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I don't love a line of thinking that BTC devs are authorities and so they're just right by default. That kind of contradicts the assumption of PoW itself; really all we should require is logic, reason. And if you just sum up total "authority opinions" you wouldn't use BTC anyways

One way to emulate a shared UTXO that can only be spent recursively is to cheat and use a trusted third party to just validate MuSig2 spends to ensure they follow some VM rules. Just think of them as an “Oracle” and use zk or something to obscure the signing or to challenge them.

I think humans are biologically programmed to want BTC. Although there are a lot of hurdles to get past and many obstacles to the experience of hodling, once you realize this power in your hands you come to realize this is something you did always want and never want to give up.

Maybe can do an estimate of traffic on LN based on the capacity held during its duration. So if we see $1 billion held on the network and we assume that the holders want to earn a return, say 1% per year, that gives $10mm fees. Divide by fee rate 0.1% and that gives $10b traffic.

We continue to see elevated fee rates on LN paying to our LOOP node. This is related to high traffic, similar to how chain fees rise. Unlike chain fees though, we have a lot more flexibility to add capacity on the network and higher fees should attract more competition given time

We’ve reached a point in BTC where no one knows exactly how it works. That’s because it’s grown into lots of very specialized areas and in each of those areas there are only a small number of people who know what’s really going on. It’s nothing to worry about, people are limited.

A long time ago I thought that other coins would face the classic decentralization dilemma where if avoiding centralization isn’t a core value they will be beaten by centralized competitors who are more efficient since decentralization is expensive. Seems to be slowly happening.

A goal that seems achievable to me is replacing external wrapped versions of BTC with non-custodial solutions. This would secure a large potential failure area, but also I think once you have this money token in your system, you don't need to invent your own new money. Just BTC.

I joined Lightning Labs the summer of 2018. I was very bullish on BTC but believe it or not some younger people I met were feeling morose that they "missed the boat" on BTC value appreciation. I thought it was funny because there's so much to grow, and it did, and there still is.

A problem in BTC protocols and software is something common in OSS and elsewhere: things are rarely cut or removed. So when someone wants some feature or extension and it's added it increases the overall dev and support workload and increases UX clutter and software fragmentation

If you are looking to Loop Out higher values of BTC, say 200+ BTC, with the state of LN as it is today it's quite achievable. However I would advise normalizing your flow. Just like how chain fees spike with a lot of traffic, routing fees can also spike up a bit with heavy volume

Although BTC has gone up hugely, it's interesting to consider why it didn't go up faster. Maybe it's because short term realities drive buying; vision is hard to price and select for. Like the dot-com bubble actually underpriced many big players even at its height, looking back.

My sentiment today is that things are pretty bright in our tech future. We can see the small things that aren't spread out yet but make a big difference. Automated coding, driving. Energy storage, generation. Stable global money. And all these can interact and multiply each other

There are a lot of recommendations and opinions that I have about LN stuff where explaining the full reasoning for various reasons can not be done. So I just leave it out or come up with something else, but it's always a bit frustrating that saying everything plainly isn't smart.

It makes sense to me that Bitcoin culture extends to other big topics like health, food, travel and family. From a tech/economic perspective BTC often seems to blot out the sun in its importance, but we still have to live our lives and that means eating, staying fit, experiencing

I would not recommend storing your BTC savings on any system where it requires a specific company or individual to exist in perpetuity. So think about forgetting it for many years and when you go back is the hardware unsupported, the software not available? Plan for that scenario

Seems like there's a lot more interest recently in running a LN routing node. I got a lot of pushback to telling people there is money in routing, but peep at LOOP median fee: it's around 0.5%. So coins only need to forward twice to make 1%, or 20x to earn 10%. Looks achievable?

There are some corporate routing node operators out there who have huge portions of the network capacity, and it may look like an indie node operator has no shot next to these guys. But actually on LOOP we get most routing via indie node operators, it's pretty decentralized use.

LN has a lot of rough edges that I knew about from the start, but I also knew could be addressed in updates. However lots of these issues still remain, years later. Number one priority is network resilience. Even privacy is less important than just things staying online, working.

I use multiple hardware signing tokens, and it’s a great way to isolate security to a special purpose device and make key based software more usable, and I have both devices with screens and without. I prefer a screen, otherwise it’s literally a blind sign except the timing of it