🐮 Sacred cows

On today’s Supply Shock, Pete Rizzo trades notes with Paul Sztorc (Layer2 Labs) on Lightning, Core’s authority, relay policy and how Bitcoin actually advances.

Sztorc says Lightning drifted into “we’ll fix it later” mode — HTLC limits, liquidity juggling, new acronyms every quarter — while crowding out other L2 experiments.

He’s pro-L2, anti-monoculture: keep L1 minimal and backwards-compatible; let multiple L2s compete (Sztorc’s drivechains/BIP-300 among them). 

But Sztorc still doesn’t pull any punches.

‘[Lightning] is still one of the biggest sacred cows,” he said. “So I recognize that people worship the Lightning Network, but to me it is clear that it will go down in history — I think at certain points it has actually crossed the line into overt fraud and it will be talked about like with Theronos and Fyre Festival and stuff like that. Just mass delusions of people just all going all in.”

Sztorc otherwise reckons that Core vs. Knots feels like a bad fork of 2017: Core is slow and insular; Knots chose a losing battlefield and leaned on panic. 

There’s still a practical way through the disagreement in any case. Run Core as-is and add options at the edges.

Full episode on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and X.

This newsletter was created with assistance from AI tooling.

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