JJ | ⚡

Builds (#bitcoin) products, studies technology and new ventures. Everything is in a flow.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

"Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love."-Lao Tzu
#SeasonOfGiving

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@Ben_deWaal met your digital twin @ben__dewaal

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@balajis @ayushswrites @marcelolima The success of SpaceX is another curious and amazing case of learning from failure for complex systems.

[₿𝔢𝔫 ∞/2.1Psat ⚡️💊🧠📚🌍🌏Ⓐ🏴🌹 @Ben_deWaal]

If you missed it in Prague, here’s my amazing daughter’s presentation.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

Fantastic commentary on the challenges and user experience of lightning and approach of @lightspark

[David Marcus @davidmarcus]

In a nutshell (but there’s a lot more to it than this): Lightning was designed the way it was to make #Bitcoin transactions cheaper, faster, and private. Three attributes that L1 doesn’t have. L1 in turn provides the best form of decentralized governance of any chain out there, the best security, and uses the most prevalent asset, has the most regulatory clarity, acceptance, and liquidity of any digital asset out there. So on paper, it should be amazing, right? Well it really isn’t, and I think that’s what @fiatjaf is hinting to.

Let’s unpack this a bit more.

1) Lightning is unintuitive: it’s a channel-based payment protocol that required participants to lock up liquidity in channels with other nodes to send and receive payments in the form of a theoretical abacus. It would already be complex if it was only 1:1 channels, but when you understand that it’s a mesh network of channels through which transactions move, it’s borderline maddening to fully understand and manage well.

2) Routing & channel management out of the box are really bad: standard Lightning routing is incredibly basic and fails way too often to find successful routes for higher value transactions because, in most distributions, it basically uses a form of pagerank algorithm. Channel management is complex and suboptimal resulting in dormant liquidity all over the network, making it inefficient.

3) Self custodial Lightning is even worse! It’s incredibly hard to provide the expected user experience on a self custodial wallet that allows for full remote signing, AND an elegant offline receive solution.

4) Liquidity constraints: moving liquidity in and out of channels can prove to be challenging and confusing. The concept of a usable / withdrawable balance vs. total balance because of reserves held, combined with how hard it is to truly grasp the different ways to close channels and what it means in terms of liquidity availability times is quite foreign.

Like I said, there are many more intricacies to Lightning than these, and the joy of working on turning such a complex, hard to fully understand, operate and depend on protocol, into a *great* product that does what people need it to do without any of this madness is real and rewarding.

What we did here at @Lightspark is just that, and yes, we’re far from being done. We have a lot more work to do. But in a nutshell we made Lightning behave like familiar Bitcoin layer 1 for our partners and customers.

1) no more channel madness: we automagically make it work on your behalf in the backend. Channels as a term is not even used in our interface.

2) With Lightspark Predict we do what I believe is the best job of routing, and dynamic liquidity deployment in the market. This results is predictable, dependable, successful payments without any of the complexity involved with deploying and locking up your own liquidity and worrying about channel capacity at all times.

3) We are developers building for developers, so our SDKs and APIs are solid and easy to integrate and maintain.

4) We’re making all of this work in a self-custodial way as well. So this is not only working for custodial setups.

So basically, I believe we made Lightning what people hoped for before diving into it a lot more to understand it. Simple, fast, cheap, reliable, private #Bitcoin payments.

Typed this on the go on mobile 😂, so there’s a lot of details I left behind, but since many of you asked for details, I wanted to share more. Hope this helps! I’m sure @tdryja can also answer a lot of questions here.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@_tessr Thank you for the brief guiding conversations. Sending you best wishes for the next impactful involvement 💫.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@Ben_deWaal @SwanBitcoin This is wonderful news. Congratulations @Ben_deWaal and @SwanBitcoin will massively benefit from your personality and leadership.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

A beautiful imagination leading to an appealing vision results in a meaningful name. 👏

[Square @Square]

Oh! Obviously Square Crypto no longer makes sense, so the team is changing its name to Spiral (@spiralbtc). This rebrand reflects their focus on #bitcoin as it continues to grow like a spiral from a single point, encompassing more and more space until it touches everything.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

Brilliant demonstration of rigorous thinking in building a product through the different stages of its evolution.

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

This awesome video is a lot like the long journey of taking a product from an early concept to massive adoption, with the added complication that the book will randomly whack you from time to time

(h/t @ValaAfshar)

https://t.co/fkSiEQwkCx

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@dhaber @weiss2go building a neo bank dedicated towards healthcare professionals.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@thebitsian What are some of the projects or products which caught your attention?

[Sai 🚀 @sainathkm]

Twitter folks from NL, need help in finding for our furry friend 'Mia' 😢 She went missing from Amsterdam Zud area and last spotted near RAI on Wednesday late afternoon. We need her back home so badly.

We need your help with spreading this message. #MissingDog

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn This trust and utility value depends on people's respect towards the ban too.

Alice in China can send bitcoin to Bob in US. Bob can send RMB to Alice. No ban will stop people to people transaction.

This is the state of things in Nigeria already - https://t.co/0qTtTXmRGa

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn People's investment in Bitcoin, the trust and thereby its utility value with intermediary financial services in the country which has banned will diminish. However, it will still work between people to people and it doesn't need an intermediary to exchange in local currency.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn Curious to know if it helped? Should we continue the discussion further?

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn It is best to read the idea and the vision from the creator themselves for its significance and storytelling. This mail introducing Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakomoto, the creator is worth a read. He/she/they/it makes a solid case. https://t.co/D2KKVOFSyn

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn Ahahaha, that is definitely a good thing to hear for the process of joint inquiry. Seeing the value of UPI is a fantastic leap to the exploration.

Sure, I shall answer but may you please reflect on the question yourself and state your thoughts prior to my reply?

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn Waiting to hear your case for exclusivity now, thank you.

[JJ | ⚡ @iamjesly]

@anoopajohn In summary, an open blockchain such as Bitcoin is inclusive as it has set its own framework for participation without anyone's permission. In this way, it has the power to change any existing framework as it empowers people and people care about it when they realize its features.