Why Bitcoin is the Best Monetary Network with Lyn Alden

 
 

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“Lightning opens up interesting things, if you’re a programmer in a country, you can now get international payments directly from them without going through their country’s banking system. It’s basically peer-to-peer finance. And then they have a unit that is hard, that is harder than their local currency….basically it connects global labour, global work, global productivity in a way that didn’t exist before.”
— Lyn Alden

SHOW DESCRIPTION

Lyn Alden is a macroeconomist and investment strategist. In this interview, we discuss her latest paper on the Lightning Network (LN). We focus on the importance of Bitcoin’s base layer, how LN compares to Visa and Mastercard, and how LN is connecting the world in new and revolutionary ways.

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To understand the Lightning Network, you need to go back and understand money: what attributes does it need to have, and what are the best means of facilitating these attributes?

Bitcoiners believe it to be the latest evolution in money. It has the best combination of features of any previous version of money: it is hard, auditable, portable, uncensorable, immutable, fungible, trustless and decentralised. Yet, Bitcoin’s Achilles’ heel, and the question that plagued its first decade, was how it could scale to become an effective medium of exchange.

The capacity of the Bitcoin network is purposefully limited to ensure that the network can remain as decentralised as possible. For Bitcoin to operate as a medium of exchange, a transactional layer needed to be built on top of the network.

This is the Lightning Network. It's designed to provide an instant and cheap payment system connecting the world.

TIMESTAMPS

00:01:26: Introductions
00:02:43: Money is broken, and Bitcoin is the world's best ledger
00:09:45: How Visa and Mastercard networks work
00:22:55: Lightning is the ultimate payments network
00:25:28: Channel-based vs broadcast-based transactions
00:29:25: Lightning's user experience
00:43:10: Bitcoin's pace of growth, and peer-to-peer money
00:48:11: Limitations to Lightning Network, and Bitcoin's volatility
00:52:51: Rival layer 2 systems, and regulation
00:55:52: Future development on the Lightning Network
01:01:12: Final comments

 

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SHOW NOTES

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Mentioned in the interview:

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