Bitcoin development is happening very slowly and I am not sure what is planned for the next soft fork. One thing I am looking forward to though, is the Eltoo upgrade for the Lightning network. Eltoo requires a soft fork for SIGHASH_ANYPREVOUT, so I guess that is what I am looking forward to the most.

Apart from that, I am hoping for more developer tooling for Taproot to make it easier to leverage all of its capabilities.

That would be great! Even better if someone opened a PR for that!

People have been using Boltz for privacy reasons, like for example swapping toxic change from coinjoins to lightning. Supporting P2EP would take another step towards making Boltz a privacy preserving service

Hi! And thank you!

Yes. Pretty much untraceable if you use your own node and TOR

Unlike Boltz, it is a custodial, trusted solution. Whatever works best for you I guess

Thank you!

Yes, Taproot support is planned! Taproot swaps would look like normal onchain payments, hence better privacy and lower fees :)

Boltz mainly offers atomic swaps from lightning to onchain and vice versa. That effectively means you pay a lightning invoice and receive the coins in your onchain address (and the other way around; send coins to an onchain address and get them back via us paying a lightning invoice). All of that works in a way that you don't give up custody over your coins and we cannot steal from you.

Boltz is running LND because it was more mature back in the day, when we started our node. Personally, I am running a CLN node. I gotta say, if you want to have the low level control over your node CLN offers and can get used to the less friendly command line interface, I'd prefer CLN.

Boltz offers atomic swaps. Those swaps require 2 transactions to be made onchain and in our opinion the cost for 2 transactions can be too high for very small amounts.

In case you wanna read more about why 2 transactions are needed: https://medium.com/boltzhq/brewing-boltz-hold-reverse-swaps-fea0fadbf041

Do you mean Liquid-BTC? If so, yes that is planned: https://github.com/BoltzExchange/boltz-backend/pull/276 Working great on testnet already and is gonna launch on mainnet in the coming weeks :)

Thank you! <3

Decrease. When we get more traffic over our channels and have the same costs, fixed (hosting, etc) and somewhat variable (channel force closes, etc), we can decrease our fees.

And a new swap protocol taking advantage of Taproot and Schnorr signatures will decrease onchain fees by quite a bit.

Tricky question. I don't know a lot about Stacks, only that there is some Boltz fork out there doing swaps between Stacks and lightning.

Bitcoin scripting is certainly very limited and I can imagine use cases for applications running on sidechains or L2s that allow developers to build more advanced applications. Like for example this one, which is allows you to borrow a stablecoin with BTC collateral on Liquid (it's in private beta right now): https://twitter.com/fuji_money/status/1574766200948768769?s=20&t=6vQxLEmQ6oZ9kY2rnJvQnw

I guess nobody can tell before we actually see it live in production on mainnet.

From what I have heard, I guess that small "subnetworks" for routing TARO tokens will emerge at the edges of the existing lightning network. And there are also going to be exchange-like routing nodes where you can route from your TARO token subnet to BTC or vice versa.

I gotta admit I don't have as much time for reading books as I would like. My reading list is endlessly long. So my answer is pretty basic:

And I also enjoyed reading Ready Player One.

Being online 24/7, having balanced channels, etc makes you a good operator.

But I think a great one constantly figures out where liquidity in the network is missing, how flows change over time and can quickly adapt to that. Pretty much "frontrunning" the routing competition and achieving capital efficiency.

Yes. The lightning network has grown pretty steadily recently and new services utilizing it are popping up left and right. Can't wait to see what comes next :)

Certainly a good option for developers trying to focus on building their application and not the lightning infrastructure. Managing a node can be tricky and cause quite a few headaches. Lightning as a service can make sense for some businesses

Swaps can only do so much. Trustlessly exchange one asset from one chain or layer to another. And they have their downsides. Like for example the free option problem

Directly providing liquidity for Boltz is unfortunately not possible :(

Apart from opening a lightning channel from your node of course

How quickly Lightning grew in the last year and a half. Maybe some of you didn't notice it as much as we did. In the very beginning of Boltz there was nothing going on. But nowadays, there is always some swaps happening, sats are constantly routed through our node and people open and close channels all the time. Pretty amazing to see. Especially in contrast to the early days. I had almost lost hope before that uptick :)