This is a value for value post: see the explanation in the footer.
Note: @hivecuba gets 10% of the rewards for this post and Kevin Rooke's Podcast might get some too..... you'll see why at the very end of the post.
TLDR - skip this section if you like to read it all
I got this reply:
In The Moment Reply
About 80% of my traffic is HBD and Hive into BTC Lightning then on to Bitrefill and other exit points. 20% the other way and of that quite a bit pays for servers from @privex who accept payment in Lightning but prefer to receive Hive.
My service helps users in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere turn blog posts and photos into food.
Oh and 75% of all v4v podcasts use my infrastructure to receive value direct into their own custody unlike systems like Fountain or Alby. Good as those guys are, they hold the keys and the coins. I pass value on in under 3 seconds (similar to you only Hive is measurably faster to settle than Lightning).
Lightning is just a useful piggyback because at this moment it is sucking in so much VC money that doesn't know what to do with itself. These VCs will spend huge money to get merchant adoption and build nice apps, all of which solutions like @v4vapp will benefit from for free.
Background - Start Here
Yesterday I sat down to write about another mega-money VC play in the Lightning world with an eye watering top tier price $22,500 per month.
Lightning as a Service: what is the real cost of Lightspark or Nodeless?
As I was writing I was listening to the Kevin Rooke Podcast talking to UTX0 about his new Lightning as a service company Nodeless. I pretty quickly realised that his solution is the same as the massively funded Lightspark which I was writing about.
The whole first chunk of the podcast was UTX0 (I don't know or care what his name is) talking about all the problems I repeatedly point out with Lightning. He knows how ridiculous it is to expect real people to run Lightning to receive or send funds. I'm talking about real people like online merchants who just want to sell stuff, and who aren't hard core, laser eyed Bitcoiners.
"I'm not for custodial solutions .... it was always managing the Lightning Node which was the hard part" - UTX0 on Kevin Rooke's Podcast
He points out on the show that there are 19,000 Lightning Nodes and more than 150,000 people on Twitter talking about BTC. So the vast majority of Bitcoiners don't even run full Bitcoin or Lightning/Bitcoin nodes. And obviously he has to call out "shitcoins" because that's how he gets credibility with the rest of the cult.
So I added his Nodeless to the post (and I signed up for it and had a look at his company's very pretty website and system which is working nicely). In fact I could switch to using it with a day's work I suspect (though I couldn't run the Podcasting 2.0 side of @v4vapp through him). I found a little (understandable) problem on his site and tried to submit a detailed bug report with a screen shot which failed because he's using Google's Captcha on his site.
Actually my bug with Nodeless is that they will accept a Lightning Address for the custodial Wallet of Satoshi but won't accept a Lightning Address from my own v4v.app service (which doesn't hold user funds).
Toward the end of the show UTX0 mentions that he is bootstrapping the company based on other Software as a Service (SAAS) companies he runs but he's looking for VC money because he knows that promotion and awareness raising would take more money than he has. The only real difference between his product and Lightspark is pre vs post VC money.
When I shared yesterday's article on Twitter I tagged both Lightspark and Nodeless and his first response to me was this:
"An important discussion to have!"
But then he obviously went a little deeper and this was his reply:
I tapped out a reply on Twitter but it got too long, here it is.
In The Moment Reply
About 80% of my traffic is HBD and Hive into BTC Lightning then on to Bitrefill and other exit points. 20% the other way and of that quite a bit pays for servers from @privex who accept payment in Lightning but prefer to receive Hive.
My service helps users in Venezuela, Cuba and elsewhere turn blog posts and photos into food.
Oh and 75% of all v4v podcasts use my infrastructure to receive value direct into their own custody unlike systems like Fountain or Alby. Good as those guys are, they hold the keys and the coins. I pass value on in under 3 seconds (similar to your service, only Hive is measurably faster to settle than Lightning).
Lightning is just a useful piggyback because at this moment it is sucking in so much VC money that doesn't know what to do with itself. These VCs will spend huge money to get merchant adoption and build nice apps, most of which @v4vapp will benefit from for free.
Lightning's structural issues
You can't monetize the network. Lightning itself will be hard to make money from directly. Lightning is in the unenviable position of every shitcoin project without the added shitcoin benefit of a pre-mine token to pay back the initial investors!
Lightning suffers, ultimately, from the same problem as the Bitcoin Layer 1 it is built on: no resources are allocated to any dev work, promotion, sales, awareness spreading etc. by the core protocol.
Routing fess on Lightning are a joke and will DECREASE and possibly tend to zero because as the big money VCs enter, the traffic will flow through their over capitalised solutions. They'll carry traffic and harvest data.
Fortunately I'm working on Hive with a properly decentralised system untainted by VC money.
The Bitcoin Maxi Shitcoin Paradox
Whenever Bitcoin Maxis throw around the Shitcoin slur about EVERYTHING other than Bitcoin it leads me to contemplate this paradox:
- Bitcoin, which exists because it incentivises hardware operators via inflation to run the system by paying them at the core protocol level, is the most revolutionary tech ever and changes the world.
- Any other system which uses the same cryptographic and technological ideas to incentivise hardware operators to run any other system at the core protocol level, is shit.
And they somehow know this to be true without examining the specifics of ANY other project. They seem sure of this with an almost religious fervour. "Don't bring your facts to contradict my faith".
I'd say there will be only one Proof of Work chain in the long run. That part of the tech (PoW vs POS and dPOS) is largely irrelevant if you do the game theory right for POS and particularly dPOS as we have on Hive.
What the BTC Maxi crowd continue to overlook is the importance of directed inflation.
Bitcoin's early life was massively inflationary but this inflation only paid for security and ongoing operation of the hardware. Luckily the first to get insanely wealthy were developers and their largess and generosity probably keeps much of the development going to this day. This is similar to how Nostr is funded: a big gift from Jack Dorsey.
No development work or anything else is funded by Bitcoin's ongoing inflation. There is just the hope (not a certainty) that eventually fees will cover this massive hardware and energy operating expense.
The Bitcoin Maxi Shitcoin Paradox doesn't allow its devotees to see how this fundamental aspect of the brilliance of the invention of Bitcoin, can ever apply to anything else, whilst still believing it is the most important invention mankind has ever made.
Intellectual cop out
As we cover extensively on @cttpodcast and I can't say it better than @theycallmedan:
You can stay clear of a lot of nonsense if you stick by the following in web3 governance.
Were they voted in? - no, move on.
If they were, was there a premine? - yes, move on.
It's not a hard test to apply, but if you chose the intellectual cop out of "if it's not Bitcoin it's a Shitcoin" you clearly don't have much beyond a religious devotion to BTC.
Nodeless's first reaction
And I agree: but most of the voices I listen to in the Lightning and BTC world, people like Kevin Rooke on his Podcast, What Bitcoin Did or TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast are hugely resistant to looking at anything that isn't Bitcoin with any kind of intellectual rigour. And they never seem to want to debate with someone like @theycallmedan or myself.
And a shout out to @hivecuba who gets 10% of the rewards for this post for this kick ass reply:
And I'm also setting aside 10% of the rewards from this post and will give those to Kevin Rooke as a Lightning Boost via Podcasting 2.0 BUT ONLY IF HE leaves a comment here or tweets or sends a note on Nostr that he has seen this. He has 7 days.
Older post:
Hive is better than Lightning for receiving Value 4 Value in Podcasting 2.0
Value for Value
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