Replies (66)
You can probably vibe code one with Shakespeare.
I've been saying basically the same, I am using primal now, I have just decided I really don't care if my funds get rugged or taken down cause I never leave enough in there to worry.
However it is concerning to me that every app is switching to one provider, sounds like a recipe for disaster, doesn't matter who makes it.
Wallets like minibits works pretty well for pocket change like zaps
Improvement in Lightning experience follows capital deployed. Incentives.
I think Cashu has a good chance at being Bitcoin with less middlemen (or more middlemen but decentralized). I like Spark but sadly that technology is somewhat centralized by Lightspark.
Big picture, you've got people putting their savings in a couple on-chain addresses. And have a revolving channel to a lightning node or two from their house (like core lightning just running) their phones have an endpoint like Zeus to spend from their LN Node and zap as they see fit with their paycheck coming in through Strike (lightning withdrawal) out to their own node liquidity. (Until direct deposit forms are replaced by Lightning withdrawal forms Node Pubkey and all that.) BOLT12 would be huge but not entirely necessary.
We are not that far away from this reality.
Don't build atop providers build atop protocols. The ingredients are already availabile just need the sauce to bring it together. As Doc said to Marty "Where we're going, we don't need roads".
Lightning is emergent of real world constraints of trustless decentralization and the physics of Bitcoin.
Nothing can be better, trust and centralization are the only levers one can pull.
Ark and Spark are both crypto theater, scams just rebranding trust and centralization.
Bolt12 is just tor-wrapped nonsense peddled by NGOs and LSP salesmen milking anyone naive enough to waste sats on a mobile "node".
CLINK and Lightning.Pub accept the reality that node runners are the new elite, that trust must be locally distributed instead of hidden, and that Lightning needs a robust protocol to connect services, nodes, and the web. All via Nostr of course.
Lexe! Self custodial lightning in the cloud, incredible UX. Seems like it could be a great swap in for the primal spark wallet?
Not feasible for the 99% of the population. Running a lightning node is so painful and the UX terrible. We should do better than this.
Is it intended that anyone could be a Spark operator in future?
Not sure about the great UX. Sent some sats and they went to /dev/null
What's hilarious is most people in the early 90s would have said the same thing about owning a home computer. Just some food for thought.
Your tolerance for pain seems way too low. It's not THAT hard for a crowd of 100 people to run a node. It takes maybe 8 hrs of 1 of them per year to maintain.
@npub12rv5...85vg‘s news about ecash becoming non custodial could change this 🤞
All of these are centralizing.
No
I want something that's as easy as generating a bitcoin address or Nostr profile and boom you can receive zaps.
I want something as easy as CashApp. Install an app, tap a couple buttons, boom.
Normies need this.
> Normies need this.
No, they don't. :)
Then you're out of touch with billions of humans.
Take a look at the level of adoption in the real economy, as well as in peer-to-peer transactions for USDT-TRC20 (Tron) - from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East all the way to Latin America - and think again about who is out of touch with reality with billions of people. :)
This is a cool and interesting solution, but has trade offs just like any other solution and I think the trade offs are too many for me to fully like it. My main issues are speed and fees. It's only acceptable now. I don't believe fees will always be as low as they are now which makes this very hard for sending small amounts. I don't believe the price of bitcoin be always be this low, so again this makes it incredibly hard for sending small amounts. I could be wrong but I also feel that telling someone I tipped them but due to randomness, they can't use that money for an hour seems like bad experience. Maybe this last one isn't a big deal, because it's a tip and they don't need the funds ASAP. I don't like that we're setting people's keys up to be incredibly more valuable than social communication. I like that this is all part of the conversation. We need to keep having these, because ultimately someone will solve many of these issues and make trade offs minimal.
There's no way this can be "solved" in the way you want without creating immense complexity. That's the tradeoff. It's already been "solved".
That's how it should be but we shouldn't start using centralised services out of convenience. Nothing good has ever come from such an approach as we can literally see all around us. Some things aren't meant to be easy.
it should be done on a merge-mined sidechain instead of L1
i've spent the last year designing a distributed L2 with claude. there's no mining, just staked cryptographic ledgers enforced by your peer nodes. simple wallets are 12 words, multisig also supported, you can be offline as long as you want, still receive payments, and if your node goes offline or rogue, another node will have your funds when you come back
it's untested, but the theory appears sound. if it does work, it requires less trust and scales better than ark / spark / liquid. it requires transparency so there's no privacy, but you can open a lot of deposits and easily move funds in and out of ecash. all communication is over nostr relays, so only the relay knows your ip address
current state: 100% me running everything. hoping to shake out the remaining bugs and fan things out soon / now
bitcoin deposits
Bitcoin Deposits: A Layer 2 Scaling Protocol
You should add a README to that repo and explain the high level architecture. I’m reading each DEP document in order and it’s really hard to understand what the overall system is.
Oh I didn’t realize you had a website now! Yeah that’s what I was missing lol
it needs a better one, and some videos
I think you're misunderstanding the point: normies need this precisely so that adoption is not prevented by technical hurdles.
What are your thoughts on a solution like FediMint?
True enough, but what was the alternative to the computer back then? There are instead today's hundreds of apps that are going to transfer dollars for you with no friction. If normies adapted Bitcoin because the FED is evil they wouldn't be normies, right?
It is _not_ the lack of technology but the mindset/mentality/lack of political backbone that makes people normies.
I fully agree, yet I cannot dismiss frictions that arise from technical complexity. Don't you think that a much easier to use Bitcoin would also have an effect on adoption?
I don't want to offend the feelings of Bitcoin fans, so I think I'll skip this question. :)
Please feel free, I don't personally care at least or should anyone for that matter
I would say there IS friction just a different kind to bitcoin. Bitcoin has responsibility friction. Everything else has efficiency, control, and freedom friction. Many people complaining about "my check took two days to clear" or "the put a hold on my card when I got gas" don't know about Bitcoin's efficiency in those areas.
Thanks for bug report, forwarded to them. I’ve been able to use it, although had to close and reopen app once to refresh
Make it so the reciever can receive whatever the sender wants to send. An npubs should create a default L1, lighting/cashu, monero or anything the reciever wants to enable and scan for. Ideally the default is silent payments address. Even if the reciever has not selected an option the sender should be able to send it after a couple of warnings that the user has not set this up and it might be lost.
I appreciated your work and wanna to test it...
link to github (in your site)appears to be 404 >.< (also, there is no link to whitepaper from main page)
Also, whitepaper still not very clear: what if some Bad Guy(s) try to make unfair (outdated) transaction(s) onchain? What Good Operator(s) can do? (it's the main question, especially if some Bad Operator in the game...)
Do users need to open channels before they can use your idea? (can you explain everything from baka-users point of view? (hope your whitepaper is not AI - generated?)
ah, i fixed those links. thanks
the basic construction is that the operator appends updates to the ledger, but a quorum that they chose controls the onchain reserves utxo. if the operator goes bad, the quorum gives the reserves to a random quorum member, and the ledger is now their responsibility
if quorum members collude and do not reassign reserves in a timely manner, then the honest members of their own quorums will reassign their ledgers. the question is, how far does this scale. in my analyses and simulations, it is farther than expected
there has been more interest today than for many months – i will write more soon
Most interesting question is how honest members of quorum will reassign ledgers to re-gain control over "stealed by operator" funds; need they vote majority? such as 3-of-4 or so? (as far as I understand you, it will be multi-signature to protect against "one-sided onchain transaction"?)
Also, what if "random quorum member" (the one to which quorum gave the reservs to) will goes bad?
Also, need operators & quorum members to run a full node?
(sorry if too many questions...)
Bitcoin marketing campaigns (propaganda) from 2016–2017 through to the present day have made BTC unsuitable for use as a currency, because most of those same "normies" buy BTC with the intention of selling it later at a higher price.
Add to that the lack of privacy by default. In other words, a merchant might not like your UTXO history and refuse to sell you goods or services.
before wallets will use a ledger, the operator spends the reserves to a multisig of quorum members. so during operation, the operator controls "truth", but the quorum controls "funds".
a bad operator cannot steal, they can only misattribute.
the majority of a quorum can steal, but in doing so reveal themselves to be dishonest. it is required that quorum members have their own ledgers with their own quorums of at least half the size, so by colluding to steal, a minimum of 2 or 3 other ledgers are at risk
since quorum membership is visible, wallets can choose ledgers where dishonesty would cause maximum fan-out of liability
nice idea! would be best if you replace your bloated "whitepaper" with two your messages above! 😋 😜 (friendly ironical joke)
I wanna to be one of first testers! (I have around 300 sats, alas! May it be enough for testing? Will you make web-wallet soon? zap compatibility with nostr?)
So, in another words, it kinda similar to "reputation" of "escrow" or so, but collective governance (not one-person based)? slightly similar to DAO, by the way...
> at least half the size, so by colluding to steal,
does it mean that if quorum member have ability to sleal 1000 sats,- he will immediately lose his own >=500 sats, - so, thief can not gain something by steal any funds?
(if yes, your idea is revolutionary good... is it your own idea?)
(maybe, no, - because 1000 is still more than 500...)
fuck spark
Yes. And the UX evolution has been the most important element for that evolution. You see my point.
This is the mentality which is going to kill bitcoin. UX is terrible. Having balanced active lightning channels is a fucking nightmare. We can do better than this. Don’t settle. Keep going. Competition is fierce.
Yeah... spark is clearly solving a real problem though. More can be done in this area
What about ecash ?
And how they had paper notes like dollar bills but it was ecash sats that can be redeemed to Zeus
It’s literally so easy for anyone to scan a QR code and then once your balance gets to a certain amount it prompts or suggests you to level up or upgrade to self custody lightning ⚡️
And once that balance gets too high it prompts you to go onchain
Walking normies along with you
It’s a wallet that grows with you on your journey:)
it takes a long time to say things succinctly! and things have changed significantly a few times over the last year as i tested designs. unfortunately 300 sats is too little to run a node, as each quorum rotation (currently every ~ two weeks) requires an on-chain transaction of 180 vbytes, which at 2.5 sats/vbyte is 500 sats every two weeks.
depending on a node's advertised fees you can store just a few sats in a wallet. my first few nodes have high per-deposit fees (208 sats / month) and low limits (1,000 sats max) so that people don't keep funds there yet.
but if you have custodial lightning or ecash, you can still make wallets, move funds into them, between them, back out of them, etc. fees are only taken when the balance is greater than zero, so moving funds through them quickly only costs lightning fees.
it's all pretty loosey goosey until more people start running nodes and a market emerges
Add this to your website/README too! (you are pretty good with answering frank questions, so, FAQ is best for documentation!)
Please, write some announcement/ad/whatever, I'll repost it!
📢 💜
If operators only keep multi-sigs, - so, they not need to run a full bicoin node? it's easy to become operator, if so! (I assume, they not need, - and it makes your idea much better than lightning network, and it may easily become viral here, in nostr)
What if several of multi-sig operators agree between themseles to steal funds? their own actives will be confiscated by other quorum (higher-level)? (I assume yes; but what if higher-level quorum are malicious, and/or controlled by one person silently?)
What if confiscated actives will be less than stealed? (for example, stealed 0.01 btc but available for confiscation is 0.006 btc) (I don't know, answer, please?)
you don't strictly need to run a full node for lightning, though you're relying on someone to be your watchtower. deposits is the same, except the watchtower role (quorum members) is incentivized to act out of both benefit and obligation: classically, fear and greed.
by requiring that quorum members have at stake at least half of what could be stolen, and requiring collusion to steal, and having transparent operations, it appears that individual ledger collateral ratios around 50/50 may require a sybil group close to half of the network in order to profitably steal
It kinda reminds me proof-of-authority: if trustworthy members of nostr community create first quorum;
Ok!
Will it be a web/javascript "lightweight wallet", or rust only? Something that I'll be able to zap to/from, inside of nostr webclient? Maybe it worth to be a NIP-something and new "kind of event"?
How can I help you to test your software right now?
I'll try to translate your docs to Russian (while there are only a few russian people here), and I'll repost your news/announcements
the protocol is tlv-over-nostr: all you need is string manipulation and crypto primitives. running a node in a browser seems unlikely to be satisfying, because nodes should have better availability that that would provide.
there's an interesting angle here though... 🤔 fees are set by a node. if you didn't care about offline receive, you could have a low availability node where you and some liquidity provider are the only people on it ... now there are no fees and you only need to maintain the availability standards of whatever liquidity provider joins your ledger.
it creates a spillman-like environment with the ability to send funds to any key. but you'd have to rotate every N weeks or lose the ledger to someone else. i don't know if this is better than keeping funds on a ledger run by someone else with fees less than 500 sats-per-quorum expiration period, but it's certainly a shape.
what's more likely for most people is that they pay 1% per year to a random node and get a lightning-like wallet with no availability requirements or channel / liquidity management. now you can write down your twelve words just as you do on the base layer, except per-transaction costs are 0.005% and 2 sats
but, permissionless means no one can tell you how to use it
sorry, to answer your other questions, yes, you can send zaps, receive zaps, make lightning invoices, and pay lightning invoices, among other things.
it's lightning without channels. custody without discretion
Agreed… get the feeling it’s just a series of agreements with a world of fiat payment rails dressed up as an L2
Let’s see… I’ll eat my hat and scarf and jacket if it lives up to ‘willing participants’ principle of Bitcoin and Lightning
Truth
Agree. And Bolt12 is awesome.
Spark is not Bitcoin - there is no unilateral exit.
