Hey, Azz here! This is super late but these are all great points, all valid. If the late Valera (more on this in a second) decided to pull VC capital, we’d (1) be at risk to losing our way to contracts and control created by VCs and (2) platform management could be influenced by investors.

This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that the entire platform was designed for us to not actually know who you are. For example, we could see profiles but not the virtual Lightning nodes attached to them. The backend architecture was specifically designed for the only data we can provide being “yes, this person is registered with us” along with their already public data. The platform was very client heavy, as it used end to end encryption for transaction data and designed to minimise the amount of data we can see. It was more like a server augmented architecture than a client server architecture.

Still, that doesn’t stop us from merely deleting someone’s profile. That would break any new loading of the profile. However, the virtual nodes would still exist. That’s because we simply can’t find out which nodes belong to which user. This was done on purpose to minimise data exposure - only the user’s clients know the IDs of their nodes. It also reduces the risk because we couldn’t risk deleting someone else’s nodes for example. We can’t link a user profile to the user’s accounts, as nodes were authenticated to directly, not through checking if the user was the owner. The authentication keys are completely different.

But anyways, Valera no longer really exists. Typical of some of the technologies we develop, other things would bottleneck before Indra did. That “thing” was the timechain. Indra had the efficiency and capacity to run eight million nodes on a single server. Bitcoin doesn’t have the yearly throughput to even handle what a production Indra deployment could come close to using. Simply, a LN node per person - no matter how efficient you make the operation of it - does not work because the chain cannot deal with it. Indra made heavy use of splicing for automatic liquidity, and this wasn’t even possible with a small number of people yet alone Indra’s planned scale.

Learning from this, I’m currently working on something different. Something that can handle the population’s needs. Even though the project was cut, we learnt a lot from researching it. This something is called Constellation and I’ll be releasing more details about it soon, maybe.

Thank you for listening to the episode! :)