Hey Jessecond layers
I've made no secret that I am heavily biased towards Bitcoin, I feel it is the standard, and anything that wants to compete with it needs to be 10x better even to consider taking away some of my attention. Granted ETH has blazed a trail and made a lot of marketing noise, the work going on in the Bitcoin space tends to fly under the radar.
Bitcoin development is NOT sexy; it's pretty geeky, it's not all that innovative when we look at the ideas and implementations of other coins. What the Bitcoin community does do, is take steps to add to its network effect methodically and I can appreciate that approach.
Build it once and build it well, then you can layer on all sorts of applications once that foundation has been laid.
Layer cake
One of those layers has been the lightning network, which I've actively been playing around with for some time, and while not many are using it.
I can see the potential in what it can offer, as a solution that absorbs some of the really good ideas surfacing in the wider crypto space.
I've spoken about LI-FI/Lightning Pools, Stable coins, Smart contracts, Dapps on Lightning and while those are cool, and solve a few pain points in the future, one of the biggest pain points for me was moving between the main-chain and the lightning network.
Opening up a payment channel
One of the biggest pains for me has been opening up payment channels, so with the lightning network, you have to set up a new lightning wallet separate from your Bitcoin wallet.
Let's say your Bitcoin wallet is like a savings account, whereas your lightning wallet is your day to a day chequing account. So you'll need to move some of your funds to the lightning wallet to use every day or when you need it.
Like some banks that charge inter-account transfer fees, Lightning was subject to on-chain fees. So when you create a payment channel/lightning wallet, you send your Bitcoin to this new wallet you own and have to pay on-chain fees.
If you ever want to close the wallet/payment channel, again you need to secure it on-chain paying fees once again.
However, once the payment channel is opened, a user can send bitcoin payments almost instantaneously and at a fraction of the cost.
As you can tell, this doesn't help if the network is clogged with transfers in the mempool and could cost you a fortune as competition for block space increases.
The on-ramp into Lightning still had a bottleneck, but now it looks like a solution is on the way in the form of lightning loops.
The lightning network goes loopy
Normally, these payment channels are set up by users with a fixed capacity and need to be topped up to facilitate bigger transactions. The new loop out feature Calling it the “Loop Out” / “Loop In” feature will enable a payment channel refills with “on-chain" bitcoin source such as wallets or exchanges.
Now that payment channel liquidity has been sorted and the idea of lightning pools combined with the added value the main chain is gathering it's only a matter of time before these channels are well funded and ready to be used in daily transactions, making the satoshi more user friendly and extracting more value out of Bitcoin for the ordinary user.
Sources:
Have your say
What do you good people of HIVE think?
So have at it my Jessies! If you don't have something to comment, comment "I am a Jessie."
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Some pretty cool developments happening with lightening network. I've not given it a go as yet as I'm just piling what I can into savings (ledger) but if this can provide a way to send BTC cheaply and easily (which I'm sure it will eventually) then we're in for a pretty tasty decade!
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If you want you can spin up your own lightning node provide liquidity and open up payment channels and allow people to filter transactions through your node and earn a few sats in the process.
It's a bit of a pain now but a cool way to support the network theres already over 10k nodes running at the moment
I am hoping once the LI-FI has a GUI we can all start to provide liquidity to the market and earn some sats without risking your capital with a 3rd party
May have to be talked through that as it was a bit over my head - did you do a step by step blog on this recently? Having said that, if the li-fi is made a little easier and don't have to risk it with 3rd party like on CeFi, I'll hang fire. Spent a while building up this pile of sats, don't want to risk more of it outside Ledger. I'm like an obsessive sat parent haha
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
I am waiting eagerly when I will be able to use the bitcoin just like any other currency. Swipe the card and you are done 😃
But I still doubt how many people would like to do that at this stage as bitcoin is going up, breaking all records and everyone want to hold it for a little more 😂😂
Yeah that's going to be awesome, so far I think Crypto.com is the closest but you still need to convert before you spend, BlockFi is also releasing a card soon, I am sure we'll get there eventually, but I don't think its' time for that yet, the opportunity cost of spending BTC is still too high, until we get to a marketcap size where I say volatility is sub 5% I think we can then start looking at the medium of exchange part more aggressivley
I got excited when I seen the topic of the lightning network in my feed and started responding in points before finishing. The first three paragraphs I had were essentially why would you ever want to close channels unless you're ending that node completely? If I need to send on chain then I just do a loop out. Then I got to the last block and realized that was the point of the article altogether! 😂
If you want to share your public node address then the next time I need to open a channel to add more liquidity I'll try to connect with you.
I think it's for those who may not have the luxury of additional liquidity let's say I am a business, and I need the capital I would need to close my channel, having the loop in and out just gives much more flexibility. I think if they can combine this with RGB and we have BTC backed stable coins on LN, loop in and out will be even bigger
I recently took my node offline and sold it to a friend, I am building a new one now, waiting for my Raspberry Pi to be delivered, once I set it up, I'll share my address and open a channel with you. I also found some peeps on microlancer willing to open channels.
How come the rest of the cryptos are performing well and not Hive?
And why SBD is trading at $2 ?
That’s a good question well we will never really know but my theory is that alt coin season only kicks off when people feel Bitcoin is seriously overbought the last run a Bitcoin 4-5x’d before Alts started to kick off as investors now started to look for coins they felt are”cheaper”
most retail investors use data aggregotors to decide and invest in the ones with the largest market caps first and then move their way down of which hive has a really tiny market cap at 50mil or so it should eventually get its moment in the sun
As for SBD since the tron intergreation hype steem had a pump and for some reason people started bidding up the price of SBD no rational reason I can think of to be honest with you but then again these markets are hardly ever rational
I understand now. It seems that nobody's buying Hive then.
Sounds like Crypto religion.
very good
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