I have this feeling that LN is intentionally crappy. Don't ask me why
The actual guy who created Lightning was actually pretty clear in interviews that it couldn’t actually do what people were claiming:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnG5H62I7Ko
“Everyone’s like: ‘LN is the gonna be the best thing ever’. Wait, uh, [LN] can’t actually do that.” (43:20 // 27:50)
So I don’t think it was intentionally crappy. I think there was irrational exuberance in 2016 around crypto, there was a ton of hot money flowing around, and over the years a gigantic amount of investment was put into LN. Everyone was excited about LN when they first heard about it. It was an idea that is cool to think about in a time when even the most retarded crypto business got millions in investment. So Lightning got a huge chunk of this hot money, and now there’s people that committed their reputations to what was an interesting and compelling bit of theory but later turns out to not be a viable protocol at scale.
They weren’t malicious. They were good people simply wrong about something, but now they have pulled investment for years on the LN idea and don’t want to admit they were wrong. Not even to themselves. Because the amount of time, money, and reputation for Bitcoin that has been burnt on this is massive. $130M+ in capital and a decade of genius developers playing Herman Hesse’s glass bead game when they thought they were giving financial liberty to the whole world.
I earnestly feel for these people, and I know for a fact that they were not making something intentionally bad. Well, perhaps not at first. I think some of them know, at this point, and don’t want widespread merge mined sidechains to come along because they will actually work in a way that refutes LN, and it will damage their reputations and busineses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnG5H62I7Ko
“Everyone’s like: ‘LN is the gonna be the best thing ever’. Wait, uh, [LN] can’t actually do that.” (43:20 // 27:50)
So I don’t think it was intentionally crappy. I think there was irrational exuberance in 2016 around crypto, there was a ton of hot money flowing around, and over the years a gigantic amount of investment was put into LN. Everyone was excited about LN when they first heard about it. It was an idea that is cool to think about in a time when even the most retarded crypto business got millions in investment. So Lightning got a huge chunk of this hot money, and now there’s people that committed their reputations to what was an interesting and compelling bit of theory but later turns out to not be a viable protocol at scale.
They weren’t malicious. They were good people simply wrong about something, but now they have pulled investment for years on the LN idea and don’t want to admit they were wrong. Not even to themselves. Because the amount of time, money, and reputation for Bitcoin that has been burnt on this is massive. $130M+ in capital and a decade of genius developers playing Herman Hesse’s glass bead game when they thought they were giving financial liberty to the whole world.
I earnestly feel for these people, and I know for a fact that they were not making something intentionally bad. Well, perhaps not at first. I think some of them know, at this point, and don’t want widespread merge mined sidechains to come along because they will actually work in a way that refutes LN, and it will damage their reputations and busineses.
4
