Covenants cope grasps at straws with LN-Symmetry LN-Symmetry is trash now being leveraged in attack on LN by the fake L2/bithereum/shitcoins 2.0 industrial complex. Note the increasing correlation with it and former Lightning products, many still engaged in the mobile node fantasy, that burnt out, quit trying to actually innovate on UX, and took the fake-L2 Faustian bargain. The "feature" of Symmetry is that it removes much of the online-ness incentive for nodes, and the justice disincentive for attackers. The combined change of these delicate incentives would make the open and disintermediated version of the network unusable, increasing reliance on central coordinators. Who benefits from that?

Bunch of nonsense, they're a little older than the new wave of Fake L2s and have been beaten up already. Ex https://petertodd.org/2023/drivechains Paul can't even get basic Lightning principles right, shitcoiner clown of the highest order.

Can you upload to Lightning.Video? can share a link from that

I just got locked out of twitter too, they forced yubi-key re-enrollment and botched it big time Anyone trying to get hold of me there i'm not ignoring you

I get into my solution, Lightning.Pub, a bit on the full interview It's a recognition that casual users are going to end up trusting somebody, so we need to make the tools that allow that to be distributed to the local extreme of the family/small-biz

Indeed, I actually think institutional mining breaking down into decentralized heating appliances is a good thing, but that will be disruptive for any good actors in that industry so they should plan accordingly. The risk of Fake L2 / Miner co-integration is just another risk Fake L2 users need to keep in mind before they capitulate to centralization for the sake of convenience.

Fake L2 / centralized coordination creates an incentive problem with miners for sure. With any meaningful scale they'll have incentive to vertically integrate miners and coordinators to start play games where they mine their control transactions and not competing ones or exits. But that aside, if things remain where they are with sub-sat fees, and price languishes relative to the subsidy with future halvings, the nature of hash rate will inevitably change but not necessarily decrease. The big industrial miners right now are already starting to pivot to AI, the arb is starting to come out of stranded energy. The subsidy also currently draws in institutional investment that will pay a premium for "uncirculated" coins that have a known provenance and can't in the future be linked to "illicit activity". With each halving this strategy becomes more expensive for these institutional accumulators. That's not necessarily negative for overall hash rate, ASICS keep coming and each new version is cheaper than the previous one. Things like Heatbit are a glimpse into where the hashrate will move to once institutional miners start move on, application where heat is the primary output and Bitcoin just subsidizes THAT. Greenhouses, water heaters in your house etc. This would be better than the status quo today vs. a few very large pools anointed by institutional (nation-state?) capital.

Ty Shawn 🫡

Clinkme.dev

And opening a channel to a big routing node is your choice, Lightning is just infinitely re-usable transactions, you can open a channel to anyone also running a node.

They shitcanned my application for being "too thin" when I applied, which is hilarious because Nostr wouldn't exist if not for ShockWallet and NWC if not for Lightning.Pub

Fake L2's don't scale anything There's two factors in scaling 1) Transaction throughput: Lightning already scales transactions infinitely 2) Ownership: Distribution is the real bottleneck, there's a minimum amount of Bitcoin needed to not be dust and even at sub-sat fees today there's not enough Bitcoin for everyone to trustlessly transact (unilateral exit)... a few hundred million people at most... likely less as big accumulators like institutions continue to accumulate

💯 Yep, that's all covenants do, enable delegation theater to centralized Bithereum-like Fake L2 apps, it's an application stack feature not a monetary one. I expanded on that a bit here

A user of one LSP can pay a user of another LSP trustlessly. Two users of disparate Ark's have to go through trusted middlemen. Trust aside, the cost of Lightning swaps to these centralized providers will easily exceed that of just opening a channel.

Lightning's UX issues are inherited from it being an emergent part of Bitcoin, no "L2" can fix that as the physics of chain security are what they are. Only centralization and trust mitigate the experience for the casual user, which is what Fake L2's are repackaging with scam narratives. That being the case, the only honest and philosophically consistent approach is localization of that trust and coordination to family/small-business scale appliances

There's a new wave of Lightning FUD hitting the wires, but that's noise. What no one else is talking about is the signal. Reality is that Lightning faces a massive incentive problem, one it inherits from Bitcoin itself. The great wave of shitcoins in the early years highlighted this problem way back then, but it's manifesting itself in a new, potentially even more dangerous way today. Since Bitcoin, and its only real L2 in Lightning, are emergent, truly decentralized, disintermediated and "just work" as money, the profit motive for companies looking to benefit from a growing industry skews towards "inventing" things beyond them; there must always be something "new" to re-brand non-solutions or introduce middlemen. Enter the newest attack by fake L2s, or shitcoins 2.0 as they should be more appropriately framed. Shitcoining 1.0 has lost its novelty, as over time people realize there is one true coin. Scammers have thus adapted, and are now affinity scamming as Bitcoin projects. Ark, Spark, Citrea, Stacks, and countless others now... with their astroturf for Covenants that would lend them some perceived legitimacy... solve nothing. These are all means not to solve problems or enhance UX, but to smuggle trust and centralization for profit. Lightning wallets can very easily introduce trust and centralization with the same exact trade-offs; fake L2s are no different than zero-conf channels, but this isn't sexy and won't raise a bunch of money or generate hype. Actually enhancing UX is tedious, hard work, to which I can attest, and inherently requires scarce creativity, otherwise the challenges would be solved already. This is a perfect storm for the scammer class. Unsophisticated users that lack technical discernment, combined with hipsters always ready to jump on the current thing bandwagon, magnify the scammer astroturf. This reinforces investment theses, then more investment yields more scams, which amp up hipsters and the unsophisticated; it's a downward spiral. **Unlike Shitcoins 1.0, Shitcoins 2.0 presents a Bitcoin contagion.** Never before have so many disparate scams sought to change Bitcoin itself to pervert the incentives further. Shitcoins 1.0 sold you a new coin... Shitcoins 2.0 want to exploit YOUR coin. Shitcoins 1.0 sold your friends and family a new investment thesis; Shitcoins 2.0 stand on the back of your hard-fought orange-pilling. Covenants are the force multiplier of this attack. These apps are in chorus over how it enhances the security of their centralized apps, and given their affinity scam nature, the security of Bitcoin. In reality, it has no monetary purpose, only to enable delegation to these centralized middlemen. If you control your Bitcoin today, you control your Bitcoin, period. Covenants offer you nothing. Covenants scammers want you to believe, however, that you can control your Bitcoin while someone else, via their fake L2 centralized application, controls your Bitcoin. New OP_ Codes like CTV, CAT, DRIVECHAIN, and others represent a new era where changes to Bitcoin aren't argued on the merits of Bitcoin as money, but its use as an Ethereum-like stack for centralized applications. > But aren't VAULTs a monetary use of covenants? No, just as covenants are a push for centralized remote control, vaults are to CLAW BACK that control. This leaves 2 mutually exclusive scenarios: * Bitcoin loses its utility as money, as merchants can no longer simply rely on confirmations to conclude a payment is settled. * A merchant can ensure funds are not encumbered through certain output types, but then so can an attacker, rendering the vault pointless from the start. > What do? Incentives are a bitch; we couldn't stop shitcoins... but we did grind them down over time. The question is whether we can grind down these fake L2s and covenants scammers; fortunately, Bitcoin being hard to change buys us time. It's imperative that if you value Bitcoin as hard money and wish to defend it as such, you present the same show of force we showed against shitcoins. Let every investor and user know, in every comment on every blog or Twitter post, that these applications are not Bitcoin, that Covenants are an attack by the Bithereum Industrial Complex, and that whoever advocates them is either a scammer, a paid shill, or a hipster moron.

Fake L2's including Spark and Ark are scams, anyone shilling them as a solution is in on it. Smuggling trust and centralization are not solutions.