Just for fun I'm going to answer one of the brand new accounts spreading FUD about the #LiquidNetwork. Liquid is an inter-exchange settlement network - that means it's for exchanges, OTCs, traders, market makers etc. L-BTC isn't for putting into cold storage for your descendants.
Liquid is designed to solve a problem: moving large amounts of BTC very fast and reliably. On-chain transactions are prone to variance and exchanges typically require more than 1 confirmation, so full settlement can take an hour or more. Full settlement in L-BTC is minutes.
Bitcoin is trustless and permissionless. Corrrect! Liquid sits on top of Bitcoin and uses a distributed trust model. If you're a trader (remember what Liquid is for) you trust the exchange with custody of your coins while trading - so now you trust a federation of exchanges.
I think that's a pretty good tradeoff for near instant $BTC transfers PLUS confidential transactions which will prevent front-running. Imagine you're a OTC desk and want to send 10,000 coins to Bitfinex. Now you can do it privately.
Once Liquid wallets are released, traders will be able to move L-BTC on and off exchange to hardware wallets at a moments notice, which reduces custody risk for the exchanges, and reduces risk of theft for traders. So it's not just "beneficent" for "Big Players." It benefits all.
Lastly, isn't it good that Liquid is built by the most respected Bitcoin developers? I mean, this is a security critical system that will transact a lot of value. Btw, @wtogami isn't THAT respected ;)
Or did you mean devs that work on open source projects shouldn't work on things that can generate revenue for Blockstream? Keep in mind that most of the Liquid codebase is FOSS (that means free) & available on github.com/ElementsProject along with all the *other* free stuff from us.
And, the #LiquidNetwork is just one implementation of a #sidechain. This sidechain is for inter-exchange settlement. There can be others, and serving other purposes. The code is there for you to use. Maybe after you set a Twitter profile picture you can take a look? Peace out. ☮️
