Why Bitcoin is the Best Monetary Network with Lyn Alden - WBD549
The Peter McCormack Show
Peter McCormack
4.7 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2022
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Lyn Alden is a macroeconomist and investment strategist. In this interview, we discuss her latest paper on the Lightning Network (LN). We focus on the importance of Bitcoin's base layer, how LN compares to Visa and Mastercard, and how LN is connecting the world in new and revolutionary ways.
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To understand the Lightning Network, you need to go back and understand money: what attributes does it need to have, and what are the best means of facilitating these attributes?
Bitcoiners believe it to be the latest evolution in money. It has the best combination of features of any previous version of money: it is hard, auditable, portable, uncensorable, immutable, fungible, trustless and decentralised. Yet, Bitcoin's Achilles' heel, and the question that plagued its first decade, was how it could scale to become an effective medium of exchange.
The capacity of the Bitcoin network is purposefully limited to ensure that the network can remain as decentralised as possible. For Bitcoin to operate as a medium of exchange, a transactional layer needed to be built on top of the network.
This is the Lightning Network. It's designed to provide an instant and cheap payment system connecting the world.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Lighting opens up interesting things. If you're a programmer in a country, you can now get |
| 0:06.8 | international payments directly from them without going through that, their country's |
| 0:11.4 | banking system. It's basically peer-to-peer finance. |
| 0:14.0 | And then they have a unit that is hard, |
| 0:16.0 | that is harder than their local currency. |
| 0:18.0 | Basically, it connects global labor, global work, |
| 0:21.0 | global productivity in a way that didn't exist before. |
| 0:24.0 | Hello there, how are you all doing? |
| 0:26.0 | Welcome to the What Bitcoin Day podcast, which is brought to you by Gemini, |
| 0:30.0 | the only place I'm using for buying Bitcoin. |
| 0:32.0 | I'm your host Peter McCormack and today |
| 0:34.2 | I've got an interview with the legendary Lynn Alden where we're going to be discussing |
| 0:38.6 | why Bitcoin is the best monetary network and why it scales so well. |
| 0:43.0 | So while we were in New York a couple of months ago, |
| 0:45.6 | Lynn told me about a lightning network article |
| 0:48.6 | that she was writing, and I knew we had to get on to discuss it. |
| 0:51.8 | The article examines the relationship between a monetary asset being a store of value |
| 0:55.8 | versus being a medium of exchange and the paper just dropped. So make sure you head out to the show notes, check out the article itself, as it's a bit of a banger. |
| 1:06.1 | As ever, Lynn brings far on the subject, so I think there's plenty to gain from this discussion |
| 1:11.1 | for both those who aren't familiar with the lightning network and those who are active users. |
| 1:15.0 | Anyway, if you've got any questions about this, anything else, please feel free to get in touch. |
| 1:19.0 | My email address is hello at what Bitcoin did.com and I do try and reply to everyone. |
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