[nullc]

What the heck Joseph, when you first started talking about lightning I spent considerable effort trying to convince you that "hub" was a bad model for thinking about or describing these things.

Blockstream has no intention of ever monetizing lightning on Bitcoin in any way (nor do I have any idea how we could do so); our interests for it in the case of Bitcoin are only to promote and expand the use of Bitcoin. (We also hope to use it to enable other kinds of asset systems).

[josephpoon]

Sorry Greg! I didn't mean it in the sense that Blockstream is planning for a hub at all! I was being sarcastic, but perhaps that wasn't conveyed properly in text. I thought the "if they ever make one" was sufficient, but it didn't properly convey the cultural apprehension towards those types of systems and could be seen as deeply disrespectful. We were definitely in agreement from the start that decentralization in the protocol layer was immensely important.

I thought it was obvious that the parent poster was being ridiculous, but should've ended the post with :^)

[nullc]

No problem! Understood. It's a bit tough with so much crap being flung to stay clear of it. :)

[ptokb3]

nullc,

I'll take your word for it that Blockstream will never run a Lightning network hub.

We understand how the Lightning network works and you also have to admit that it has the potential to centralize into a few large hubs -- even if they aren't by Blockstream -- that will be able to provide the lowest transaction costs in order to keep track of user transaction data.

The problem with Lightning is that it's really far off, and it might not even work.

Meanwhile the network is breaking at the edges while we wait for this pie-in-the-sky solution. Increasing the blocksize is the best approach and it's safe to do as a hard-fork. The delay and push back from CoreDevs is what makes people not trust you. We've had enough "my transaction didn't confirm" posts.