The Lightning Network – Bitcoin’s ultimate scaling solution. In less than a decade, it has grown from a small experiment into an enterprise-ready payments solution that powers 25% of CashApp’s bitcoin transactions.And yet, in spite of Lightning’s growing enterprise adoption, people sometimes say things like “Lightning self-custody doesn’t work”. And how can we blame them for saying this? At conferences and on podcasts, you’ll hear people saying that Lightning is more like a “glue” that binds together other bitcoin protocols. “Lightning isn’t for users, it’s just infrastructure”.While it’s true that Lightning helps to bind together many different bitcoin protocols and companies, it doesn’t end there. I argue that Lightning isn’t only for settlements between big players. Lightning-self custody works for end-users.But before I describe why it works, I want to first dispel some of the things that do not work.
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286 sats \ 13 replies \ @justin_shocknet 21 Nov
Rare L take from Voltage, the sooner folks building stuff for Lightning let go of the mobile node fantasy the sooner it becomes the native money of the internet.
There's no such thing and never will be, anything above the chain is inherently interactive. These are immutable physics.
An LSP taking custody while your offline, or the sender retrying after you signal you're back online, is not offline payments.
Both are just re-branding trust/custody. Really blows my mind how anyone still takes LDK and their NGO salaried soy devs seriously.
Absolute garbage pushed by the mobile node distributions that can't work with LNURL because they're not servers. Emulating Tor on Lightning is not a solution for that, as anyone trying to run a business node behind Tor can attest to.
They'll keep fighting CLINK to salvage their reputation and keep that NGO money flowing.
AMP has had this solved for years
Ark shilling, disgraceful, and it's not "or" custodial, it is custodial.
Try not wasting liquidity on a single device that's offline most of the time.
The mental gymnastics people will do just to avoid admitting mobile nodes are retarded is absolutely unreal. You don't run an email server on your phone, don't run a Lightning node on one either, enough larping.
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98 sats \ 0 replies \ @0xbitcoiner OP 21 Nov
Thanks for saying what nobody wants to say.
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122 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 21 Nov
You are right to say that mobile nodes are stupid, but this is valid for those that don't know too much about LN and these mobile nodes are hard to manage.
I can easily run 1 or 10 Zeus /Blixt nodes with a single channel to my own remote node at home. The home node could act as a cental bank with public liquidity and serve multiple family members with 0-conf trusted channels in their mobile nodes.
Yes, is a different scenario than Lightning Pub but works perfectly fine.
For the moment these mobile nodes are a good option even for not so advanced users. The trust in a LSP is the same trust as using the same LSP with Lightning Pub.
I have more trust in Olympus, Blixt, Megalith than any random Tor shity node. Let's not forget that these LSPs main feature is to provide good routes for private nodes. Their business is not how to rug pull but to have as much traffic possible to earn more fees.
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27 sats \ 4 replies \ @DarthCoin 21 Nov
You need some influencers to shill CLINK.
Very few people know about it and is really underrated. Not even LN devs knows about it.
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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner OP 21 Nov
Are they actually from this planet?
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39 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 21 Nov
😂😂😂😂😂😂 good question
I think they live in their own cage and not even read SN...
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 21 Nov
you are my lead influencer!
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17 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 21 Nov
hahaha I am just a meme officer
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @d01abcb3eb 30 Nov
Ark is not custodial. It is surveilling, but not custodial. At least not more custodial than lightning - where your funds can be lost as well if you don't check in periodically to challenge fraudulent force closures.
I haven't read the Voltage shill, but am generally of the opinion that running your own lightning node is a good idea. Not only for privacy, but because I believe that we should actively promote as much decentralization as possible. CLINK looks great, but so does self-sovereign lightning network participation. People shitting on any side of the spectrum just do so to promote their own agenda.
I had Blixt in my iPhone between ~700000 and ~900000, and thought it was great. Connected to my own always-on node however, so didn't need to worry about fraudulent force closures. I only got rid of it because the level of use didn't motivate the amount of funds locked up in a channel.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 30 Nov
It is "Trustodial", in most of the use-cases they market it toward. It can be used with Lightning-level security, but the cost of doing so is the same and therefore doesn't solve those other use-cases they market towards. It's DeFi-brained crap.
This is true of both, interactivity is an inherent requirement of anything above the chain as there's coordination involved. Bitcoin is unique with its lack of interactivity requirement, that goes out the door once you coordinate over the top of it.
Shitting on Ark is not shitting on solutions that leverage trust and centralization, its recognizing those options have always existed, and that only scammers would re-brand as an L2 to hide it.
Key insight, Lightning needs velocity, currently most people incur costs just to tinker with it... it needs to unlock revenue streams. Mobile nodes that don't work while you sleep and can't be shared are antithetical to velocity.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @d01abcb3eb 1 Dec
I can empathize with your frustration, you being a developer of a competing solution.
A leaf lightning node doesn't really need velocity. Private channels can't even have velocity as no routing is allowed. My reasoning leading to the closure of my channel was rather specific to having that channel to my own node, thus being able to use all the allocated funds differently - while retaining a non-custodial mobile wallet using e.g. LNbits (although perhaps without plausible deniability of that wallet). Stating that end-users ought not run their own nodes is always just a sales pitch for something else - usually something worse.
My claims of Ark not being custodial came from the Ark paper, which clearly describes the ability to exit without the need of cooperation. This is basically what non-custodial means. Having read that paper, I'd definitely judge that the protocol described there is an L2 as well.
The paper was written by people behind Arkade. You seem to imply that Ark implementations do something else, which makes them "Trustodial" as a consequence. I'd be interested in some pointers to sources supporting this, as it'd be a peculiar divergence between theory and practice - a bit akin to claiming that lightning implementations do not support channels closures without trusting the channel peer.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @standard_sats 26 Nov
It works every time on Valet ♦️. You've seen wrong wallets.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @justin_shocknet 26 Nov
First I've heard of it, but doesn't change the math that channels to devices are wasteful, you can't run an lnurl server, and you can't make money while you sleep.
They're fundamental limitations, not execution.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @standard_sats 26 Nov
Well, one of Valet ♦️ design goals was make a light node that can route via private channels. There are some fundental limitations to that though.
But it was just an illustration that everything is possible on certain platform if it is not LND based wallet.
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66 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 21 Nov
No love for ln.pub
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @brave 21 Nov
Completely agree that self-custodial Lightning works today better than most people think.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @krispy_donkey 21 Nov
Would a self hosted Alby Hub fall into this category? Any other recommended products/projects?
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @DarthCoin 21 Nov
https://darth-coin.github.io/wallets/lightning-wallets-comparison-en.html
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