Hey everybody,
As many of you know, Let's Talk Bitcoin incorporates many experimental bitcoin technologies and one of them is Token Controlled Access or TCA (read about how it all got started here
Basically you prove to the website, platform or app that you own a certain bitcoin address. The platform then associates that address with your username on the website and grants you permissions or access to content or whatever, based on what kind of tokens are contained at that moment within your address.
So the problem is that all of this assumes that a user has a unique address which contains their tokens and those transactions happen on transparent, neutral and auditable bitcoin blockchain.
So here's the issue - The lightning network is an off-blockchain solution, and the world it's seen as a solution is one where bitcoin transactions are very expensive because they are only used for settlement of these payment channels. People talk about fees becoming as high as 10 or 15 dollars per tx since they are really being used to settle thousands of transactions.
If you just want to trade that might work well, but from what I can tell it will not work at all because in order to actually get the use out of the token you purchased, it needs to be in a wallet whose private keys you control.
Spells of Genesis would not be able to develop their game in the way they are planning, instead they would need to become a hub themselves and then all players would deposit their cards into spells of genesis, which is exactly the sort of centralized issue we've had all along.
I haven't had a strong opinion about the bigger or smaller blocks until this came up but if the lightning network can't support token controlled access that pushes me hard towards on-blockchain solutions that can.
If anybody has a solution or ideas, let's talk.
