Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 36. (Read 14150 times)

Without running a Lightning node, what is the easiest/best way, and what apps should be used, if a person wants to open a private channel with a routing node, send the coins to himself through Lightning, then close channel to confirm onchain. Asking for a friend.

Without running a Lightning node, what is the easiest/best way, and what apps should be used, if a person wants to open a private channel with a routing node, send the coins to himself through Lightning, then close channel to confirm onchain. Asking for a friend.

Podcasting is an interesting example, since podcast micropayments through Lightning are implemented quite nicely in Breez.
You can set it to pay a few sats (any amount you want) every minute you listened. And compared to traditional solutions, it doesn't just count the minutes and does a one-off payment afterwards; it directly pays LN invoices every minute which is not possible without BTC and Lightning.

Here discusses the impact of LN on content creators.
Something we might not really familiar with, today, but could be relevant in the newer future. He actually also discloses, in the last row of the article, his investment on this thesis.

The last 20 years have been a golden age for independent creators on the internet. Platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and others have empowered a new class of creators to turn their passions into sustainable businesses.
Despite this success, a fundamental problem still limits creators and their ability to do their best work. That is, no creator owns both their distribution and monetization.
Creators rent access to their audience and their income from tech companies like Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook, without leverage to negotiate on their terms of service.
While it's true that creators can still distribute emails, blog posts, and podcasts beyond the reach of social media giants, creators have never had the tools to earn income on their work without censorship, fees, or processing delays.
Now, for the first time in internet history, they do.
The Lightning Network's architecture allows creators to earn directly from their biggest fans, in new ways that aren't even possible on a fiat payment system.
I suspect that there will be many new business models and applications for creators that are uniquely enabled the Lightning Network, but one I'm particularly excited about is podcasting.
To see why, and to appreciate the importance of building on open platforms, it's helpful to first understand the distinction between closed and open platforms.

I don't know about you guys, but after this bull run I'll probably buy one of those..
https://twitter.com/i/status/1456346866875052034
Fits perfect to my plans to start making home brewed beer hopefully next year.

on another point: saying the internet is centralised, just tells me, that you don't understand how the internet works

the p2p browser is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2022

The internet is centralized: Yes.
Is the internet centralized by design: No.

Of course, centralization has a lot of nice features: it's damn easy and convenient.
Of course that is at a cost: privacy and freedom.

In case of centralized actors turn evil, can the users show the middle finger and turn away? Yes.


Lightning network is similar, not all systems are built this way. The banking system is centralized (every dollar exchanged in the world has to go through the NY FED), and you cannot basically escape from it.

This is a relevant feature.

Impervious API is a programmatic layer that sits on top of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, i.e. "Layer 3." Developers can leverage the Impervious API to easily build secure p2p data transmissions and payments into their applications and services.

1. Truly peer-to-peer (like the Internet was meant to be)
2. Censorship and surveillance resistant
3. Default encrypted
4. Payments built in

I think the LN is going to evolve in a way MUCH like the internet.  Is the internet centralized or not?

Yes.

A lot of the clustering debate originated from this paper ^{I might have already posted it here?}

Lightning Network: a second path towards centralisation of the Bitcoin economy

Maybe you could find useful insight, even if I am afraid the taxonomy of the network has changed a lot since the publication of the paper.

i nearly reported your post. what are you saying? why should primary nodes fail? why should i make a backup plan after looking what develops? if what gets worse?  i am confused...

Something is wrong before everyone corrects their behavior. When mistakes happen, some people learn immediately and change their habits, while others do not. But gradually, over time, there are fewer central points of failure and the whole thing becomes more resilient. A similar situation may arise here. If any of these primary nodes fail, people are more likely to use smaller nodes in the future. All I can suggest is to keep a close eye on it, see what develops, then make a backup plan if it seems to get worse.