Well done Ryan for doing this incredible work. I see no reason conceptually why it should not go exponential if you finish it; you are solving a big problem, and there are few people better than you to tackle it.
I have one observation to make, off of this highlight. There are no “legal questions” over what you choose to call “Smart Contracts”. I think it is a huge perception molding error to call Smart Contracts “Smart Contracts” They are no different conceptually to an “if, else, elseif” clause in any language, save in complexity. so there is no need to frame them in the context of real world paper contracts whose basis is the law of the State.
This is the same mistake that some people made by calling Bitcoin “money”. As soon as you do that, the public mistakenly believe that Bitcoin IS money and that it needs to be regulated as money. Now we can see with projects like Yours, that Bitcoin is in fact not money at all, but more like a distributed crytographic file system.
If you really want your Yours project to take off, I would stop bringing in these ambiguities and questions about the law to the table. You are only going to attract unwanted scrutiny to yourself, making investors take a “wait and see how the legal landscape plays our” approach, meaning you will run out of runway. It would be much better for you and Yours if you take Open Bazaar’s position; “This is what we are building. We have built it. Go and use it.” They do not talk about, “Compliance” and all the other strange things that only hurt software development.
Of course, Yours is your project, and you are free to discuss whatever you want in any way that you like. I am simply warning you that bringing this irrelevant speculation about the legal position of your software will kill it. You would be well advised to only talk about the problem you are solving, how far along you are towards completing it, and what you need to complete it.
You say that “what is needed is clarity over the mechanics and intent of the Lightning Network so that anybody can judge for themselves whether traditional finance regulation applies.” Letting lay people make up their own minds as to what software is is a very bad idea, and we have already seen what happens when you leave it to non technical people to classify software; you get BitLicense, KYC/AML, money transmitter licensing and all of that other business destroying guff.
Your example of Alice and Bob using Lightning could just as easily be called a “Message Routing Channel” rather than a “Payment Channel”. Lightning is like a telephone exchange, not a series of Payment Channels; and don’t you know that the internet itself is just a series of pipes?
Stop making categorical statements about what software is based only on the uses to which it is put by a few men. MySQL is not “Banking Software” it is a database. Lightning is not a, “Network of Payment Channels” it is a “Secure High Speed Message Exchange”.
You are, of course, free to say whatever you like, and take the consequences. I am simply warning you that your work will be very negatively impacted by making the claim that you are building a Financial Services product, rather than a High Speed Messaging Service.
Services like yours are desperately needed. I want you to succeed. Take a page out of Open Bazaar’s PR Playbook; stick to the facts, “I am writing some software”. What OB is doing is far more dangerous than Yours, and they got away with releasing it without any scrutiny, from inside the USA to boot.
