Good afternoon ZmnSCPxj, Thank you for your thoughtful reply! I agree with many of your points. One thing I wanted to say regarding the forces that act on banks:
> It is helpful to remember that banks have, historically, been federations: > they are typically implemented as corporations, which are basically a bunch > of people pooling their money and skill together to start a business. > Thus, I argue that banks already *are* federations that take custody of your > money and manage it for you. > > To my mind, any system that is a federation that takes custody of user money > *will* face the same social, political, and economic forces that the legacy > banking system faced in the past. I actually think that banks operating on top of bitcoin may be subject to different forces. A major factor in the misbehavior of legacy banks has been lack of competition due to artificial barriers to entry due to regulation. I think in the absence of regulation, with competitors being able to enter the market at little cost, and without needing a license, we would see much less bad behavior from banks. I don't think that, aside from regulation, there is anything inherent to the business of banking that makes banks behave badly. If federated chaumian banks that interface exclusively with the Bitcoin and Lightning networks are able to evade regulators, the market for such banking services will hopefully see healthy competition between participants. This would be enhanced by the fact that such banks would be able to serve a global audience, and not be closely tied to a country, national currency, legacy settlement network, or region. > In addition, ti seems to me that the node management problem can be solved in > software, by something similar in purpose to CLBOSS. I think projects like CLBOSS are great, but I share elsirion's pessimism that LN node UX not be a fully soluble problem, no matter how good management software gets. Users will be choosing between services like Wallet of Satoshi, which are completely seamless, and it might not be possible for management software to fully abstract over things like high fees, uptime requirements, and unexpected fund unavailability due to channel closure. Best regards, Casey _______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev