Nick Szabo  🔑

what product sits on the fence between layer 1/2? a concert ticket, dinner for two, a car? What does the computer science dictate here?

Computer science doesn't give anything like a precise answer. Engineerng says to allow ample margins for error if you want to remain secure.

Can be confident that if one secure blockchain was used for all world's high-value txs, fees would be too high for most or all of your list.

$LTC $DASH

At scale those will have the same problems as Bitcoin.

Do you think the Lightning Network could be a viable solution?

Are many solutions & potential solutions based on Lightning & variations thereof. I expect some of them will be spectacularly successful.

But you think all solutions will be pegged to the BTC blockchain?

No.

Do you have an impossibility proof that premium global blockchains can't pay for coffee at scale? Is innovation out of the question?

It's unlikely: all known varieties of Byzantine consensus have negative economies of computational & network resource scaling.

Far more likely scaling on-chain coffee payment compromises security, so that blockchain is neither premium nor seamlessly global.

Ok. This is an educated guess, an opinion. "can't" and "need" in original tweet don't reflect that.

When the utopia/knowledge ratio gets too high everything negative is non-obvious.