The big picture and the focus

• Do not get tripped up the concept of "crypto", or "blockchain technology". The only use case for blockchain is censorship resistant money.

• At this moment the best investment is to hold Bitcoin.

• The businesses in Bitcoin aim to solve the following problem:

  1. Help overcome the technical challenges of securing non-custodial bitcoins: co-signing, vault, inheritance. See Casa, unchained capital, etc.
  2. Provide liquidity for moving the underlying bitcoin across layers or assets: trading, swap. See Boltz, Lnmarkets, Loop etc.
  3. Provide infrastrucure support for running nodes and other open source services: See voltage, umbrel, etc.
  4. Provide payment services, custodial or non-custodial, see Zeus, Phoenix, Breeze, wos, etc

• Our focus should be the last one, providing payment services on top of Lightning network.

Lightning Network (LN) is becoming the common language of Bitcoin

• Bitcoin is already proven to be a store of value, now LN can make Bitcoin a medium of exchange.

• Lightning is the common language of the Bitcoin economy, enabling interoperability between different subnetworks and protocols.

• Incentives within the Lightning network encourage the movement of Bitcoin and the use of Lightning as a rail for communication.

• The goal is to provide a seamless user experience for Lightning transactions and make Bitcoin a common language for payments.

Wallet / Lightning Service Provider (LSP)

• There is a need for both custodial and non-custodial solutions, with a growing focus on self-custodial options.

• Custodial lightning wallets

  • Walletofsatoshi is the business model
  • An accounting system + a big LN node

• Non-custodial lightning service

  • The business model is LSP: providing instant channels and liquidity for fees
  • Poster child in this category: Phoenix, Breez, Zeus

Bitcoin Bank / Mint

• This is really in early stage, but the potential is big.

• The model is based on the open source project LNBits - it is an accounting system sitting on top of a funding source, which usually is self custodial LN node.

• Besides LNBits, Chaumian ecash on top of Bitcoin is being developed as we speak. There are two flavors: cashu ecash and fedmint ecash. The latter is federated while the former is not.

Exmaple Bitcoin only businesses