0 sats \ 8 replies \ @Line2Wire OP 16 Dec 2023 \ parent \ on: How's Liquid doing in the current landscape? bitcoin
This is really interesting, I need to dig a bit deeper to fully understand what you mean with
I also need to look further into developments like timeout trees.
Why would you say Liquid doesn't need help with scaling? Like I mentioned in OP, I feel it's not as accessible and perhaps I just haven't looked further but it seems pretty tightened with Blockstream's hand, it doesn't seem as accessible as running an LN Node.
If that IS what you mean, that's fair, though I wouldn't call it scaled in anyway in that case. But like you said, it's not trustless, so maybe I'm just wanting to combine permissionless with scalability.
Have a look at channel factories too: another idea that the mainnet lacks necessary opcodes to support properly.
I think Liquid is accessible enough with consumer-oriented wallets like Sideswap. What I meant by the need for scaling is what happens now on the mainnet: the throughput capacity is pushed, causing the fees to skyrocket. Liquid is still very far from being used at maximal capacity. Therefore people are not doing L2 solutions on top of Liquid (that would be already L3 I guess).
I'm just wanting to combine permissionless with scalability.
Yeah that would be great. I haven't figured out Ark yet, maybe that is what we want. However I'm happy enough to have instant payments done with trust because that's most of the time no more than 100-200 ksat anyway. For a transfer of 10M sats I'm happy enough to wait a minute or ten.
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Problem is we can't keep coming up with solutions that just end up centralising infrastructure for convenience.
Bitcoin with a 9 page whitepaper solved a world-class-problem by really taking some time to think about it and managed to remain accessible for the average user to self-host. No intermediaries.
Lightning has become an over-engineered centralised honeypot for bait and switches (look at WoS recently) that no average user wants to help grow, and Liquid as we know just seems so inaccessible infrastructure-wise and I see now it's even more centralised than LN.
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Problem is we can't keep coming up with solutions that just end up centralising infrastructure for convenience.
That's pretty much the only thing we can do, which is why we keep doing it.
Bitcoin with a 9 page whitepaper solved a world-class-problem
Yeah but the early discussion about Bitcoin banks with Nick Szabo shows that it was understood early on that the chain itself can't scale up to the whole planet.
Lightning has become an over-engineered
I consider it way under-engineered. Where are John Law's hierarchical channels? They don't need extra opcodes.
centralised honeypot for bait and switches (look at WoS recently)
WoS was holding your money in custody for convenience. That in itself has nothing to do with whether it uses Lightning or SWIFT or whatnot.
that no average user wants to help grow,
Bad, lazy users!! :)
and Liquid as we know just seems so inaccessible infrastructure-wise
It's very accessible unless you try to run a node, and you don't have to do that because only 15 nodes are actually important anyway.
and I see now it's even more centralised than LN.
Yes. It's just one mint after all.
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WoS was holding your money in custody for convenience. That in itself has nothing to do with whether it uses Lightning or SWIFT or whatnot.
I understand the point of services like WoS, my point was that they made themselves a target, an easy one at that.
It's very accessible unless you try to run a node, and you don't have to do that because only 15 nodes are actually important anyway. That's exactly my point. The moment self-custody and interaction with the timechain becomes conditioned by external entities, it is not longer accessible from a self-custody PoV.
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But there's literally nothing other than Lightning that satisfies your requirements, not just in Bitcoin but also in crypto. Succint ZK-proofs were paraded as a scalability solution but all rollups are centralized and even if you don't have to trust its sequencer it's still an easy target and it can censor users. So we have to make Lightning work because there's barely anything else.
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I agree there, and that's what I wanted to say regarding Liquid's 15/16 federated nodes led by corporate entities being the sole backend of the entire Liquid system.
I've been looking into Liquid further these past few days and I'm coming to the conclusion that while it may be necessary for those looking to do various finance-oriented activities (it has a working system for various financial instruments), it is imperative that Lightning (or something that supersedes it in every way) remains alive and well for day-to-day transacting, and that it becomes more necessary than Liquid.
Lightning's most current strength is the fact that it offers both custodial and self-custodial solutions, with increasing accessibility and ease.
But Liquid has designed itself to do things that Bitcoin just cannot on-chain because it wasn't designed to. My preference would still be something like Liquid but with more of a Lightning infrastructure where it's free-for-all to back and run.
But again, the custodial solutions are becoming more and more of an easy target, and in return let down newly onboarded users.
I think we need to shift and make a bigger push for self-custody, with things like Zeus Wallet's embedded LN mobile node.
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Yeah, I think we basically agree.
But again, the custodial solutions are becoming more and more of an easy target, and in return let down newly onboarded users.
Yes, and my pessimistic guess is that LN providers like ASYNQ and Breeze are also going to be targets even though they're non-custodial. I wish I'm wrong about it.
Maybe Lightning on Liquid would be a good thing (Juraj Bednar proposed it too). Sort of like real LN but with negligible costs to open and close channels.
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They'll try to enforce regulation anywhere they can.
Big public LSPs will definitely become a target.
However, when most people run their own nodes, or start sharing smaller community nodes, that'll then become very hard, if not impossible to enforce - And I think that's the direction we need to go.