That potential "scaling chain" would have to battle the 20k+ shitcoins first before it gets to the throne. I wouldn't worry about it that much. Even in the misleading "bitcoin dominance" terms all thousands shitcoins combined are valued less than half of the total "crypto market cap". Any shitcoin is simply bitcoin's counterfeit inflation which we can easily detect and dismiss. The only effect of it is a temporary drop of bitcoin's purchase power which lets other people stack harder.

Lightning is 100% Bitcoin, Liquid is 100% not. It's really easy to distinguish if you look who mines and verifies the transactions in both.

Also don't forget that Ark tx has to be in every single block if there was at least one tx between them. So yeah, if everyone uses it then it might scale well (infinite number of txs squashed into just one), but if only few people use it the ASP would pay enormous fees to keep it all running. See the current fees and estimate how many transacting people it needs to split the anchor tx fee between them, cover the cost and maybe earn some extra? And if we want this thing to be decentralized, we need multiple such ASPs, and each will be sending their transactions trying to get in every block or else the whole vUTXO trick becomes unreliable.

In LN you only pay twice per channel, no matter if it's used or not.

For some reason this little technical quirk isn't highlighted on their website arkpill.me. Maybe I misunderstand something, but this is what I got from the twitter discussions.

The fact that you don't see the seam doesn't mean it's seamless. Some provider simply accepts L-BTC and sends roughly the same amount via LN (minus fees of all kinds). There's absolutely no difference from accepting any other shitcoin and sending the converted balance via LN. For example, you can do that at FixedFloat.

I find it ironic that to use Bitcoin (a p2p electronic cash with no trusted third party and verifiably limited supply) we apparently have to use a trusted 3rd party that can arbitrarily inflate the supply because it can't be verified. Are you sure this is the way and not an attack?

The more interesting thing is this: https://imgprxy.stacker.news/uEEhdpdOzSthFhgu1aRbBON2bCPwD_EBZ1RB6s5GFPM/rs:fit:600:500:0/g:no/aHR0cHM6Ly9pLmltZ3VyLmNvbS9jb0V6TUMyLnBuZw And those are ordinal pushes I think. There are many huge txs with tons of identical very small outputs (<2k sats) so each one of them causes this blip on the radar. Fucking disgusting.

The cryptpad links are broken, looks like some essential part of the URL is missing.

Yes, future tense, not past.

What stops you from returning to it? Prediction is about the future, not the past that already happened. I'm not sure you understand what "prediction" is, probably mistaking it for "postdiction" or something.

I will pay it anyway because I'd need to use bitcoin to pay for goods and services. But I will do it voluntarily and in a way that I prefer. The difference is consent and actual need. If I only need one tx in a month I will pay once a month, if someone needs it more often they will pay accordingly. Rather worry about the insufficient block space to accommodate all of humanity, I'm sure you'll be arguing for increasing the block size next.

There's no "overtax", you pay for the service. Need your tx to get into a block? Pay for it. Don't need it? Don't pay. It's that simple.

Miners want guarantees in this probabilistic system where nothing is 100% guaranteed. Even PoW is probabilistic though the probability is as close to 100% as you can get. They want to be able to make money at everyone else's expense because tail emission = perpetual inflation = global universal taxation. Miners want to be another branch of government that gets paid no matter the circumstances, just because it exists, even if their services aren't needed.

The external oracle is needed not to confirm the ownership of the hash. It's needed to confirm that the original data (that is hashed) is the genuine first copy that the company or artist or anyone else created and that they did it first. As I explained before there are many tricks to create an NFT that's a copy of some earlier one but you can't verify it because it was slightly modified. For example, I want to sell you an NFT with a hash 9ebca060d1a1ef4544e33738f868c1fe1819737d50e9c43a95f3d2d4951cdda6. I show you an image that, indeed, hashes to this number. Since you assume you don't need any external oracles, you buy it and we part ways. Later you find out (from your friend) that the actual NFT you wanted to buy has a hash of 6d6e6a030355c851f7520e1a563ea3c75647a4f036ac18846fc27f2001cc7cc8 and it's one pixel different from what I sold you, it was also issued 1 block earlier. See the problem now?

I saw that perspective and I explained why that worldview is wrong. I don't understand why I should support a point of view that's mathematically invalid.

More or less. You can of course shrink it to just one hash (like it's done on ETH) and store the file itself separately, but even in this case all you own is the hash which isn't scarce and proving that it corresponds to the bytes created by a certain person requires external sources of truth. Therefore a hash isn't by itself sufficient to establish the true ownership and it shouldn't be on blockchain as well because it's just spam.

The difference between sats that have a use case and fully deserve their history to be preserved forever and NFTs that don't have a working use case (outside of pump&dump/scam schemes) and will be forgotten in a few months or eventually become useless or unusable due to external events and conditions. This difference.

How can I make an argument for using NFTs on blockchain when I'm fully against it? I don't get it. I explained in details why I'm against it. There's not a single argument that can justify their usage in a decentralized environment. I'm not trying to learn an objectively wrong point of view (why would I do that? Or did you mean "teach"?), instead I'm explaining why NFTs and Bitcoin are fundamentally incompatible.

I'm against all NFTs on blockchain because they simply don't work, same as shitcoins, same as PoS. You can say "but they do work" and it's only partially true, same as buying sand castles for candy wrappers works until a bully comes, stomps the castle and tears the wrappers. As I already said in that other branch, NFTs don't need decentralization. Feel free to store them in a database, replicate it between those interested in this shit and be happy. Polluting the decentralized timechain is a waste. Why should everyone store my receipt from a supermarket for eternity? For real, why? What's the reason? I bought some food, ate it, shat it, the receipt is now useless but it's still preserved in the most decentralized database for eternity. It's like shitting into that database directly.

Same about diplomas or anything you can come up with. This stuff only concerns a few people, I don't care about some Argentinian dude's diploma, for example, I will never meet him or employ him. Why should I waste my precious disk space and bandwidth on that? The dude dies, the diploma becomes useless and yet it's stored forever. Same about apartment ownership, the house is demolished, it's useless. The NFT hype goes down, the monkey is worthless.

Sats, on the opposite, will not become worthless because they're fungible. Any sat is as valuable as any else, so we need to verify all of them. Everyone is interested in every sat verification because we can freely exchange them and I can get those Argentinian dude's sats, sure I want to make sure they were created from the valid PoW and were not doublespent. See the difference now?

You're missing the point. You can confirm the ownership of an address or some hash (though the concept of ownership becomes very vague in this case). You can't confirm the genuiness of that object, again, because "genuiness" is vague when you're talking about easily duplicated arbitrary data. You bring back complex methods of analyzing the previous data, looking for potential duplicates and not-exact copies.

When someone sells you an image they don't care if it's "genuine". It's the buyer's burden to verify it's not a copy, and it was always like that with anything, including money. The party accepting the money needs to verify it's not a counterfeit, not the payer. So the fact that you can prove that you own these bytes means basically nothing, if tx goes into a block it's already verified by the software. But you assume that the cost of this sat is much higher than 1 sat because it's somehow tied to a previous tx with an arbitrary payload, and this payload may be genuine (created by a certain real life person) or not (created by another person that's not famous). This is the missing link between the blockchain and real life, and just the blockchain can't tell you who exactly created this payload. You need a website that says "Barack Obama created this NFT in this transaction: <hash>", and you also need to verify the website itself is genuine, again, using Google or Twitter or asking your friends.

And over time these websites go offline, tweets get deleted, accounts get suspended, and then scammers create a similarly looking website with a different address that references an NFT that was copied, slightly modified (so that 1:1 match doesn't work) and posted a few days after the "original" (yes, they were patient enough to wait until they get an opportunity), and you can no longer tell if it's "real" or not. You have no truth anchors and the blockchain can't help you.

Your anti-flashbot scheme is laughable. If you need this 100% centralized scheme for it to work, you don't need Bitcoin. Moreover, these bots can themselves collude and post a slightly modified NFT for the future scam to profit off (the scheme is described above). If you need centralization to make your idea work in a decentralized setting, your idea isn't decentralized at all. Put to a database where it belongs and stop polluting the global decentralized ledger.

So in the end you're back to shitcoining: unreliable, extremely complex schemes of verification, inherently centralized, fragile and used only to extract value early. This is completely against the Bitcoin ethos which tells you to not trust but verify, and Bitcoin lets you verify cheaply, instantly and using blockchain only, without other websites, tweets and friends to call. Any other imaginary use case is spam at best and an attack at worst.

I think you can format the number with backticks so it's rendered as code: *384*8333*1234#

Are you sure the number is correct? Looks like some asterisks were eaten by markup.

I can recommend using Polar (https://github.com/jamaljsr/polar) to roll out a local LN. It runs real daemons such as Bitcoin Core and LND and they connect to each other using real sockets. You can insta-mine btc and give it to all the nodes, open channels, create and pay invoices etc., the usual stuff. Everything is instant, free and as close to the real network as possible.

No real way to answer that, just open some channels and see how it scales. Liquidity only limits payments in one direction, i.e. you can't send more than 1M sats through a 1M channel. But if you send and receive back, you can do that indefinitely long. So what actually matters is the balance between selling and buying goods&services between those businesses.

I think a good rule of thumb would be opening a channel with at least 3 times greater capacity than your monthly turnaround so you'd have some margin. It's possible to buy inbound with push, i.e. you buy a 3M sat channel and your balance will be 1.5M (of course, you pay that 1.5M on chain + the service fee for 1.5M inbound). Now you can both spend and receive which is ideal for a business because if all businesses open channels with no inbound they can't pay because no one can receive, and if they all buy inbound they also can't pay because no one can send, and if they somehow agree that some of them open channels by themselves and some buy inbound it becomes overcomplicated and messy.

Another cool feature is that LN doesn't need to be global or even public. Businesses, banks and communities (such as villages) can run their own segments that don't interact with the main LN, fully privately. They don't even need internet for that except for opening the initial channels and monitoring the chain for force closes. Of course, they can also run their own Bitcoin network (and ditch the internet completely) but it wouldn't have any real value because it wouldn't be a global consensus money.

Yes, your understanding is correct. LN is indeed an investment, not very risky, not very profitable, but useful to learn the ropes, people and tech. The biggest risk is losing your node due to hardware failure so make channel backups regularly. Best to automate it with Restic for example, it's easy to setup with virtually any storage, SSH/FTP/S3/WebDAV/etc. and it's FOSS. In case your node dies you can use that small backup file to force close all your channels by asking your peers nicely to do that for you. It's the only supported way to recover your sats, NEVER backup the big channel database. If the state there is outdated even by 1 step you will get punished by your peers and they will take all money to themselves because you'd use a revoked state.

Nothing is guaranteed with LN (in terms of profitability and availability) except the fundamental principles and it's by design. If it weren't possible to unilaterally take your money back while making sure each participant can only get back what belongs to them and not more, LN would be just another trusted exchange of sorts. If you believe no one ever tries to cheat and everyone is always online, the protocol could be 100 times simpler, just update the balances internally, no revocation needed, no HTLCs etc.

Force close is what makes it work, and it's the nastiest thing at the same time. Probably my most love-hate feature, love that it exists, hate when it actually happens to me. If we were only able to close cooperatively it'd be a disaster, because your peer could disappear and you'd be left holding the unusable bag. Maybe they would do that deliberately to mess with you, especially if the balance is on your side mostly so their loss isn't significant.

Another aspect is that nodes can refuse to accept your channels no matter what (by public key or IP for example), and it's their right. Fortunately, you can connect to another node and as long as you have any access to LN and liquidity you can transact with any node, and they can't refuse your payment because they don't know where it comes from thanks to the onion routing protocol.

I think these features let everyone have agency over their decisions, and at the same time limit that agency only to their own channels and not the entire network.