Alex Bosworth

The difference between regular Bitcoin deposited in an exchange/sidechain/wrapped-coin and deposited on a Lightning routing node is the difference between trading capital vs working capital. Comparing the two is like comparing the inventory of warehouses to that of retail shops.

What people ask for to run a Lightning routing node: 1. It should be totally risk-free, as secure as a cold wallet 2. It should offer a good rate of return, better than S&P 3. It should require no particular effort from the operator 4. It should be able to run on my Raspberry Pi

If you are routing or receiving funds on Lightning, you want inbound liquidity. How much inbound liquidity would you want? There is no limit: inbound liquidity represents capital commitment from your peer, not you For the right price, you'd want to buy infinity inbound liquidity

If you don't like some decision taken by an OSS project, you are always free to fork it. This is not a bad thing. Not every project is for every development or user community. Even with a consensus critical codebase, there are lots of non-critical choices that forks can adjust.

Once we have dual party signatures in Lightning for channel funding, it would be nice to redesign public channels to allow for a shadow mirror channel that is unadvertised. That way you can manipulate liquidity with the shadow channel without revealing its ownership so globally.

One thing I notice in BTC is a chase of outside trends, "let's bring this hype cycle to BTC" By the time you notice the hype cycle, it's too late to quickly enter it, so make a big entrance or don't try at all The most interesting projects are ones that could only happen on BTC

It's possible to make money through Lightning routing. To do that you'll want to actively manage your channel liquidity assignment It is possible though to give only readonly access to someone and have them perform circular rebalances on your behalf by routing through your node

App idea - Containerized Tor LN node - Takes a single UTXO - Creates a channel with it to a Tor peer - Makes circuitous, MPP route paying to regular LN request - Pays out the UTXO funds completely - Once finished, closes channel, kills node Have any leftover UTXOs? Put them there

Adding more liquidity to Lightning is very cheap. You can currently open up $10,000,000 worth of liquidity to 2000 peers for under $10. Why are there routing fees? The risks of a hot wallet. Closing fees. Operational expenses. Implementation risk. Efficient capital allocation.

Some cool standards have been created for working with Bitcoin: Miniscript, Harmony, PSBT A standard I see missing is a way to describe security policies such as velocity limits. The consumer of these policies would be multisig co-signers such as your LN peers or your HW wallets

Price ceilings are dictated by narratives The big problem that fork-coins face is that their narrative was that their phony name meant they would maybe become real Every day that narrative grows weaker With splintering their narrative is now which will be the most credible phony

I first bought Bitcoin because I thought it was table stakes for development of future applications With Lightning, this is true. A routing node requires capital I think we’ll see this a lot more in future protocols. If you don’t have BTC, there is no way for you to participate

A first response to someone in power misbehaving is to suggest replacing them with another. The alternative solution to remove the abused power structure itself is very rarely suggested or embraced It's difficult for people to grok BTC. It's not a new fiat. It's the end of fiat

Absent rebalancing action the entropy of Lightning Network routes is for routed payments to get more and more difficult and expensive The cheapest paths have a limited directional liquidity. When people use that all up, it becomes a distraction, and higher fee paths must be used

If political systems were blockchains, I think we’d be incredulous at their arbitrary design. Official vote suppression and shaping. Power blocs able to rearrange maps to keep power. Party loyalty and funds driving decision-making. All of the trust required to make things work.

Adding inbound routing fees to the LN protocol could help make the network more private. Currently accepting private channels means adding channels useless for general routing, probably often offline. This creates an incentive to avoid such channels and favor online, public peers

People go a bit overboard when calling out new profit-seeking ventures as being illegitimate There is intense pressure on founders to dissemble and distort reality when higher level demands are themselves irrational This was the most difficult part when I founded my own company