Casey Rodarmor [ARCHIVE] on Nostr: 📅 Original date posted:2021-06-29 📝 Original message: Good afternoon ZmnSCPxj, ...
📅 Original date posted:2021-06-29
📝 Original message:
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
📝 Original message:
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