The report gives  quite a surprising insight on the matter:







This is way more than I would have expected.
This is yield out of your own private keys.

That's the exact way I'd describe it. It's like renting your funds to someone, but you don't hand them over anything. 

We might reach a time when routing a transaction becomes more expensive than paying the transaction fee of an altcoin, but we will never pay more for an off-chain transaction than an on-chain one, with the same confirmation time.

Also,

became aware today of this interesting service for the lightning nodes.
anyone already there who has tried this?


https://tunnelsats.com/

Bitcoin is a possibility to redistribute the wealth without the use of violence, for the first time in history.
And for the first time in History also, there weren't entry barrier to the bitcoin investment, nor violence or prevarications involved.

I am not saying that the resulting distribution will be fair, no one ever said that and it's not something Bitcoin has or even want to address.
It will only be different: as different are the criteria used for this distribution.
Luck, smartness, vision, instead of violence, prevarication and law, as the previous paradigm.

You started off so great franky1, and you described one of the issues, and how bitcoin addresses the ability for very poor people to get into bitcoin, and you lasted almost 3 paragraphs before you started to devolve into nonsense.

Very poor people can still invest into bitcoin, and they do not have to NOT operate a node and they do not have to use any inferior aspects of bitcoin or even any side chains if they do not want.  They can buy bitcoin little by little, and they can study bitcoin at the same time to figure out how they want to store their bitcoin and even the extent to which they might run a node  or to engage in any of the securing the network aspects that come with running a bitcoin node.

Regarding lightning network or any other second layer those are additional use case options that they can choose or not choose to add to their BTC participation that might go beyond merely just buying bitcoin, whether it is $3 per week or some other amount that might work for them.

By the way, between about 2015 and 2019, I used to buy and sell bitcoin to random folks, and I would charge anywhere between 5% and 12% premium over what I considered to be my replacement costs for the mere hassle of meeting some stranger or some random person, and I would also tell them that I did not want to arrange a meeting unless they were going to transact a minimum of $300.. and many times I had maximum amounts too.. such as maybe just a few thousand, and if I got to know them, then maybe I would agree to go outside of the ranges or to change the premium.

People will sometimes meet others at bitcoin meet ups or other events and then agree to buy or sell bitcoin, and I suppose if they know each other they might decide not to even charge any premium or to have minimum amounts, and maybe if someone is in a really poor location they might choose to trade very low amounts - and it used to be that some of the exchanges would allow trading of any amount, even a dollar... but these days some of the exchanges will have $5 minimum.. or some other similar amount as their minimum trade amount.

There are ways to attempt to work around minimums, and I would imagine that some of the ideas around minimums would depend on the environment.. Sometimes when BTC prices start to move a lot in a short period of time, some individual buyer/sellers don't want to transact, and some exchanges will shut down or "pause" their services, and maybe volumes get high, or maybe the price gets so volatile that they don't want to get caught on the wrong side of a trade (or a bunch of trades that are flooding in and meeting in person , there might be ideas that people are starting to act crazy during such high volatile times, so it might feel unsafe to even meet).

You likely realize that some kinds of products are more pegged to BTC than other types of products, and I recall a guy who used to come to me on a fairly regular basis, and I frequently would try to talk him out of doing any bitcoin transactions because he seemed a bit nutso.., and several times he told me that he had heard about bitcoin from a friend who told him to get involved in "OneCoin."  So he would text me or something and say that he wanted to meet so that he could buy some bitcoin, and then he would give me an apparent bitcoin address to send bitcoin to him, and so many times, I tried to explain to him that he should be buying bitcoin, not investing into "OneCoin" because that was a scam and he was quite likely to lose all of his money... but I said that I would sell him the BTC and he just needed to give me a BTC address, and I was not responsible for if he received the BTC or if the BTC was credited to his "OneCoin" account.. and so sometimes people get ideas in their head, and I was in a bit of an uncomfortable position regarding how much to interact with the guy and the extent to which I should even agree to sell him BTC that he was having me send to his "OneCoin" account.

We seem to be deviating more and more away from talking about lighting network - yet for me, sometimes it is not easy to leave new ideas or responses outstanding.. ..

Accordingly, I will agree with you that it is likely that a lot of poor people are not very well financially educated - and part of the evidence would be their actual status of being poor and perhaps not being able to get out of such trap, but the basics of building wealth are neither complicated nor difficult to understand in practice - which is living within your means, setting some portion of your income aside and then try to put that "investment" money into something that will either appreciate in value or hold its value as much as you can.... and sure the other part about NOT dipping into the wealth stash while it is building and compounding can be quit difficult for anyone to accomplish - whether poor or not.,.. and of course, if you are poor, you may well only have one or two places in which you have stored value... when you are richer then you would likely have more areas in which you have stored your value, so if you have an emergency (or some desire to purchase) while you are rich, you can choose to spend from the asset class currency that has the least likelihood to appreciate in value.


I am pretty sure that I have similar back and forths with you on this topic in the past, and it does not seem to be that we really disagree about some of the underlying characteristics that might exist at certain points of time regarding how an investment portfolio might look, but we should be talking about how the poor person can potentially be in a position to improve his/her lot, even when his/her starting position is relatively worse, way worse or even dire as compared to the person with way more assets and resources.

So maybe I am starting to get frustrated with some of your themes because you seem to imply that obstacles are so great for poor people that they would not be able to overcome them or to catch up to the rich person, or that the rich person is always going to be ahead, not have to try very hard to stay ahead, and a lot of those kinds of assumptions have some truth within them because the world has a lot of unfairnesses, and social (financial) mobility can be quite difficult to achieve - including that maybe the moving up from being in poverty would not be possible to get to millionaire status, but still it seems to me that there still could be decent chances that diligent poor person is going have decent odds to catch up to the sloppy millionaire.. even though s/he would not be able to catch up to the equally diligent millionaire.  

Regarding diversification, it is not necessarily true that a rich person is going to automatically be diversified, even though it may well be true that it may well not be prudent for a poor person to attempt too much diversification prior to growing his/her investment portfolio to a certain size in which diversification starts to become more justifiable in order to bring more protections towards the kinds of assets being held and abilities to being able to choose from which assets to spend during times in which various asset classes might have differences in their valuations and projections of valuation changes.


There are a lot of ways to frame ideas of fairness whether we are talking about access to being able to buy bitcoin or ability to know about it or to understand the information that is out there about bitcoin.  Of course, one of the easier ways to attack fairness would be if there would have been some insider folks who would have gotten more bitcoin than others due to their insider distribution (and or superior knowledge or location), and sure those kinds of accusations can be made after the fact because there are people who were in a better position to know about bitcoin and to find out about bitcoin (and to understand it), so it should not be unexpected that people are going to make claims about bitcoin being unfairly distributed and the earlier adopters knowing more and having more access - so in some sense the great price swings do allow for newer people to get into bitcoin at a relatively lower price - even though they won't likely be able to get bitcoin below $5k or even less likely below $1k or $100, as some of the earlier adopters had been able to do.

I claim that I don't really know very much about technical matters; however, over my nearly 9 years in bitcoin, I have done bitcoin transactions in a variety of ways - including some services that were like exchanges, and other variations of wallets, and sometimes interacting between these - if there is some desire to interact with someone or some service or even claiming forked coins in 2017 (which was a challenge for me to learn some things/angles about derivation paths).

The longer that we are in bitcoin, hopefully we learn things, yet in my above comment I was also trying to suggest both that things change and that there may well be quite a bit of geographical variation or even variation in terms of whether people who want to transact in bitcoin might know people in the real world who would like to transact directly with them - and maybe not even using any third party services, beyond wallet to wallet (and wallets might differ, but if they are transacting directly they can frequently negotiate terms and/or fees in respect to any transaction that they might decide to do).

The more options that anyone has would likely increase their abilities to negotiate terms or even refuse to transact if they believe the financial or even the safety circumstances are not good for them.  Or maybe some people might get worried about accounting, so they might not want to engage in some transactions because they might believe it creates too much accounting work for them.  So for example, let's say that someone wants to buy $300 in bitcoin from me, and if the BTC price had moved dropped a lot, I might feel that I would ONLY want to do such transaction if the fee is high because I feel that the BTC price might not drop anymore in order that I would be able to rebalance my books at a lower price (which might have been my attempted practice of sell and replace by rebuying at a lower price, if possible).

If someone has BTC, then probably they have more options to set the terms of a negotiation if someone else does not have any BTC, they want BTC, but they cannot find any other way to get BTC that they feel comfortable with... so in that sense if I am amongst one of their ONLY options for getting BTC (and I know it), then I could be more strict in my negotiations.. maybe?  Personalities can come into play too because some people are more ruthless in their negotiations than other people, and there are likely circumstances in which people like to "build good will," and other people want to be perceived as a "ruthless bargainer."


These kinds of dynamics happen all over in the world when we are dealing with people.  There are always a percentage of people that we might find annoying or crazy, and some kinds of activities/jobs involve more interactions with people in the real world but also some jobs/activities can be structured in ways that might lessen or even eliminate interactions with other people or even the ability to negotiate if some people might set up their transacting arrangements as "take it or leave it" and other people love to haggle in their interactions.

So, maybe if you interact with someone and they might not have any other offers, or they believe you give them the best deal, or they can trust you not to screw with them, then they might keep coming back and referring their friends - and yeah, you may or may not want to be perceived as the "bitcoin guy" or "master of bitcoin" as you put it.


Well, sometimes we do have repetition of themes, and some members have more patience than others in terms of dealing with repetition of themes.  I feel that I have way more patience with repetition when I believe that the poster is being genuine - rather than merely trolling... and sometimes it is not easy to know these answers.

I know that even I will sometimes post in ways that seem less than genuine, and maybe I either go on the attack of another member or fail to have enough patience with another member because I might make some premature presumptions about their intentions or even sometimes read the interaction/post wrongly.


People are in different stages of their learning, and some people go through shitcoin phases, or they might get reckt or they might be resentful about some earlier bitcoin (or crypto) transactions that they made, or they may be influence by either wrong information or assigning the wrong kinds of weight to the information that they know to reach bad/wrong conclusions.

We are all subject to wrong conclusions and/or weighing our evidence wrongly.

If I am interacting with a member and calling them a "dummy," I might later realize that I was the one who was the dummy - so we are all subject to getting some aspects of bitcoin wrong, and it seems that a lot of us are hear to share information - should involve both teaching and learning - even if there might be periods in which we are more on one side of the relationship depending on with whom we are interacting, and we likely can also treat other members as peers even if we might feel that we know more than they do in some areas.. but there could be areas that other members know more, including their experiences.. I cannot know your experiences unless you tell me, and I can attempt to make inferences from what you tell me, and sometimes if information is communicated badly, then I might get it wrong. and it still might NOT mean that you are a dummy just because I am having troubles understanding the message that is being attempted to communicate.


Of course, getting started is going to be different for people who entered into bitcoin now as compared with 9 years ago or even 2 years ago, so there are going to be stages that we may well have to go through, even if we already determined that we want to enter into bitcoin, we still have to figure out the size of our position relative to other investments that we might have, and then we also have to consider various ways that we might want to store or use bitcoin - whether we use exchanges, on chain bitcoin wallets or even lightning wallets that may be more custodial and/or trusted than others.  There are likely some people who currently come into bitcoin by learning about lightning network, but there still might be some needs to learn about both bitcoin and the lightning network in order to attempt to understand aspects of the tools that they are using - even though many of us would like some of the tools to become more user-friendly and even less likely that someone might end up losing their BTC due to mistakes that they might make or that they might presume that if they lose their password, they can still get someone to help them to recover their funds - which in many circumstances in bitcoin, there might not be a way to recover the funds if the person had not taken adequate precautions to make sure that they have a back up... and I think that many of us here are trying to balance those kinds of factors, even if some of the members in this forum are way more technically literate than others which surely affects which bitcoin or lightning tools that they are going to use versus what a less technically literate member might be willing to try out .. and that also goes to some of the ideas of newbies who might be more or less technically literate, but sometimes they might need to figure out why they are investing into bitcoin or wanting to use it before really digging into the technical aspects - but those are personal choices too.. because many of us will gravitate towards areas of our knowledge in which we are more comfortable.

Even if you have inside info, most people will ignore you.

One example:

I had inside info (thanks to some Discord friends) about Chia/XCH, around 1 month (Feb 2021) before the mainnet was launched (day 1 difficulty was around 100 PiB).

I managed to get quite a few XCH for myself with solo farming (took around 1 month of continuous effort/plotting, until farming difficulty became too high and pooling wasn't available from the get-go).

There are some rumors that the XCH blockchain will serve to store WEF's notorious carbon credits, so I think it's a good idea to hodl them (didn't pay anything, apart from miniscule electricity amounts).

Was did I do as an insider? I tried to return the favor by informing others. Did they listen to me? No. Should I pity them?

I wish someone had told me about ETH back in 2014-2015, when you could mine 1 ETH ($1 back then) per day with a single GPU.

Fun fact: someone had informed me about the BTC concept back in 2003 (!!!). What did I do? I mocked him (along with several other forum participants).

The same person informed us again in late 2008/early 2009 about BTC's launch. Same response. We mocked him to death.

The moral of the story: if you are a man, you should accept the responsibility of your own actions.

There is no politician here to save anyone from his idiocy. Mistakes are (expensive) lessons.

What your proposal regarding "fair" BTC distribution?

Should Satoshi have divided 21 million BTC to 8 billion people from the get-go? That's around 0.002625 BTC (262500 sats) per person. That's assuming new people aren't born every single day...

Guess what? Even if that was the case, 1 year later some people would have ZERO sats, while some others would be wholecoiners.

Why? Here's why: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yo4WF3cSd9Q

Some people are spenders (instant gratification), while some others are investors (delayed gratification).

Some people will decide to spend their money on drugs (cigarettes, weed, heroine), while others will decide to cut their bad habits and stack more sats:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/lolbr0/im_quitting_smoking_and_buying_bitcoin_every_week/

How many people smoke on this planet? Billions! And most of them are poor. Should we pity them?

Everyone can buy some sats, instead of literally burn money by buying/smoking cigarettes. Why don't they do it? Because their mindset is poor. Richness begins from your mindset, not your wallet!

Of course being rich isn't for everyone and I'd argue it can be detrimental to their health (if they're highly addictive personalities/prone to instant gratification):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Best#Alcoholism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_Maradona#Drug_abuse_and_health_problems

Socialism doesn't exist according to universe's laws... unless we become gods one day. We're nowhere near that.

If you want a more scientific (mathematical) explanation of why income inequality exists, I suggest to read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle#In_economics
https://qz.com/957711/everything-including-the-growing-income-disparity-can-be-explained-by-physics

Of course that doesn't mean that everyone who is already rich deserves their wealth... inheritors are the worst kind IMHO. They didn't work for their wealth.

I don't like Proof of Stake either for the exact same reason: the rich get richer with zero effort. PoW allows this to happen: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/xanz0h/bitcoin_mining_powered_by_used_cooking_oil/

That's why I don't plan to inherit wealth to my children, unless they really deserve it (I'll judge that).

You need to be able to prove you worth something and that you won't squander it on stupid things (like drugs). That's non-negotiable for me.-

Either way, true diversity means that not all people are the same. Some are good at building wealth, while others may be good at dancing or singing or cooking (there are lots of potential talents).

Why should everyone be rich? If everyone was rich, who would do all these 9-5 jobs? That's something to consider.

Maybe in a society where A(G)I and robots will do all jobs, everyone will be rich. We're far from that.

Probably overall, I am not even really disagreeing with your various factual representations or even the appreciation of various life futilities that exist with much of the population that might not be realized the futility of a lot of matters until working a whole life and still being poor after doing everything correctly...

But it still seems to me that you are ongoingly complaining about the unfairnesses in life and sure it may even be true that any of us can work our asses off and still we don't get anywhere and we cannot break through the glass ceiling and we might not even end up better off than our parents, even if we might have tried harder or even had more successes along the way.. in the end we still end up in a bad or maybe even worse position.

Another thing is trying to figure out what is being measured, because we already know that dollar wealth does not necessarily equate with happiness, and wealth can be measured in a variety of ways, yet even if we attempt to stick with financially measuring wealth, we still might be able to figure out ways in which people who are able to live within their means might end up being able to become more wealthy than people who live beyond their means and then keep getting into trouble because they are not very good at managing whatever financial resources are available to them - and I am not even against debt, because there are ways to use debt in order to leverage wealth, but there are also ways to use debt that gets someone into trouble because of the consumption of products and services that do not hold their value, and so the person may get into debt beyond their means or be held back from accumulating wealth because of consumption rather than investment decisions earlier in life or before they are sufficiently financially ready to consume at the level that they choose to consume.


Of course, winning the jackpot could result in a person being rich and wealthy if s/he knows (or learns) how to manage the money in order to figure out how to live on interest rather than depleting principle or otherwise figuring out ways to manage the money.

Let me give an example of a person (in mid-to-late 20s) who might ONLY have $50k in networth and who might have ONLY had an income of around $3k per month wins a jackpot that receives a net amount of $2 million may well either completely squander the money or such person could be set for life with a $6,666 per month income from the $2 million for the rest of his/her life, if they invest it somewhat wisely and they live off the interest and they ONLY dip into principle when they might feel that they are getting close to the end of their life (in the event that they might not want to pass it on after death). 

So for the above hypothetical person, winning of such jackpot may have allowed this person to completely stop working because his/her income has doubled, and therefore it comes down to just managing the new income and the new situation, there may be ways to create buffers to ensure an ability to continue to live with a $3k per month income and maybe ONLY slowly move up to the $6,666k per month income that the $2 million would allow.. and the transition would be learning how to live with the income and then also making sure to learn how to make sure that the principle is growing in value at least 4% per year in order to justify drawing up to $6,666k per month, but if managing finances is new to a person, then such person would have to learn to make sure that they are able to sustain their chosen withdrawal rate on their newly acquired wealth.   

Just because we can witness a lot of examples of irresponsible behavior should not necessarily cause us to conclude that everyone is irresponsible with their finances and not capable of learning, even if maybe most people might end up NOT being able to sufficiently manage their newly acquired $2 million extra to their networth because they choose to fail/refuse to learn how to manage that money to make it last, but instead choose to spend it without giving sufficient attention to making sure that it is able to last as long as they would like it to last..
 

I don't really disagree with your various categories of assessment, yet no matter what there are going to be complications involving existing systems and even the passing down of wealth, so matters can become overly complicated when trying to compare what someone would have had available in 2009 versus 2080, and it seems like a big so what to me because it is something that none of us can change in terms of when we were born... but even in 2080, there still might be no coiners or family of no coiners or there might be bitcoiners who had hoarded their bitcoin and passed down their bitcoin, or locked up their bitcoin from earlier years, and some folks may benefit or be disadvantaged by the actions of the earlier bitcoiner,.,.


There are a lot of ways to consider insider-information in terms of being able to advantage yourself and people around you or even trying to create systems in which fewer people will have insider information or advantages.  I think that bitcoin Satoshi had been attempting to create the latter.. perhaps merely to attempt to cause bitcoin to seem to be more credible rather than his own pureness - Open source software has some of those same kinds of sharing of information ideas contained within that may well be attempts to share information in order that no one else has any superior advantage - but also perhaps even a kind of security approach - even though even with bitcoin, there are presumptions that individuals will act in their own self-interests - so there is an interesting balance that seems to be going on with the underlying incentives that were built into bitcoin and continue to be built upon in some ways.. but maybe not in all ways.. 


I think that it is a bad idea to bring up shitcoins in this thread - even though we are already deviating a lot from the topic by getting into discussion of financial matters.. and you are just likely to make matters worse when talking about so many ideas that might relate to shitcoins .. so maybe you should come up with better example that relates to bitcoin.. and even better if it relates to lightning network.


Fuck shitcoins.  No need to discuss them here.


Well, of course there are going to be various ways in which people might have been able to participate in bitcoin related matters and even might have been in a better position to understand the topic and/or able to allocate time towards learning about it or investing into it.

Bitcoin is a different thing when it is "prior to its birth" and then even once bitcoin is announced on October 31, 2008, not too many people knew about it or was able to understand it.. and even when it went live on January 3, 2009, it took a bit of time before others started to mine it and it took even about a year and a half longer in mid 2010 before there were starting to be examples of trades for value and even people willing to assign a price to it that others were willing to pay.

And, even hearing about bitcoin would depend on what circles you are in or what part of the world, so surely we can say that some people are advantaged versus others depending on where they were at in life... or even if they had been able to learn about bitcoin, did they take such opportunities or dismiss it.. when they might be too busy to take on a new project, such as learning about what is bitcoin.


You seem to be bringing quite a bit of baggage into this discussion. 


I wasn't proposing anything.  I was just mentioning various ways that people might perceive that bitcoin distribution might not be fair, and the criticisms might not be completely without merit in terms of some people being in a better position to have had heard about bitcoin or to have had invested earlier, yet it would seem that the prudent and reasonable thing for anyone to do after they start to learn about bitcoin is to figure out if they are able to learn more and/or if they might need to start to invest into bitcoin at whatever point that they start to hear about it... whether they are investing to learn (or otherwise spending time and energies on bitcoin) or they are financially investing.


I did not see anyone here suggesting any other way to distribute bitcoin, even though BlackHatCoiner described various ways that he thought that the rich were advantaged over the poor and even seeming to suggest that bitcoin would not necessarily change those kinds of unfairnesses.. and I was largely attempting to suggest that bitcoin seems to be a tool for the poor to be able to use.  So the ideas of fairness did come up several times, but not necessarily in terms of proposals to change the way that bitcoin "should have been" distributed.. like where you (cryptosize) seem to want to go with your seemingly strawman attack.


You're all over the place, cryptosize.  Bring us back to bitcoin.. or maybe even better yet, lightning network?


A lot of that seems far afield - like either you need to create your own thread, or find a thread on those kinds of topics.  Bitcoin/Lightning.. remember? 
 

You're getting closer to the topic.. but still?   


Ideas of inheritance and abilities to pass down wealth vary quite a lot throughout the world, and surely there are aspects of bitcoin that might allow for timelocking of wealth or even being able to pass (or transfer) wealth without requesting or getting permission.. some of these characteristics might also exist somewhat in lightning network too.


It seems that a lot of people aspire to get to financial and psychological circumstances in which they are able to choose their own work, so on an individual level we can see how people might try to create systems in which they can either choose their own work and even to lessen the amount that they have to work.  Even if someone in bitcoin might be able to acquire a lot of bitcoins, they still might need to figure out systems in which they can preserve their wealth and even to be able to spend their wealth without anyone taking their wealth from them, and I suppose that bitcoin and lightning network can be fit into those kinds of systems - yet there still might be questions regarding how much work that any of us ends up having to do to either learn or to establish systems or even to trust others to set up the systems or to manage some of these kinds of interactions with our bitcoins whether they are on chain or if they are being used in the lightning network.