LNMarkets on Nostr: ⚡️ DailyZap: Banco Santander Talks Lightning Santander, Spain's largest bank, ...
⚡️ DailyZap: Banco Santander Talks Lightning
Santander, Spain's largest bank, published a blog post about Lightning, describing how it helps enhance Bitcoin scalability by enabling users to perform cheap transactions with instant settlement. Funnily enough, while the beginning of the piece deals with "the Lightning Network", the tone switches in the end and addresses liquidity issues in Lightning Networks. I don't know if it's just regular vagueness, accounting for 💩coins Lightning networks (such as Litecoin or Decred), or testimony that whoever wrote this piece understands that there is no such thing as the Lightning Network.
Indeed, as John Carvalho highlighted back in 2019, there is no global consensus on Lightning, but merely a common protocol which implementations are convergent enough to enable interoperability. But various implementations are free to prioritize some features over others, even developing things they are the only one to support. That's completely allowed and expected by the Lightning protocol, which is why nodes are able to set and advertize per-channel and or per-node features. For now the set of features is quite convergent, but we're already seeing differences in feature prioritization across implementations, and I expect this to be even more the case in the future. And that's ok: there can totally be different subsets of "the" Lightning Network, tailored for different use cases or to maximize different outcomes. Two subsets may or may not be able to communicate through nodes that are compatible with both flavors of the protocol -- but I expect they will.
A bit more concerning is the perspective described by Odell back in March that the real split between Lightning subnetworks might be the one separating KYC-abiding nodes and channels from the rest. That's a daunting vision, presumably the one that banks such as Santander will need to embrace if they're to jump on the Lightning bandwagon. So having a bank write about the greatness of the Lightning Network(s) is cool, but cheer with caution my friends.
Blog post: https://www.santander.com/en/stories/lightning-network-blockchain
Santander, Spain's largest bank, published a blog post about Lightning, describing how it helps enhance Bitcoin scalability by enabling users to perform cheap transactions with instant settlement. Funnily enough, while the beginning of the piece deals with "the Lightning Network", the tone switches in the end and addresses liquidity issues in Lightning Networks. I don't know if it's just regular vagueness, accounting for 💩coins Lightning networks (such as Litecoin or Decred), or testimony that whoever wrote this piece understands that there is no such thing as the Lightning Network.
Indeed, as John Carvalho highlighted back in 2019, there is no global consensus on Lightning, but merely a common protocol which implementations are convergent enough to enable interoperability. But various implementations are free to prioritize some features over others, even developing things they are the only one to support. That's completely allowed and expected by the Lightning protocol, which is why nodes are able to set and advertize per-channel and or per-node features. For now the set of features is quite convergent, but we're already seeing differences in feature prioritization across implementations, and I expect this to be even more the case in the future. And that's ok: there can totally be different subsets of "the" Lightning Network, tailored for different use cases or to maximize different outcomes. Two subsets may or may not be able to communicate through nodes that are compatible with both flavors of the protocol -- but I expect they will.
A bit more concerning is the perspective described by Odell back in March that the real split between Lightning subnetworks might be the one separating KYC-abiding nodes and channels from the rest. That's a daunting vision, presumably the one that banks such as Santander will need to embrace if they're to jump on the Lightning bandwagon. So having a bank write about the greatness of the Lightning Network(s) is cool, but cheer with caution my friends.
Blog post: https://www.santander.com/en/stories/lightning-network-blockchain