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What happened to the Bitcoin Liquid network?
I remember reading about it sometime back, that promised very fast settlement, peg-in and peg-out (with 1:.999 ratio for spread) but seems now barely makes a noise? Has lightning made it obsolete? Or does it serve a different use-case?
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @OT 9h
People might be quiet on it as there's a lot happening however TX have picked up a bit over the last year or so. Maybe 5-10x more. Wallets like Aqua are using it with Boltz to swap in and out of LN.
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62 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 8h
and 90% of those txs are made by BTC sessions with his tutorials LOL
Liquid is not a L2... is a sidechain.
Liquid was a good intention back into his inception. It was coming up early in the block size wars as a proposal for exchanges, to have some kind of interoperable network to move funds between them, faster and cheaper than BTC onchain, but still using BTC.
I kinda agree with that use case. A federation that is moving funds privately between them.
But then LN was launched and come in force and Liquid kinda lost the use case. The block size war was also over, segwit in place and onchain mempool liberated, so even the exchanges that were excited about Liquid, they were still preferring to do it over onchain as usual.
LN got more and more grip and Liquid was slowly forgotten and became useless. Now Blockstream, want to push people into using it as it would be a "cheapest and fastest" way instead of LN, because they do not want to see it terminated (as nobody is using it). In the end they put a lot of effort and money to build it.
Right now is just a massive marketing push by Blockstream to be used this LBTC crap.
IMHO they should go back to the original idea to be used for private entities and not pushed to large masses of users.
Now all those onchain maxis want to use Liquid instead of preparing in time, with calm new LN channels. That's why this crazy mania with Liquid. But as usual when the onchain fees are going down, Liquid use is going to meaningless until zero.
A TLDR:
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I'm a fan of using aqua wallet in combination with the lightning function. Once there are enough sats, I will convert l-btc to btc. It also has privacy benefits compared to using btc on-chain. I feel better about keeping some btc in l-btc than keeping it on an exchange.
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I would have expected now being Liquid’s time to take more share of the “tokenizing equities” markets, but seems like the Robinhoods of the world are using Ethereum layer-2s and Solana instead.
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It's a network for people who don't understand bitcoin and who want to pay fewer fees in exchange for losing their bitcoins in exchange for a token and a promise. In short, a network for non-bitcoiners to say they are bitcoiners, “hold in LBTC”.
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Actually Lighting made it useful ;-)
Misty Breez, Aqua, Helm are all Liquid wallets that offer a Lightning interface via Submarine Swaps. Users pay swap fees per transaction but don't have to deal with channel management. Very appealing for non tech users.
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The only useful tech there so far is hodlhodl. That's it. This is the problem: not enough traction.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @siggy47 9h
I have tried to explore it a little bit, but I don't see a use case for me. Just about everything I do at this point involves lightning. A few years back I had many more failed LN transactions, so maybe I would have checked out liquid. All the advances in lightning make it very reliable now, IMO.
Also, to each his own, but the tether thing is a non starter to me. The fees seem unnecessary too.
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