaling Lightning provides is required for any sort of hyper bitcoinization from a medium of exchange perspective. Either the largest exchanges become the Visa's of the world and keep a ledger among their businesses and settle on some sort of regular interval (giving them a position to rehypothecate and in a sense "pay" for the services to maintain infrastructure), or the LN grows to support and chunk away at the functionality Visa provides - albeit from the ground up in many emerging markets where having a new financial system may be more of a net new opportunity and provide utility.

But for Bitcoin to become a currency beyond a digital store of value, there will need to be some sort of off chain immediate exchange property, and the success of LN helps ensure we don't face rehypothecation issues.

The biggest challenge I see in the near term are demand factors - getting more goods and services denominated in bitcoin (and LN), which in turn gives more incentive to routers, which encourages network growth, and makes running a node more profitable - especially considering the time, expertise, risk, and captial node operators are putting forth in these early days.

This is why things like Taro are so crucial and helpful for network growth and adoption as well. It's a necessary demand flywheel to keep the network effects headed in the right direction for everyone.

Any commercial business will need cloud hosting or an enterprise grade on prem solution for running a node (or offering endpoints). Especially taking into account things like failover, redundancy, power, etc - there are a number of challenges to run a business on a 'self hosted' node.

It is great to run a self hosted node locally (I run bitcoin core on my computer), and to go one step further to verify transactions on your own instance - but beyond personal use, cloud or a data center setup is almost a must have.

And $100/mo+ is not at all unreasonable

Quicknode offers a nice Bitcoin blockchain endpoint (pricing based on API calls): https://www.quicknode.com/chains/btc

And lastly, this post (linked here) has a nice summary: #101809

It's scary how good GPT is...

The bitcoin Replace-by-Fee (RBF) proposal is a way of allowing transactions on the bitcoin network to be flagged as replaceable, meaning that they can be replaced by a new transaction with a higher fee. This allows users to increase the fee on their transactions if they get stuck in the mempool (the pool of unconfirmed transactions) for too long.

The main advantage of the RBF proposal is that it allows users to have more control over the fees they pay on their transactions. By allowing transactions to be replaced with new ones that include higher fees, users can ensure that their transactions will be confirmed more quickly.

Another advantage is that it can help to prevent transaction congestion on the network. By allowing users to increase the fees on their transactions, the RBF proposal can incentivize users to include higher fees in their transactions, which can help to ensure that the most important transactions are confirmed first. This can help to prevent the network from becoming congested with low-fee transactions, which can slow down the confirmation of all transactions.

However, there are also some potential drawbacks to the RBF proposal. One of the main concerns is that it could be used for double-spending attacks, where a user tries to spend the same bitcoins twice. With RBF, a user could potentially create two transactions with the same bitcoins, and then replace the one with the lower fee with a new one that includes a higher fee, thus "tricking" the network into confirming the second transaction.

Another potential concern is that it could lead to increased centralization on the network. If only a small group of users are able to afford to include high fees on their transactions, this could lead to an uneven distribution of fees on the network, which could in turn lead to the concentration of power in the hands of a few large miners.

Overall, the bitcoin Replace-by-Fee proposal is a way of allowing users to have more control over the fees they pay on their transactions, which can help to prevent network congestion and ensure that important transactions are confirmed quickly. However, there are also some potential drawbacks to the proposal, such as the possibility of double-spending attacks and increased centralization on the network.

Great thread here: https://twitter.com/thomas_fahrer/status/1596281370133037057?s=20&t=QM5-qtLKJZ292sJ1HlHiOQ

The AI has watched so many netflix movies by now 😅

This GPT stuff is crazy 😅

I used this site: https://www.articleforge.com/

I don't know what is used behind the scenes, but I used this site: https://www.articleforge.com/

💯 - I'm now browsing all of these AI text sites - even the demo videos are putting auto generated content into things like blogs, emails, DM's, and even dating profiles

It's almost scary how good this is...and then to consider it took three keywords and a button click... I don't know how I feel about this yet 😮

😂 Bitcoin coming in and blowing up the curve on the test everyone is getting a 20% on