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169 sats \ 2 replies \ @0xIlmari 27 Apr \ on: Sill bullish on eCash? bitcoin
It's easy to chase and shutdown a couple big names like ACINQ or BlockStream.
But imagine:
- every family has their own mint, run by the local Uncle Jim
- every town/district/housing community has its own mint
- every single pub/library/hotel/hospital has its own mint
- everyone belongs to a dozen of mints (related to their residence and services they use)
- it's painless to move funds between them transparently
How do you shut this down?
Still waiting for everyone to run their own website and email server.
But most people/families/orgs/businesses are satisfied with their Facebook page and use one of the handful of email providers that can actually get mail delivered without going straight to the spam folder.
Only the medium-large actors have a website. And by virtue of being large, their website must comply with all applicable regulations.
But I'm sure hosting something as high-stakes as people's savings will be easier /s
But I agree, this is probably the most bullish/realistic take so far.
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Running your own website and email server is "trivial" *.
sudo apt-get install sendmail apache2
Indeed, in the last century, a lot of people were doing that. Why are email addresses the way they are? It's because
user@example.com really identifies the user account user on a machine identified as example.com.If your computer had port 25 internet-accessible and was hosted under the domain
mycomputer.com then after installing sendmail you would be able to receive mail at nullcount@mycomputer.com, delivered straight to /home/nullcount/mbox file.And a website? Just dump your files into
/var/www and Apache will do the rest.I'd say that's significantly easier than setting up a Bitcoin+LN stack.
*) So what happened that we don't do it anymore? Well, Internet kinda exploded in popularity, and with it came malicious actors. Spam is now a thing, and competition can denial-of-service your piddly webserver with ease, potentially taking you out of business.
So we recognized the effects of scale and started centralizing hosting of email with dedicated service providers who can handle the spam volume, develop better filters, and hire people to keep the lights on. We moved websites to CDNs which give us virtually limitless bandwidth and (D)DoS protection.
But Bitcoin is different. There are no benefits from centralizing. In fact, the opposite is true - the network is more secure with more nodes being run, so it is in every user's best interest to run their own node(s).
Unlike spam and denial-of-service which have almost zero cost, attacking Bitcoin carries a very high cost, thanks to proof-of-work.
Lightning and eCash mints are a slightly different animals, in that there needs to be some expertise involved in running it, and it's almost a business-like venture to do so.
But there are, or will be, more-or-less turn-key solutions like Umbrel, or my own Sov-Stack. There will be fewer Lightning nodes than Bitcoin nodes, and even fewer mints, but I don't see that as a problem.
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