The following is a quote from a book cover, by David Graeber.
[For] more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods
Imho, the LN protocol, and Bitcoin, are operating within an experimental context, and flawed principle, that debt is bad.
Debt is bad, sortof like guns are bad. Debt doesn't bankrupt people, people bankrupt people - or themselves.
If you accept debt into the protocol, I think the solution space could open up.
If there was a way to lend the sats in a channel, to another node, that would create a credit system. Those credits, would themselves start to work similar to channels themselves. Because this expands the utility of a channel, and unlocks yield, this would increase capital efficiency. Trouble is, I can only think of three ways to force settlement, and none of them are native to the Bitcoin network.
Sounds like IOUs which is basically fractional reserve banking and printing money out of thin air to make it work? Or would it be like a guaranteed one-to-one? Which sounds like Liquid Network in a way.
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Debt is synonymous with IOU.
Debt is not synonymous with printing money out of thin air.
The 1:1 guarantee is an implementation detail. Could work either way, or a mix of guaranteed and not-guaranteed.
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