The purpose of a system is what it does.

And in modern times, we can't forget the concerned citizen calling the police when seeing young kids out on their own. So childhood has become semi-illegal, depending on the mood of the officers on duty.

Many such cases with crypto. Moderately good idea powered by a token becomes a Ponzi.

Bitcoin Lightning Network solves the routing payment problem via a series of cascading unlocks of value across the route. Nodes can change their fee policy independent of the network, so the bottleneck node could make more money in your scenario. Then those high fees attract additional nodes to provide liquidity along that route, bringing fee competition.

Bitcoin Lightning requires realtime communication with every node in the route. If you can communicate with enough nodes to negotiate passing a message, you could also just send the message.

So painful when people recommend bitcoin lightning. Its technically interesting... but complete nonsense to pay like $50 just for one "hop" of the payment chain. It would be an upfront cost of hundreds to get a payment chain you planned on spending fractions of a penny per day/week/month

Hm? As I understood it, you lock up some money, and then secretly agree to reallocate it with the Lightning protocol, and then eventually get it back in the latest allocation. So it costs $50 and then you get $50 back - or $60 or $40.

This is an interesting thing when financial institutions do it between themselves. It's completely useless as a consumer-facing payment system. Consumers aren't going to plan in advance how much money to lock up, that's just stupid.

I assume you're not referring to the transaction fee because last I heard, it's not currently $25.

Your brain on conservative propaganda: "social distancing is nazism".

One thing I've been listening for in the podcasts is a discussion of equity. I'd love to get the company's perspective on equity, options, liquidity, etc. The Silicon Valley Way (tm) of using stock options to "juice" compensation while injecting large amounts of risk and drama into the employee's tax returns is certainly something I'd like to hear Bryan's (and Oxide's) take on.

I can tell you that we receive options pretty much like any other startup. Early exercise is a nice perk.

Are the options grants as transparent (internally) as the cash?

There is effectively no difference internally than externally here. There’s no like, big list of who exactly has what amount of equity. Of course, talking about compensation with your coworkers is a legally protected activity, and I have discussed the topic with coworkers before.

Personally, I don’t really care how much equity my co-workers have.

This implies that the goal of compensation transparency is to satisfy people's curiosity. I don't think that's the case. Regardless of how it's denominated, I think the goal of compensation transparency is ... uh... equity... no pun intended.

Here's how a printer company could gain massive market share:

- Open firmware and interfaces to the hardware

- Make a profit on the sale of the printer hardware

- Open spec for any ink manufacturer to create cartridges

I don't think so, unless you're talking about professional-grade printers for businesses who print a LOT and look at the TCO of printers before buying them. Consumers buy literally the cheapest printer available at the store. Manufacturers have had to start shrinking the amount of ink in starter cartridges just to get consumers to buy any cartridges at all since otherwise people would buy a new printer instead of buying cartridges.

A printer that's actually profitable without any ink sales is going to cost hundreds of dollars more than any consumer would be willing to pay.

Here's how a printer company could go bankrupt immediately:

- Fixate on open firmware and force all third parties to open source their code (because yes, third party firmware vendors are necessary to develop a working printer system)

- Make a puny profit on durable hardware

- Miss out on the only true recurring revenue you can have

It’s like unlimited data cell plans, if one does it they’ll all have to do it.

I'd love to see it, but realistically that's not the world we're living in. 99% of people will just pick whatever box in the store that looks snazzy and is cheap.

There are probably a gazillion patents around printing, I wonder if it's even feasible to bring new hardware to market.

Future generations aren't voting in the next election.

Possible, yes. Probable?

The other tradeoff comes with ease of debugging. Compile-time vs runtime errors. Dredging through microservice logs vs stack traces from the monolith.