This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.
Note: @hivecuba gets 10% of the rewards for this post and Kevin Rooke's Podcast might get some too..... you'll see why at the very end of the post.
TLDR - skip this section if you like to read it all
I got this reply:
In The Moment Reply
About 80% of my traffic is HBD and Hive into BTC Lightning then on to Bitrefill and other exit points. 20% the other way and of that quite a bit pays for servers from @privex who accept payment in Lightning but prefer to receive Hive.
My service helps users in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere turn blog posts and photos into food.
Oh and 75% of all v4v podcasts use my infrastructure to receive value direct into their own custody unlike systems like Fountain or Alby. Good as those guys are, they hold the keys and the coins. I pass value on in under 3 seconds (similar to you only Hive is measurably faster to settle than Lightning).
Lightning is just a useful piggyback because at this moment it is sucking in so much VC money that doesn't know what to do with itself. These VCs will spend huge money to get merchant adoption and build nice apps, all of which solutions like @v4vapp will benefit from for free.
Background - Start Here
Yesterday I sat down to write about another mega-money VC play in the Lightning world with an eye watering top tier price $22,500 per month.
Lightning as a Service: what is the real cost of Lightspark or Nodeless?
As I was writing I was listening to the Kevin Rooke Podcast talking to UTX0 about his new Lightning as a service company Nodeless. I pretty quickly realised that his solution is the same as the massively funded Lightspark which I was writing about.
The whole first chunk of the podcast was UTX0 (I don't know or care what his name is) talking about all the problems I repeatedly point out with Lightning. He knows how ridiculous it is to expect real people to run Lightning to receive or send funds. I'm talking about real people like online merchants who just want to sell stuff, and who aren't hard core, laser eyed Bitcoiners.
"I'm not for custodial solutions .... it was always managing the Lightning Node which was the hard part" - UTX0 on Kevin Rooke's Podcast
He points out on the show that there are 19,000 Lightning Nodes and more than 150,000 people on Twitter talking about BTC. So the vast majority of Bitcoiners don't even run full Bitcoin or Lightning/Bitcoin nodes. And obviously he has to call out "shitcoins" because that's how he gets credibility with the rest of the cult.
So I added his Nodeless to the post (and I signed up for it and had a look at his company's very pretty website and system which is working nicely). In fact I could switch to using it with a day's work I suspect (though I couldn't run the Podcasting 2.0 side of @v4vapp through him). I found a little (understandable) problem on his site and tried to submit a detailed bug report with a screen shot which failed because he's using Google's Captcha on his site.
Actually my bug with Nodeless is that they will accept a Lightning Address for the custodial Wallet of Satoshi but won't accept a Lightning Address from my own v4v.app service (which doesn't hold user funds).
Toward the end of the show UTX0 mentions that he is bootstrapping the company based on other Software as a Service (SAAS) companies he runs but he's looking for VC money because he knows that promotion and awareness raising would take more money than he has. The only real difference between his product and Lightspark is pre vs post VC money.
When I shared yesterday's article on Twitter I tagged both Lightspark and Nodeless and his first response to me was this:
"An important discussion to have!"
But then he obviously went a little deeper and this was his reply:
I tapped out a reply on Twitter but it got too long, here it is.
In The Moment Reply
About 80% of my traffic is HBD and Hive into BTC Lightning then on to Bitrefill and other exit points. 20% the other way and of that quite a bit pays for servers from @privex who accept payment in Lightning but prefer to receive Hive.
My service helps users in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere turn blog posts and photos into food.
Oh and 75% of all v4v podcasts use my infrastructure to receive value direct into their own custody unlike systems like Fountain or Alby. Good as those guys are, they hold the keys and the coins. I pass value on in under 3 seconds (similar to your service, only Hive is measurably faster to settle than Lightning).
Lightning is just a useful piggyback because at this moment it is sucking in so much VC money that doesn't know what to do with itself. These VCs will spend huge money to get merchant adoption and build nice apps, most of which @v4vapp will benefit from for free.
Lightning's structural issues
You can't monetize the network. Lightning itself will be hard to make money from directly. Lightning is in the unenviable position of every shitcoin project without the added shitcoin benefit of a pre-mine token to pay back the initial investors!
Lightning suffers, ultimately, from the same problem as the Bitcoin Layer 1 it is built on: no resources are allocated to any dev work, promotion, sales, awareness spreading etc. by the core protocol.
Routing fess on Lightning are a joke and will DECREASE and possibly tend to zero because as the big money VCs enter, the traffic will flow through their over capitalised solutions. They'll carry traffic and harvest data.
Fortunately I'm working on Hive with a properly decentralised system untainted by VC money.
The Bitcoin Maxi Shitcoin Paradox
Whenever Bitcoin Maxis throw around the Shitcoin slur about EVERYTHING other than Bitcoin it leads me to contemplate this paradox:
- Bitcoin, which exists because it incentivises hardware operators via inflation to run the system by paying them at the core protocol level, is the most revolutionary tech ever and changes the world.
- Any other system which uses the same cryptographic and technological ideas to incentivise hardware operators to run any other system at the core protocol level, is shit.
And they somehow know this to be true without examining the specifics of ANY other project. They seem sure of this with an almost religious fervour. "Don't bring your facts to contradict my faith".
I'd say there will be only one Proof of Work chain in the long run. That part of the tech (PoW vs POS and dPOS) is largely irrelevant if you do the game theory right for POS and particularly dPOS as we have on Hive.
What the BTC Maxi crowd continue to overlook is the importance of directed inflation.
Bitcoin's early life was massively inflationary but this inflation only paid for security and ongoing operation of the hardware. Luckily the first to get insanely wealthy were developers and their largess and generosity probably keeps much of the development going to this day. This is similar to how Nostr is funded: a big gift from Jack Dorsey.
No development work or anything else is funded by Bitcoin's ongoing inflation. There is just the hope (not a certainty) that eventually fees will cover this massive hardware and energy operating expense.
The Bitcoin Maxi Shitcoin Paradox doesn't allow its devotees to see how this fundamental aspect of the brilliance of the invention of Bitcoin, can ever apply to anything else, whilst still believing it is the most important invention mankind has ever made.
Intellectual cop out
As we cover extensively on @cttpodcast and I can't say it better than @theycallmedan:
You can stay clear of a lot of nonsense if you stick by the following in web3 governance.
Were they voted in? - no, move on.
If they were, was there a premine? - yes, move on.
It's not a hard test to apply, but if you chose the intellectual cop out of "if it's not Bitcoin it's a Shitcoin" you clearly don't have much beyond a religious devotion to BTC.
Nodeless's first reaction
And I agree: but most of the voices I listen to in the Lightning and BTC world, people like Kevin Rooke on his Podcast, What Bitcoin Did or TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast are hugely resistant to looking at anything that isn't Bitcoin with any kind of intellectual rigour. And they never seem to want to debate with someone like @theycallmedan or myself.
And a shout out to @hivecuba who gets 10% of the rewards for this post for this kick ass reply:
And I'm also setting aside 10% of the rewards from this post and will give those to Kevin Rooke as a Lightning Boost via Podcasting 2.0 BUT ONLY IF HE leaves a comment here or tweets or sends a note on Nostr that he has seen this. He has 7 days.
Older post:
Hive is better than Lightning for receiving Value 4 Value in Podcasting 2.0
Value for Value
For the last few months while building @v4vapp I was generously supported by the DHF. Going forward I have a much more modest support which covers direct server costs and a little of my time.
If you appreciate the work I do on and around Hive, you can express this directly: upvoting posts on Hive is great. Also consider a direct donation (there's a Tip button on Hive or a Lightning Address) on all my posts.
Support Proposal 244 on PeakD
Support Proposal 244 with Hivesigner
Support Proposal 244 on Ecency
Vote for Brianoflondon's Witness KeyChain or HiveSigner
„My service helps users in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere turn blog posts and photos into food.“
Strong point, @brianoflondon and a real usecase for @v4vapp that no maxi can discuss away. At least until there is a Bitcoin only content monetization platform out there that works from small accounts upwards. I don’t know one yet.
Nostr people get all excited when they get 10,000 sats ($3) on a post. I just laugh.
That’s the issue with many BTC Maxis: They are so obsessed with „stacking Sats“ that they are not willing to give some away, even for good content. 🤷🏼♂️
Yeah, that HODL mentality.
I know quite a few Maxis who send millions of Sats via Fountain. I think the annoying selfish ones in any group are just the loudest.
It’s on this commenter from post above to look into Hive before lumping it with all the centralized trash indeed! But I can’t blame many who crap on most Crypto given most are trash. But it’s on them to look into Hive and they’d realize it’s not in the 99% of centralized garbage.
What amuses me is the combination of zero intellectual curiosity and zero self introspection to think that perhaps there are things they don't know.
This reply on Nostr from a nobody is a prime example:
Repeats back my statement then adds an opinion based on zero new information.
It's just getting funny how absurd it is at this point, the utter dismissal of anyone/anything just cause it's not BTC or lightning and on top of it being rude. I'd say it speaks more about them than anyone else and I'm glad we can record such history on an immutable database for later nostalgia.
We move on, what's important is that it works and helps people actively using it. While the masses are busy utilizing a network they don't benefit from, early adopters on Hive are thriving and this time not just some devs/geeks who happened upon BTC early and stuck around, but anyone bothering to stick around and learn what's happening here.
Hive is pretty special at giving non-techy types the chance to get in early now just by posting, commenting and being around. The stakes stacked here on Hive are going to be worth a lot in the future I believe.
At first, I did write a comment too, but then I blocked that account. It's a very low-value Twitter user that basically only disturbed the platform so far. Being associated actually hurts your Twitter Reputation, which is a value that Twitter is calculating in the background for the purpose of increasing or decreasing your visibility to strangers.
A couple of things:
Perpetual or static QR codes are a slight of hand magic trick in ⚡️Lightning today. The short answer is you need to run a server which receives a web query, answers with some parameters and then waits for ANOTHER query. The second query asks for a normal lightning Invoice. I run this service at v4v.app.
This is the dance that happens behind the scenes if you put a lightning address like [email protected] into a Lightning wallet.
If you just encode "[email protected]" in a special way (which my site does) you end up with an unchanging URL which kicks off this silly process.
If you go to: https://v4v.app/address and stick in your Hive name, you'll get your own static QR which will come to you on Hive.
So awesome. I don't understand how the technicals work, but I got my "[email protected]" QR code and was just able to use my BlueWallet (synced/linked with the Alby wallet) to scan the QR and send sats over the Bitcoin LN. The sats were auto-converted into HIVE. Wow. 😀
Yup, it all works.... pretty much!
We are proud of that tweet 😂. Keep bringing the best of both blockchains!
👍
I have voted for you. But i shall check again incase it needs an update. You always have my support as you do amazing work on Hive !
Thanks for your support.
He called you a scammer just because you believe in other projects? He really does need help!
This post has been manually curated by the VYB curation project
Thank you for the huge tip! Unexpected but greatly appreciated.
Truly an elegant dismantling of the dogma there. It's a shame no-one's been willing to debate you. Would be interesting to see. Crypto debate bros... untapped niche?
The Cult of Bitcoin has a powerful hold on the faithful. I don't have any, so don't care too much about it whilst using Hive every day. Not that Hive is perfect and we should discuss its issues.
It's looking too much like a religion to me and I've already got one of those so I don't need another.
I tend to avoid religion, but I get that self-interest is also a powerful force. The crypto sphere is an interesting mix of greed, dogma and curiosity.
And fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our chief weapon is ....
Love the analogies and how you paraphrased them.
Extreme opinions are usually blinded by emotions instead to see the benefits in what one solution or the other brings to the table. This is too bad as instead pushing technology forward, we simply end up with trolls and people speaking to easy instead of reasoning and listening both parties. I find these people shallow and I've stopped losing any positive energy with them.
I probably spend too much time with them, but every now and then there's a glimmer of hope.
Nodeless? More like shameless and brainless.
So glad I'm not on Twitter. Everywhere I go would be a shitstorm...
There's an art to maintaining oneself there...
I hear you. I'm an artist.
Great work, Brian! I am going to go and read your other articles you linked in this one, later this week and give my thoughts.
You're absolutely correct: the toxic BTC Maxi cult does not care about intellectual investigation, they've been brainwashed into believing only their One Ring to Rule them all is valid, and nothing else, no other technological innovation or development matters.
It's foolish at best, and negligent at worst, because their hubris will be their own undoing.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
This is awesome and really nice to know with your efforts helping to achieve good results.
It's interesting to see the emergence of Lightning as a service companies like Nodeless and Lightspark, but the lack of monetization options for Lightning remains a structural issue.
Also the Bitcoin Maxi Shitcoin Paradox is also a thought-provoking concept that raises questions about the inherent biases in the crypto community.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
This smells like a bot writing comments with ChatGPT. Interesting, but not worthy of much in the way of up-votes.
A compliment it is then, I guess? :-)
You could follow me and watch out for my subsequent posts to firmly accertain your claim though! (please?)
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
😁
You always have my full support my fellow NA Producer! #ITM
Just a side note
I love and support @v4vapp
But kinda bummed I have a $180 worth transaction that @swap2020 got and was never forwarded out of their account. Obviously not on purpose but it’s made me hesitant on depending on it honestly. I’ve tried reaching out via memo’s and tagging but never heard back 🤷♂️
It is still sitting in the @swap2020 Steemit account. Not lost it’s just sitting there. If you can help at all let me know.
I'm really sorry about that with Simpleswap. I have to say I don't use them now but I only ever had one issue with multiple swaps and that was fixed in about 1 hour with emails via https://simpleswap.io/contacts
I'm really surprised they haven't dealt with you properly. I am not sure if they'll do anything if I contact them on your behalf. I have absolutely no connection to them myself besides having used it a bunch of times.
~~~ embed:1646865627775107074 twitter metadata:MTQ3OTMwNTE4MzEwODc3MTg0M3x8aHR0cHM6Ly90d2l0dGVyLmNvbS8xNDc5MzA1MTgzMTA4NzcxODQzL3N0YXR1cy8xNjQ2ODY1NjI3Nzc1MTA3MDc0fA== ~~~
The rewards earned on this comment will go directly to the people( @v4vapp, @hivecuba ) sharing the post on Twitter as long as they are registered with @poshtoken. Sign up at https://hiveposh.com.