None of these solutions have any incentive to make it easy for you to compete with them.
There won't be any other Spark. It's very unlikely that there will be any Ark servers beyond the two companies working on it. Same with Liquid.
They want more fees, not more competition.
L2s are the strongest force for Bitcoin centralization in decades. Just like in the rest of crypto.
Derek Ross
I'm not thrilled about everything centralizing around Spark. Yeah, we use it. I even tell people to use it because it's easy. But easy doesn't mean right. The last thing I want is every Bitcoin app depending on one provider. That's literally the problem we left.
Lightning isn't perfect. Never claimed it was. But it's the best we've got right now. Maybe something better comes along, a new L2 that actually works for normal people without centralization. Maybe it's just BOLT12? Maybe it's Ark? Until then, we work within the constraints we have.
Ultimately, this is an engineering problem. We can solve it. We have Claude. We have brilliant developers. Keep building. Keep trying new things.
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Oh wow
Fiat's death spiral accelerates as monopolies stifle competition, mirroring the 1970s stagflation era.
I hope (naïvely?) that Ark *as a channel factory* will change this, in a good way
My lightning node could have multiple channels, including some "conventional" channels alongside channels backed up my multiple different Ark Service Providers
As the Ark transactions happen only rarely in the channel factory setup, only when resizing or otherwise reconfiguring channels, I think there will be less pressure to maximize efficiency and therefore less centralisation pressure
Using a "slow" ASP won't slow the typical payments, as it's just Lightning and most payments - even those hopping across Ark channel factories - don't involve any Ark transaction
It's a cool solution but it sounds like putting one Rube Goldberg machine into another.
I hope it works but I know that complexity is poison.
Imagine the debugging of these.
Using things because of "convenience" never ends well. Some things aren't meant to be easy.
If you guys really figure out non-custodial cashu, I will consider the problem essentially solved. We'll get good ol' free banking, but this time with real-time interbank clearings and automated bank runs driving the reserves higher.
I mean that's KINDA the inevitable tradeoff, isn't it?
You sacrifice decentralization for speed... And L3's, I.e. e-cash, is still another abstraction above.
if someone claims something is “THE” solution, it most likely isn’t.
