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They mention in the post that they are interested in lightning.
Yes, maybe wishful-thinking but could have waited until a alternative was in place or at least have linked to a test implementation or something.
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> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? I look at it (maybe naively) like a solid gold bar. You're not going to walk in to a convenience store and pay with a bar of solid gold; you might flee the country with one though. Beyond that, I totally agree with your read on the post. Linking the pull request[0] was especially backhanded. It feels like there's some underlying frustration…
Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
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Has the ritual sacrifice angle been explored elsewhere? Would make for good video.
In the TV show "Sherlock," the titular main character's self-deprecating videos for the "Everyone" collective (spoof on Anonymous) are a sort of ritual sacrifice as a medium of payment.
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Gold as a metal has an inherent value though. If not only for jewelry, it also has important uses in electronics. The value associated with bitcoin seems purely sentimental.
Gold is not valuable because you can make jewelry with it. Jewelry is valuable because it's made of gold. Important distinction.
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While true, a gold bar to me has no inherent use. I am not going to smelt it and make jewelry. It is simply a store of value. I think the gold comparison is quite close.
But you're not the only person in the world, so I don't see how this is an accurate portrayal at all. To _you_ it's a value store. To electronics companies it's a consumable used in manufacturing. Same to a jeweler, and to a jewelry consumer it's desired. Crypto has exactly zero real world utility or inherent value. You, Joe Schmoe, do not by yourself and your own desires dictate what does and does not have inherent…
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To be fair, people could also stop thinking gold is worth much. Maybe a modern-day alchemist finally figures out the formula. I don't know. Probably far less likely than the Bitcoin scenarios though.
Consider aluminium. At one point it was more expensive than gold (due to mining+refining challenges). When those were overcome the cost plummeted to it's current "cheap" level. Personally, I think a better comparison is to the diamond trade. Through a series of machinations (price fixing, artificial supply constraint, marketing) diamonds are deeply overvalued if you consider just the fundamentals of them - aka they'r…
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The lightning network will not work. Yes, you can run a node and connect to ACINQ's lightning hub (called endurance), and you can even buy coffee at https://starblocks.acinq.co , their lightning demo site, but that demo was designed to be misleading. The only reason it works is because the endurance hub has locked up its own funds in a channel with Starblocks -- and it's no surprise that it did, since both are owned…
>I could certainly connect my own lightning node to the endurance lightning hub, but no one could pay me through that hub because the hub would first have to commit its own funds to its side of a payment channel with me. It won't do that... "hubs" are incentivized to open channels, because they can charge fees for any transactions that go "through" them. Locking up some BTC for a short amount of time (roughly 3 days…
If I understood you correctly, you seem to be missing the fact that a hub has to separately lock up money with every node that it's connected to, if that node expects to be paid through the hub. That is an absolutely stunning amount of money for any popular lightning hub. Even if the hub is super-rich and super-benevolent, I have no way of asking it to lock up some funds on our channel, and the hub has no way of knowing that I want to accept payments through that route. If anyone tries to pay me, they'll just get a "no route found" error message even if a route exists, because that route is not funded at every edge.
A single buyer opening a channel with both me and the hub doesn't help unless the hub has funded its side of the channnel with that buyer, AND the buyer has funded his side of the channel with my coffee shop. Now we have twice as much money locked up -- and I still don't see how the hub will decide with whom to lock up its own funds.
This reads a bit like the sort of things people say when breaking up so as not to upset the other person too much. You're a great person, but you're just more of an asset than a medium of exchange, and what I need in my life right now is a medium of exchange. What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? That is not a purely rhetorical question; cryptocurrencies change things a lot. But t…
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While true, a gold bar to me has no inherent use. I am not going to smelt it and make jewelry. It is simply a store of value. I think the gold comparison is quite close.
But you're not the only person in the world, so I don't see how this is an accurate portrayal at all. To _you_ it's a value store. To electronics companies it's a consumable used in manufacturing. Same to a jeweler, and to a jewelry consumer it's desired. Crypto has exactly zero real world utility or inherent value. You, Joe Schmoe, do not by yourself and your own desires dictate what does and does not have inherent…