[jlrubin]

I've heard around the net that bitcoin can't really scale in terms of raw # of users -- even with LN, it's pretty capped (same number of users, but more txps).

If I want to build a web-scale startup how could I rely on something like LSATs to accomodate hockey stick growth?

[roasbeef]

I wouldn't necessarily agree that Bitcoin can't scale the number of raw users with something like LN. In fact, LN allows Bitcoin to reach a _wider array_ of users that may be priced out of doing routine transactions on the base chain. Excited to continue to see how the situation in El Salvador develops, as we now have our patient zero in the form of an entire country!

It is the case however that either scaling ceiling or costs prevent everyone from possibly _creating_ a root UTXO eventually. In this direction I'm excited about concepts like multi-party channels that allow users to conjointly share a UTXO and perform off-chain transactions using it. Another very powerful upgrade on the horizon for Bitcoin are the various flavors of covenants like BIP-119, that'll allow us to do things like open 100k Lightning channels in a single on chain transaction, in an irrevocable manner.

LSATs are interesting for start ups, as they allow for a lot of new experimentation w.r.t business models and pricing. Most say SaaS start ups typically allow for a free trial, then force users directly onto a subscription payment. Combined with the open nature of Bitcoin (anyone around the world can use it), LSATs and LN allows developers and entrepreneurs to potentially capture some of the user base that drops off after the free trial by advertising an in-between tier: stream the payment as you go.

Services like bitclouds.sh capture this spirit, as you just need to top off your account (zero log in, zero sign up, just sats) and you gain access to a VPS you can access. Sure you don't want to do anything very sensitivity in a instance like this, but it's perfect for running CI tests, building containers, etc.

The natural progression of LSAT powered bitclouds.sh-like services is a sort of programmatically driven distributed Function-as-a-Service network, wherein agents of the network are able to programmatically gain access to various computational resource or services all without being locked into any particular platform or having to be worried that a data leak will expose all their private information. So stuff like robots renting VPS space (payments streamed by the minute over LN) to be able to transcode some captured video to submit to a mechanical turk-like job listing.

[1]: https://www.bitclouds.sh/

[2]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0119.mediawi...

[buck-o]

One nice thing about lsats is that you can have access to some network-based endpoint gated by payments but that authorization kind of carries its state around with it (to an extent). So you can do micro-payments as opposed to... nano-payments where one small payment can be re-used to access gated content and the lsat itself can be shared, delegated, even potentially sold and re-sold. On its own this probably doesn't take care of the number of users that can onboard onto lightning (I heard on the net that something like the Check template verify opcode, OP_CTV, can help even more on that end), but it does expand the scale of what could be done with a single channel which itself expands on what can be done with a single UTXO.