regular reminder that lightning *is* a “shared utxo” protocol that uses covenants (and multisig) to scale bitcoin payment tx thruput
most of the commentary against it points out that it does not scale number of holders in relation to # of utxos. in my mind this is a good sign of the protocol’s success (it shipped and people use it and they found drawbacks with the MVP). It’s also a sign of bad messaging around the applicability of 2-party accounts to certain payment situations (venmo for example)
sometimes it is useful to have multiparty channels; i’d argue that liquid is one such example of this.
federated mints are another one; note that both of these multiparty systems require consensus algorithms to function. fedimints were using BFS, (iiuc they just changed to a new one). liquid uses “nakamoto consensus” aka a blockchain to keep track and agree on shared balance states
Lightning was shipped as the minimum viable product to scale tx thru-put and it succeeded at that. it did this with minimalist, 2-party design as consensus from 2-parties is the simplest case. this meant it could avoid tricky consensus questions and focus on privacy + throughput instead
shipping multi-party utxos at scale will require a solutions for managing consensus amongst stakeholders in the “shared utxo”; see Ark and already existing federations for examples of contending with this problem 🫡
niftynei /
npub1e0…k0txy
2024-01-07 20:35:08
Author Public Key
npub1e0z776cpe0gllgktjk54fuzv8pdfxmq6smsmh8xd7t8s7n474n9smk0txyPublished at
2024-01-07 20:35:08Event JSON
{
"id": "98072b75e7520a96df3d1196a553e2ea94a67aa2d35974173eb84219521f917e",
"pubkey": "cbc5ef6b01cbd1ffa2cb95a954f04c385a936c1a86e1bb9ccdf2cf0f4ebeaccb",
"created_at": 1704659708,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [],
"content": "regular reminder that lightning *is* a “shared utxo” protocol that uses covenants (and multisig) to scale bitcoin payment tx thruput\n\nmost of the commentary against it points out that it does not scale number of holders in relation to # of utxos. in my mind this is a good sign of the protocol’s success (it shipped and people use it and they found drawbacks with the MVP). It’s also a sign of bad messaging around the applicability of 2-party accounts to certain payment situations (venmo for example)\n\nsometimes it is useful to have multiparty channels; i’d argue that liquid is one such example of this. \n\nfederated mints are another one; note that both of these multiparty systems require consensus algorithms to function. fedimints were using BFS, (iiuc they just changed to a new one). liquid uses “nakamoto consensus” aka a blockchain to keep track and agree on shared balance states\n\nLightning was shipped as the minimum viable product to scale tx thru-put and it succeeded at that. it did this with minimalist, 2-party design as consensus from 2-parties is the simplest case. this meant it could avoid tricky consensus questions and focus on privacy + throughput instead\n\nshipping multi-party utxos at scale will require a solutions for managing consensus amongst stakeholders in the “shared utxo”; see Ark and already existing federations for examples of contending with this problem 🫡",
"sig": "13bc373fbcc7d4274bdbf2606a4473127d37e783caaaa56d7e62f42e9840f31bf3445e7e45985151f8ba3ab8916d269f9a9ee3f167f5c7815c61bc6b92e0e4d9"
}