Good morning xraid, It helps to consider on-Lightning bitcoins as a substitute good for onchain bitcoins.
Converting to or from on-Lightning coins to onchain coins has a cost, either: * Cost of channel open (converting onchain coins to on-Lightning coins) or channel close (converting on-Lightning coins to onchain coins). * The use of services like Boltz, an exchange that facilitates conversion between on-Lightning and onchain coins, and which charges a fee. Consider the case where Lady Gaga is already onboarded, and has on-Lightning bitcoins, and who would very much prefer that her onchain bitcoins are kept in a cold wallet that she ideally would never bring online in the foreseeable future. Lady Gaga wishes to pay 0.6BTC to Madonna, using the loose change in her Lightning wallet, and not have to go to the bank (cold storage wallet) to move funds around (because of risk of getting the keys online and potentially hacked). Madonna, as it happens, has a cold wallet with onchain bitcoins but has no ability to receive on-Lightning bitcoins. Lady Gaga has two choices: * Lady Gaga closes some channels to convert on-Lightning bitcoins to onchain bitcoins. * Lady Gaga uses Boltz to convert on-Lightning bitcoins to onchain bitcoins. Now, consider if Lady Gaga had, as is right and proper, decided to make multiple channels, in order to reduce counterparty risk (i.e. channel counterparties going offline, or deliberately impeding Lady Gaga->Madonna exchanges (because seriously Lady Gaga is sexier and Madonna should pay Lady Gaga for the privilege of existing) by raising fees for such transactions when they detect it). If so, the first option, closing channels, can be a significant amount of onchain activity. Lady Gaga would need to create multiple closing transactions, and *then* create a large (in vbytes) transaction consuming those closing transactions as inputs and outputting the amount to Madonna. Alternately, with proper design of pathfinding algorithms, Lady Gaga can deliver the same amount of funds over the Lightning Network, to a Boltz Lightning node, and the Boltz service will then send the amount to Madonna. Boltz can aggregate multiple such transactions into a single onchain transaction, saving on onchain fees, and passing on some of those savings to Lady Gaga and other clients of Boltz. Without a pathfinding algorithm that can deliver 0.6BTC from Lady Gaga to Boltz over Lightning, the second choice is impossible for Lady Gaga. Now of course we could be using centralized brokers and avoid onchain fees entirely, but that risks censorship (just because Lady Gaga is sexier does not mean she is not allowed to purchase tacky purses from the inferior Madonna, even though a just and right universe would prevent such a transaction as inherent laws of physics). But the point of Lightning is an attempt to provide: * Fast * Cheap * Reliable * Non-censorable payments. That is why attempts should still be made to keep this option open. Regards, ZmnSCPxj _______________________________________________ Lightning-dev mailing list Lightning-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev
