Alex on Nostr: I've been thinking about how Lightning was designed for payments, but for donations ...
I've been thinking about how Lightning was designed for payments, but for donations (zaps) we don't need some of its defining properties:
- instant. It doesn't have to be instant. It just needs to pay out within a couple weeks. We can still have instant gratification - a promise of it - but you don't need the ability to spend it instantly.
- foolproof. This is a donation, not an exchange for goods or services, so there's no reason for someone to double-spend. And if they do, oh well, it was a donation anyway.
So my first thought it, for zaps, instead of Lightning why don't we just send regular Bitcoin with very low fees? You should get it eventually, and in the wallet UI we can show it instantly with a "pending" state.
Though I'm told this won't add up, and low fee transactions will be dropped. I don't know. Someone should investigate the lowest fee transactions that do eventually succeed to see if it's viable.
Basically I'm wondering if we can use Bitcoin directly and just work around it as a UX problem.
- instant. It doesn't have to be instant. It just needs to pay out within a couple weeks. We can still have instant gratification - a promise of it - but you don't need the ability to spend it instantly.
- foolproof. This is a donation, not an exchange for goods or services, so there's no reason for someone to double-spend. And if they do, oh well, it was a donation anyway.
So my first thought it, for zaps, instead of Lightning why don't we just send regular Bitcoin with very low fees? You should get it eventually, and in the wallet UI we can show it instantly with a "pending" state.
Though I'm told this won't add up, and low fee transactions will be dropped. I don't know. Someone should investigate the lowest fee transactions that do eventually succeed to see if it's viable.
Basically I'm wondering if we can use Bitcoin directly and just work around it as a UX problem.