The Lightning Network as Bitcoin's proof-of-stake. It represents an opportunity for users who want to run full nodes. It requires the committed expenditure of resources and right now not enough people are willing to do that without getting paid. More people would do it if they could participate in Lightning and earn fees. 'You would think that a group of miners that run fully validating nodes would want to become hubs. But it requires more maintenance, administration, and upgrades than they're used to. There is a culture divide between software and hardware.
Transcript
[AUDIENCE] One comment [you made], which I loved... you said Lightning was a bit like proof-of-stake. I just wanted to know, how does everything feed into that? How will things change?
...with those questions presented again. Sorry, babbling. [ANDREAS] That is something I said in the past. [What I meant] is, the Lightning Network involves doing local validation of the same consensus rules as Bitcoin.
But you earn fees by committing funds into a channel, which sounds very much like proof-of-stake to me. It represents a tremendous opportunity for users who want to run a Bitcoin full node. It takes quite a lot of commitment in data storage, CPU, RAM, and bandwidth. Not many people do that.
There are probably five to fifteen thousand users [running full nodes]. You are running one right there, I am running one as well. Great. How many people here are running a full node?
Ten people, wow. Go Singapore! [Laughter] It takes a commitment in resources and you don't get paid to do this. How many of you would run a full node if you could also run a Lightning node, commit some bitcoin, and earn fees?
Now you see... about twenty people. Clearly, incentives matter. Lightning is one way we can incentive [people to] run fully validating nodes...
and full archive nodes. Potentially, this could be a really important development in Bitcoin. I am very much in favour. You would think that miners, who run full validating nodes to collect transactions [from the mempool], would look at the Lightning Network and think, 'We could earn more fees by running Lightning on [existing] infrastructure.' 'We could extend into this space and be "hubs" for payments.' Why are they not doing that?
Because running Bitcoin and Lightning nodes [at that scale] would require software maintenance, system administrators, and security professionals. [They need to worry about] configuration, upgrades, and all kinds of things. You can't simply pay someone to rack and mount hardware [for that purpose]. It is an alien world.
It is not better or worse, it is just on the other side of that culture divide, which explains why miners... aren't jumping up and down saying, "Yeah, I want to run Lightning!" "We are best-positioned to be running hubs." It is not the same as racking mining hardware.