Quote from: Anon136 on June 13, 2018, 09:14:48 PM

Quote from: Globb0 on June 13, 2018, 08:56:41 PM

Question I have been a bit scared to ask because people here jump down your throat if you dare be different.

If lightening introduces cheaper/free-like transactions? wont that diminish the value/volume of expensive(price driving) bitcoin transactions on the main chain?

I have thought enough about this to have some things to say. I'll add more later if I can think of more.

The bitcoin blockchain is an immutable eternal database. You can store something in there and be confident that that information will be stored forever. That is crazy useful. Property titles, ownership tokens, other blockchains will offer this of course, but bitcoin will always be the most ideal place.

Also we can always just not increase the block size, ever, until we feel like miners are more than fairly compensated through transaction fees and all models predict that a modest increase in block size will still reatain adequate network security. In fact we can base our decisions about when to increase the block size on no consideration other than security. I personally feel that everything else is secondary.

Also I don't think there is a world where lightning gets to the point where it isn't unjustifiably cumbersome for large transactions. Nation states that want to use bitcoin as an alternative to SWIFT will probably find the blockchain it's self to be the place to do something like that. So there will still always be a marginal demand for on chain transactions.

It's about choices, IMO.

Much of the ideals we early bitcoiners have lauded are not something that all of humanity can share without there being a tremendous amount of personal responsibility. Probably an unreasonable amount.

For example: Banks.

Hang around here and you will read many saying GET RID OF 'EM. But the fact is we will always need them. At least some people will. And layer 2 lets us build the services that the new "banks" will use to offer us value for letting them put their paws on our money. Here is something we are hearing said a lot recently: "Custodial services". Not everyone has the ability or desire to do the sort of opsec to safeguard deep amounts of value in crypto. And even the more savvy like (dare i say) many of us would benefit from a nice liquid place to lock up some liquid money for spending and moving around.

Layer 1 plus layer 2 gives me the option to be responsible for the mass of my wealth privately, while directing some of it into channels that may look a little like banks... or perhaps less distributed.

Lightning gives us a choice. I like that.