>The issue with F-Droid is that all apps are signed by the same party (F-Droid) which is also not the developer eeeeeeeew! https://privsec.dev/posts/android/f-droid-security-issues/

we got a primitive that lets one user reuse a UTXO many times. okay cool. I don't appreciate the rube goldberg scaffolding that evolved around HTLCs but it does free up some room I guess. it doesn't scale users. it still requires each user to have their own UTXO. this is the foundation of most of the lightning criticism. what we need now is a primitive that lets multiple people reuse a UTXO many times. we are emulating it with presigned transactions in a centralized way, we get too many trust and liveliness assumptions as a consequence, and we do it in constructs that don't pass the fee revenue to miners. we need a primitive that achieves this for real. paul's mistake is selling his own version of a completed solution. he should focus more on the primitive, then step back. and I don't think it should be hashrate escrows, it should be more similar to covenants.

I think HTLCs work for payment channels but not UTXO sharing. Peter Todd wrote an essay about this somewhere. the lightning idea goes in the payment channels category and the sidechain and statechain ideas go in the UTXO sharing category

merge mined sidechains and a decentralized two-way peg. it mimics exactly what already happens naturally, it just ensures that the bitcoin miners get all of the fee revenue instead of altcoins and trusted third parties. there's already a huge amount of capacity for running blockchains. it's just splintered across too many different alt currencies and consensus mechanisms. they could have all been real bitcoin sidechains paying bitcoin miners for security. paul storcz talks about this a lot. but you do NOT have to use his hashrate escrows idea to make this work. there are other methods. it can be done using covenant opcodes tari doesn't have to deal with the two way peg problem. they just accept the sidechain being denominated in a totally new currency. bitcoin will need to avoid that

bitcoin doesn't have to be one blockchain

the two-way peg can be done without consensus changes and is being done in production right now, with additional trust assumptions, via bitvm. this is what the merge mined sidechain called rootstock is using. curiously the luke dashjr crowd wants to destroy bitvm. citrea also keeps a two-way peg to another blockchain but it is not merge-mined and has some centralization issues. if you want something better than bitvm or citrea it requires consensus changes such as hashrate escrow or covenant opcodes. this isn't an exotic idea with nothing to show for it. before the lightning obsession people would talk about the two-way peg to a sidechain all the time. blockstream suggested it was impossible and tried to sell us federated pegs as a substitute but I think they were just having perverse incentives. we know it's not impossible.

this is the only way you can scale lightning to large numbers of people. the only way to "fix" lightning right now is by making it centralized and adding trust assumptions. you can bitch all you want about spark but you should redirect your frustration to the lack of building blocks available on L1. premature ossification will just lead to things like spark. it is time to think about doing better. covenant opcodes are most likely the next building blocks to get added. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Covenants_support

WAOW YOU ARE VERY SMART EXIT THE MATRIX MANG

satoshi openly praised merge-mined sidechains like namecoin. he just didn't have a way for real sidechains to be denominated in BTC at the time

sure, because the users run away. they switch to a different method of transacting that doesn't compensate bitcoin miners at all. just listen to the actual people who try bitcoin. they will all tell you the same thing. they try it, experience fees, then move on to something centralized or an altcoin. the users who lived through those really big spikes are observed swearing to never use bitcoin again. this is the fee revenue problem. the market won't bear high enough per transaction fees to replace the block subsidy. altcoins and centralized trash are there to soak it all up. there is no way out of this problem without some kind of consensus change.