Assuming everyone in the world was on Lightning and you wanted to send them all the minimum amount of value that LN supports, how much do you think is the least it would possibly cost you in USD terms to send everyone in the world some money?

One hassle people face with on-chain BTC is that they might receive a payment from someone and when they go to send that forward the receiver doesn't accept it due to its provenance. With LN you can avoid that by funding channels with your own UTXOs only, disallow inbound opens.

If you are promoting a quite unilateral hard fork of Bitcoin that you are involved with and have a financial bet on as “the real Bitcoin”, and you lead people to buy your fork-coin in your advertisements for “buy Bitcoin” without qualification is that a deception?

Sometimes chain fees get crazy high because of the nature of that market and there is a lot of hand-wringing about how can anyone possibly afford to use Lightning? Well also consider that LN offers the option to join the network at chain fee rate lows and not be impacted by highs

Multiple public companies are joining the Lightning Network and I know of more in the pipeline so the way to look at this as we are just getting started on building the network, where utility and function can scale with size. Eventually all companies can join and benefit from LN.

You might want to avoid peering with low fee LN peers who don't have great reachability, which you can observe here: terminal.lightning.engineering
But on the flip side if you find a low fee peer that has a great reachability, it can dramatically improve the ability of payers to pay you

I’m thrilled to announce that Lightning ⚡️ is now live on @Coinbase! I could not be more proud of the team for shipping it so quickly.

Growing Bitcoin adoption increases economic freedom in the world. This is my personal life mission and the mission for all of us at Coinbase.

I know it's common but I try to avoid absolutist terms for Bitcoin like 'trustless' and 'atomic' because those are often not technically 100% accurate and those requirements are not necessary for utility. Specific definitional terms or 'trust-minimized' are the terms I'd prefer.

A suggested expansion to LN would be to have both sides of a channel open participate in funding a channel. This could allow a receiver to inspect the UTXO of the requesting party, which is not possible in the current protocol, and they could reject if they don't like that UTXO.

The paradoxical thing about how Bitcoin is fought is that the most effective way they could stop it is just doing better themselves. Stop bank transfers taking 5 days, wires costing $99, insane inflation rates, privacy etc. If they just made good money it would be a tough fight.

A lot of people knock Bitcoin Core chain fee estimates as being bad because they are too high, which is fair but an estimate does tell you in the word it won’t be accurate. There are also plenty of times I'd rather be too high than too low, it's important for time-lock contracts.

A common failing of smart-contract engineering is to assume that the normal rule of law contracts follow some kind of logic. But the logic they often follow is 'give me the man and I will give you the case against him'. In other words if you play against the house they always win

One reason that limited blocks are important is because at some point it may become difficult to get them. We take it for granted we can run a p2p Bitcoin node and validate our funds. At some point they may target peering nodes and it might get a bunch harder to find an open slot

It's depressing to think about trying to change systemic stuff that is set in place by overwhelming force because if you play by the normal rules things are setup at every level to stop you, probably for the best in most cases. But with Bitcoin there's a chance to exit that game.

In developing BTC software, the mindset has to be one of defensiveness, even when tempted to trust, to centralize. Keep in mind the worst case scenarios and defend proactively against stuff that may not happen. It's tough because people who don't do it might pass you for a while.

If you bought a lot of private liquidity and have a big remote balance on your peer but now you changed your mind about that purchase or peering with that peer, you can resell the inbound. On another node, pay to yourself to get the inbound, and peer with LOOP to route payments.

If you want to minimize disruptions in your Bitcoin experience:
- Use free open source software that has a community
- Avoid locking yourself into single service providers
- When you use providers, ensure trust-minimization
- Try to maximize your privacy using Tor or other tools

If a salesperson goes to the emperor and says that he has special garments that are invisible but very special and can be recognized by other special people and the emperor buys these clothes, was he swindled or is value just in the eye of the beholder?

The Lightning Network has a lot to be improved, that's part of the fun of working on it. Even with no soft forks my feeling is that we're not even to 1% of the potential capability of the network in terms of optimization, user experience and utility, and scalability. Lots to do.