F the snoops - Stacker News Saturday Newsletter

Happy holidays, stackers!

Upcoming AMAs

We don't currently have AMAs scheduled for this week, but are working on it. Watch the SN Twitter for AMA announcements.

Top Posts

Lightning network growth has slowed and @Birkeland thinks it's due the UX of running a node. The argument is familiar: nodes need to be regularly online and find good peers; this asks too much of the average user; instead, users will choose centralized and custodial solutions - the antithesis of Bitcoin.
- Running a Lightning Node is Hard—Users Need Good UX
The Lightning network produces publicly available information as it runs. As with all public information, it's subject to collection, monitoring, and as @nullcount warns, surveillance.
- Lightning Surveillance as a Service is Here!
Gigi lays out A Vision for a Value-enabled Web. Without digitally native money, online services and goods recoup their costs through hacks on attention, identity, and all manner of inefficient schemes better suited to real money being paid in real time. Gigi is ahead of his time as usual - the productivity Bitcoin will unlock on the web goes largely ignored, even by bitcoiners.
- https://dergigi.com/2022/12/18/a-vision-for-a-value-enabled-web/
- SN Discussion
Liana is a WIP Bitcoin wallet from Revault that provides an alternative, timelocked spending path for the Bitcoin it stores. Liana's wallet allows you to give a secondary key to an heir, for instance, that can only be used to spend the Bitcoin in an inheritance scenario.
- https://github.com/revault/liana
- SN Discussion
Drivechain founder Paul Sztorc raised $3m for Layer 2 Labs to continue development on the Bip300 sidechain, "improve Bitcoin's UX", and to work on "high-risk, high-reward problems" like "prediction markets and a resurrected Namecoin."
- https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/bitcoin-company-layer-2-labs-raises-3m
- SN Discussion