What's the path to easy usability?

General
1

I think the way neptue cash establishes itself as a true privacy coin is by actually being used by real people (similar to monero).

However to do that the user experience needs to be as good as monero’s.

I’m guessing payments aren’t supposed to be done on the L1. So how close are we to instant payments on some sort of L2 + a very user friendly wallet that integrates that? I’m guessing the L2 will need to be some sort of ZK L2 right? As LN’s UX is horrible due to u needing to create payment channels etc.

Is there a clear roadmap to what an amazing UX would look like on neptune and a projective timeline?

2

These days, I believe when most people (not me) think of “easy payments” they mean a mobile wallet app.

I see two primary paths to an L1 mobile wallet app:

  1. app talks to a neptune full node that talks to neptune network.

  2. app is a neptune light node that itself talks to neptune network.

Some RPCs have recently been merged into neptune core that should make (1) possible now. Someone just needs to build the actual app. This could be any community member. I expect that multiple such apps will become available soon-ish. This is not much different from a mobile app for any other cryptocurrency.

Personally I am more excited about (2). Wallet apps that are first class citizens of the neptune p2p network. These require succinctness and a light mode neptune library that does not exist yet. So they will initially be more difficult to build, but I feel like they are far better for decentralization.

L2 Apps

I’ve heard talk of neptune apps that could be built with Lightning, or something similar. My own view is that Lightning has not really proven itself a big success, and is likely not the ultimate answer. Time will tell I guess.

3

But L1 payments fundamentally cannot work on Neptune as the TPS is super limited and takes so long.

Any bit of adoption and the max tps is hit.

So the solution HAS to be a L2 one, but as you said LN is pretty arse. So I just dont understand the vision here? A ZK L2?

4

I don’t know what the TPS limit is.

However, the majority of slowdown presently when sending tx is proving time. Fundamentally proving is the sender’s responsibility. We have a mechanism in place to submit tx with weak proofs and get them upgraded by other nodes on the network, and that slows the process down. In the future, hardware may advance to the point that proving is fast client side, and/or services could develop for that purpose. The point is that to determine the network’s true TPS, we should look at only transactions that already have a SingleProof.

I am not suggesting that L1 could scale to worldwide “cash” usage, so your point stands. I’m just saying that it is maybe not as slow as you are thinking, based on present experiences.

5

@aszepieniec addresses scalability in greater detail here.

and @sword-smith addresses it here

Also the whitepaper has some discussion.

I do think the question is important though and deserves ongoing thought and discussion.

6

yeah, so quoting from the reddit AMA it seems @aszepieniec is suggesting ZK rollups as a neptune native L2/scalability solution:

Allowing for layer-2 transactions (which don’t exist yet), the throughput capacity is much larger still. For rollups, which Neptune Cash natively supports because of its zk-STARK VM, the throughput capacity is limited by the proving power of the rollup operator. For Lightning, the throughput capacity is not limited at all.

Extrapolating further, if it were somehow possible to decentralize and create some kind of market incentive for the “rollup operator” role, then that might be interesting.