31 sats \ 4 replies \ @030a29f333 9 Jan \ on: Scaling Bitcoin Giacomo Zucco, John Carvalho & Matt Corallo What Bitcoin Did bitcoin
About 25 minutes in. Feel like I'm slowly coming to the realization that everyday spending with bitcoin is likely going to be done in a trusted/custodial way, at least in the short/medium term, for most people. There's a spectrum to that (between Fedimint/Cashu/Custodial LN) but none of them are trustless.
This is overall an improvement over fiat banking, where trusted banks/mints will likely have to earn and compete for people's trust while using a fixed-supply currency. Still feels like, if this is the reality, I was oversold on the BYOB mantra a bit.
custodial way yes. its really the only way.
remember that the maximum number of transactions the bitcoin network can support per year is something like 220M. Thats a pretty hard cap.
So even with something like LN, that implies that only ~110M channels could be opened / closed in a year. And this assumes NO OTHER onchain activity. (yes those LN channels may have dozens or thousands of transactions each, but well....complexities of channel management will take its toll eventually).
Certainly things like CTV will help, but even if it expands by a factor of 10x its still not that great fit for global population.
I think the right way to look at BTC is base-level settlement layer (ie. replacing central banks), but for day to day we still we need custodians.
Certainly onboarding is going to require custodians. Just work thru the math, how would 50M people each get their first .00001 bitcoin?
reply
Definitely agreed, and anyone who thinks Bitcoin banks/custodians aren't part of the future is kidding themselves (for better or worse)
reply
You can still BYOB if you set up your own lightning channels and have your own on-chain funds, but this will most likely not be accessible for most people in the future (at least not with the current consensus rules). Novel BitVM applications might change this, but covenants seem to be the clearest way forward for base layer scaling
reply
I know I can but, like you said, most people can't/won't be able to with the existing tools. That said, we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible. I'm cautiously pro-CTV at this point in time but wouldn't bother me at all if it took a few years for that soft fork to happen
reply