Sorry for the delay. Nostr still sucks. :)
> Worth pointing out that Ark doesn’t materially “scale” without adding payment channels on top (ie Timeout Trees). Until that point, you’re really stuck with the statechain model, which has a highly-trusted third party, as you note.
I'd say you have the statechain model *until* you get the confirmation, then the model is closer to a DryjaPoon LSP than a statechain, until the expiration time. But yes, I agree the Ark model will be really interesting with channels on top, they are working on it since a while and it makes sense:
Blog - Ark Labs
Bitcoin Virtual Channels: Bringing Instant Settlement To Ark
Leveraging Ark’s VTXO paradigm, Virtual Channels enable efficient, low-cost Bitcoin payment channels by lifting smart contracts off-chain
One of...
> Huh? Ark is strictly more expensive to unilaterally exit than classic lightning.
I guess I'm playing with the word "unilateral" a bit here. I think that, realistically, the relevant thing is the exit against the coordinator, not against all the other users. The total cost of an unilateral exit in Ark is higher, but you can conceptually split it among more people in most failure modes. In a classic DryjaPoon, you share an UTxO among 2 users. That means that in best case scenarios (cooperative) the cost for opening/closing/resplicing would be X/2. In uncooperative scenarios, the cost for the exiting user is X. In an Ark with N users (ASP included), opening/closing/closing has a cost of about 10X, but that would be shared among N in cooperative cases, N-n in case n (most importantly including the ASP) are uncooperative.
> f course as mentioned above if you want scalable, trustless Ark you need payment channels anyway, so it’s strictly more complicated!
Good point.
