188
"Interest is never earned without sending capital to a counterparty."
That's an inviolable economic truth. But our mutual wealth preserving friend ?, who carries no passport and travels permissionlessly, might have a unique workaround for this:
??Routing Fees??
For example, if you run your own node (I use a Zeus??LN), you collect tiny routing fees anytime a payment channel is routed through your node. Running one of these nodes is ridiculously simple by the way, requiring only a few hours to learn. I started with 0.25 ?TC on my node and collect about 16,000 SATS a month. But I haven't done any work to make more payment channels, or advertised my channel, and the Lightning Network, although growing exponentially, is still microscopic for what it'll become commercially. Think about it: there's only ~2900 ?TC on all the advertised ?? nodes (the rest have chosen to remain private). That's peanuts.
Now, regardless of wether or not I passively earned SATS, I'd still be running a node, because that's the natural progression of a bitcoiner after they've graduated to a hard wallet, after they've learned UTXO's, then mastered partially signed bitcoin transactions. Running your own node helps decentralize the network further, and makes you a full-blown sovereign citizen as well. It's incredibly liberating. I'm now like a cypherpunk badass using my air-gapped Coldcard wallets connected directly with my node which is in a country I don't live in, mixing coins through CoinJar, and dispatching them in a way that has () reduced my tax burden. I keep emergency Opendimes, a cloned hard wallet which is buried, and my "will" in case of unfortunate death, is 24 words, which will find it's way to those I've chosen in a very unique un-hackable way. Of course that's all the backend ??. The showered and shaven face I show in public is through STRIKE or CashApp of course, which I use for daily transacting, or anytime I need to put my hands on [immoral] fiat. Just a normal dude. You'd never know John Mallardshead has no bank account anymore. You'd never know he's opted-out of crypto tax obligations. You'd never know he just quietly and permissionlessly donated ?TC to a Uyghur resistance group INSIDE China (actually a little nervous to say that here). You'd never guess that sometimes, after kissing his woman goodbye in the morning, he bikes to a Starbucks where coffee is but a secondary goal; it's here he F2F (face to face) buys ?TC from strangers, shading the eyes of the watching avid, traveling anonymously along a pseudonymous blockchain, one he hasn't used a CEX to interact with since late in the second Obama Administration. This is the way.
Oddly, I've never been technically inclined, any good when it comes to computers, or that fast of a learner. So I'm not sure what ?TC has done to my head, but if I can do this stuff, it'll probably be a breeze for most of you, even though it's like James Bond shit. Seriously, forget the Walther handgun, and instead whip out an Opendime casually on your next date, explain that, and you're getting fucked, with a capital F.
So over the next year I'm going to actively use ?? at businesses that accept it and try opening as many payment channels as possible around my state and report back. I want to see if I can work up to making 250,000 SATS or more a month. That would be an APY of about 3% on my node's ?TC at current ?TC prices. Some CORE researchers have speculated that the LNRR (Lightning Node Reference Rate) when the network begins to mature should average 6% APY or more, which compounded over 11 years will double your node's ?TC. This is interesting, because through no work of your own, it starts to add even more liquidity to the network as your node augments, allowing for ever larger purchase throughput. That's kind of how that original tenet of hyberbitcoinization was postulated: An individual, company, or government allocates 5% of their net worth to ?TC. And after 5 years sitting there doing nothing but appreciating, it's by itself become 25% of their net worth, then 50%, then 75%...you wake up one day in a hyperbitcoinized world because it's crowded everything else out by absorbing value.
Anyway, you can clearly see where this is all going. You'll likely have the LNRR affect ?itcoin futures rates as it becomes an opportunity cost of not owning the physical. The more people run nodes, the more decentralized we get. And the more people commit ?TC to their nodes...yeah, we're definitely going to need a Satoshi Standard. There's already a decade long distribution and accumulation cycle playing out that will lead to significant whole coin supply shortages in early 2023, the likes of which we haven't seen or can imagine. If people try front-running 2024's halving, it's highly unlikely there would be whole coins available on CEX's anymore. The Satoshi Standard is cool because it's something that will start voluntarily. First with non-custodial wallets (already seeing this), and with you, then with nodes. Miners and CEX's won't be left with much of a choice. And with the supply crunch of whole coinage, either CEX's will have to bulk buy those from miners (who will be the only ones with them) which will drive prices to the stratosphere, or if not, the miners will just take the CEX's ?itcoin business away from them, and become specialized ?TC exchanges themselves, leaving legacy CEX's with the PoS node and shitcoin peddling business, because that's where they've decided to allocate most of their resources. Yikes.
Lightning is necessary because it will introduce the transactional epoch of ?itcoin. Lightning is more or less a simple P2P payment rail anyone can use, plug-n-play a business on top of, or run a node for—all permissionlessly of course. As more products and services get priced, sold, and bought in ?TC, the need to exchange it for fiat falls. Exchanging it becomes an unnecessary, expensive and time-consuming step. That means the dollar peg starts to fade. The Satoshi Standard pressures it more. And the law of diminishing returns with ?TC collapses volatility, and the dollar peg is severed forever. Global GDP becomes a much better peg.
Moving on, consider this quick thought: DeFi and Web 3.0 don't exist yet, they're waiting to build themselves around a global stateless money. Neither of them will require tokens. DeFi and Web 3.0 will not be orgies of swaps, wraps, burns, mints, and stakes like goofy competitors like doing. Dapps will not be useless rubbish that serves no purpose other than to optimize interactions with more tokens to keep the orgy going. And money is not TPS, TX cost, or throughput. Those are all features of a blockchain. Lastly, this is not a technological revolution as much as it is a political revolution. The goal is one dimensional: separation of money from State. Everything drops into place after.
Anyway, I've taken up way too much of your time, I apologize. Just buy ?itcoin, explore the incredible ecosystem around it, and ignore the noise, like price, regulation, and dubious competition.
Mallardshead
We like to use ?/21M, because the global economy isn't fixed, new goods and services can be added to it, thus the "infinity" symbol.
PROVIDING THE SOURCE: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/r73qsb/lnrr_lightning_network_reference_rate/
