number one red flag that a system is not bitcoin adjacent and not an L2 is about whether the client initiates things or not.
in lightning, everyhing is bilateral. when i ask for an invoice from a seller/receiver, they send me a blinded path, encoded as onion layers, each layer being decryptable only by the node it is intended for. on my side, when paying that with my lightning wallet, what happens is *i* make the first few hops between me and the entry point that is in the clear on the invoice, and then the path follows what the receiver defined. it's impossible for them to craft an invoice that reveals where the payment actually originates.
these are examples of client-driven activity, as contrasted to server driven activity.
stuff like ark is really the new form of shitcoin. and drivechains, and all that proof of stake style or just permissioned style. unlike lightning, you can't just do this from the basis of installing a lightning node and making an onchain transfer to it, and then offer to open a channel with a counterparty. you have to ask nicely if the swap service will actually not rug you.
as i see it, there is still so much more ways you can improve the lightning protocol. for example:
- prisms: this would really help with ecom v4v type stuff where it's - again, CLIENT DRIVEN - the user agrees to pay some proportion versus the cost of the transaction, to other parties for whatever reason. the host and developer of the marketplace the user uses, some sort of charity. some poor person you want to help out, etc. would be nice also for such as restaurant and other personal service for paying the establishment and directly paying the server in one transaction, automated.
to enable prisms in lightning, i think there needs to be one extra lightning message type (fork/join)
- REDUNDANT atomic multipath payments - using 2-4x redundancy on the send such that the competing branches race and the winner triggers the competitors to flip into reverse back to the sender. obviously that's gonna require some complicated new bits in the source-routed (client driven) protocol.
and not to forget, RGB is the current newest, and there was a prior L3, built on lightning and onchain also. these are legitimate, but not l2, they are l3. or l2.5, if you like, because they interface to LN and BTC. Properly decentralized swaps and decentralized coordinators of matchmaking are possible on a smart contract consensus network protocol. strictly speaking it's risk mitigation, by diversification.
yeah, i worry about all these people being wooed by this shit, and especially the way they are all saying "oh, this is an L2, we swear" and "we need CTV for this L2 feature"
bullshit.
Covenants break the decentralization. i'm pretty sure there is a followup after they trick their way into CTV running on mainnet will be another attack on its decentralization that exploits the protocol in unexpected ways, but not unexpected to those who are running this racket.
segwit was just a bad deal, but it should be obvious to anyone that probably someone involved in taproot had already figured out the taproot witness trick long before they actually deployed it. but someone poisoned that system with a vulnerability, exploiting a former bad protocol change, and CTV is step three, if you say that segwit was the first strike on bitcoin, which it absolutely was. and with bitcoin core being plied with whores and manflesh to spread bullshit about people who think bitcoin should stick to money only. bunch of fucking goblins.
the new shitcoin is the fake L2
