9 ms·

Lightning Network Skepticism

55 points by kushti 11y ago

3dfan 11y ago
Is there any rationale for LN? As I understand the situation: Bitcoin has a hardcoded limit for the number of transactions that can be processed every 10 minutes. Having such a limit is a good thing, because nobody can stress the network with an unlimited number of transactions. But the limit should be close to the normal usage of the network. So the hardcoded limit should rather be a setting that gets updated from time to time. So there are the Bitcoin Unlimited guys who propose a client that has a setting for the limit. And there are the LN guys, who propose a whole new layer on top of Bitcoin. Why?
- pstrateman 11y ago
  Lightning (which is shorthand for Hash Locked Bi-Directional Payment Channels) is a trust-less net settlement system built by leveraging the smart contracting capabilities of bitcoin. Such a system enables transactions to occur between a limited set of participants without the requirement that the entire world know about them. Avoiding telling the entire world reduces the cost of transaction processing by many orders of magnitude (something on the order of 1,000,000 times cheaper).
  - 3dfan 11y ago
    reduces the cost of transaction processing I never heard anybody complain that the transaction processing is too expensive. Both miners and users seem to be quite happy.
    - tdryja 11y ago
      Check out /r/Bitcoin sometime for users complaining about transactions fees :) (Actually more the threat that some day there will be significant fees) Unfortunately Bitcoin has often been oversold as being "free"; but if transactions are free, and there's a fixed number of coins to mine, who pays for this whole network in 30 years? The motivation behind the design of LN is to minimize the number of transactions which need to be globally verified (which has a cost) while still adhering to the general model of Bitcoin (decentralized, pseudonymous, etc). You're right though that with tx fees being on the order of ~0.05 USD, you don't really need LN yet. I've long assumed that fees would become significant, pushing out some use cases. That's already happened with e.g satoshidice.
      - 3dfan 11y ago
        Uh oh ... for all I know, r/bitcoin is not a free community but gets heavily censored. A more balanced perspective can be found on r/btc: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc https://www.reddit.com/r/btc So you say LN is to solve future problems. Because transactions are free and in 30 years nobody will do the mining for free. Well, thats why bitcoin has fees. And a mechanism to let the market decide on those fees. This has been planned from the beginning. From what I can see, all is fine with bitcoin. And there is no need for the complexity LN brings.
        josephpoon 11y ago
        It's already infeasible to directly make a single spend of $0.0001 on the blockchain itself (transaction fees are $0.02-$0.05).
        3dfan 11y ago
        What is the use case of spending $0.0001?
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        Taek 11y ago
        Downloading a webpage, for example. Sending an email, giving someone an upvote, making use of a caching service. Basically any sort of payment you would want to do at the machine level. If I'm uploading a file to you, I would want you to pay per MB because I'm not sure if you're going to leave after you have 50% of the file.
      - freework 11y ago
        > who pays for this whole network in 30 years? Why pays to seed torrents? Who pays to run NTP servers? Who pays for running game servers? Its is wrong to assume that something has to be profitable in order for it to exist.
    - everlast32 11y ago
      For the past month there has been a backlog of 6000 to 10,000 transactions in the mempool. This is causing nodes to go offline. There are about 500 to 1000 rasberry pies operating as full nodes on the network and their 1 GB of ram is not enough to hold the backlog of tx. Blockstream is proposing to raise the limit to 2MB 2 years from now. That would be a disaster for the network.
- tdryja 11y ago
  "Bitcoin Unlimited" has no maximum block size, hence the name. There are many problems which arise from unbounded transaction rates in Bitcoin. The most fundamental is that long term the coinbase reward is zero, and transaction fees are the only reason to create new blocks. Without artificial scarcity of block space (artificial in the sense of beyond what hardware can support) transaction fees would tend to zero, and mining would no longer generate revenue. LN is proposed to allow many users and many transactions (when nodes cooperate) while keeping the security properties of Bitcoin (when nodes don't).
  - freework 11y ago
    Mining does not need to be profitable. People always make the mistake in thinking that if mining ceases to be profitable that mining would suddenly stop. That is simply not how it works. It is more economical to buy tomatoes at the grocery store, but that doesn't stop people from growing tomatoes in their backyard.
    - maaku 11y ago
      Mining costs millions of dollars per day in electricity costs. I guess we can just expect a few people to burn a hole in their pocket for the good of the network?
      - Taek 11y ago
        Sorry to be pedantic, but I do believe the daily cost of mining is closer to $250,000 - $750,000. Not a small number, but also not millions per day.
        maaku 11y ago
        I'm a physicist so naturally I do all back-of-the-envelope calculations to one-significant figure with rounding at each step. :) My own estimation is between $400k per day (hard lower bound) and $800k per day depending on assumptions about hardware efficiency, although around $100k / day was added in the last week in a trend that is continuing, so $1MM/day will very quickly be accurate.
- martindevans 11y ago
  Roughly: LN allows you to transact instantly, but with a limited group of people (it takes one normal bitcoin transaction to setup your group, but then transactions are instant). Whereas bitcoin allows you to transact slowly (block confirmation time, i.e. ~10mins) with anyone.
  - pstrateman 11y ago
    Actually it lets you transact instantly with anybody you can construct a route to. That should be essentially everybody with even a pretty loosely connected graph.
    - mrblockchain 11y ago
      How do you know? There isn't even a working prototype yet!
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  The lightning network paper at https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ addresses the rationale for its creation.
3dfan 11y ago
In case the blockchain forks, it will get really interesting. And how I understand it, some people will get stinking rich. Because you can then effectively double every old coin by mixing it with new coins. After that, it is valid and independently spendable on both forks. So people in the know will probably buy old coins like mad, mix them with new coins and immediately sell them on both chains. Then use the money to buy old coins again.
- adrianmacneil 11y ago
  Not how it works. If there was a fork, then coins on each side would become independent (you could not mix them together). Since the current price represents the total demand, the market cap must equal the sum of the parts, so coins on each side would become less valuable. I would expect the aggregate would actually go down, due to lack of faith in Bitcoin developers being able to get shit done (and possibility for other coins to pick up the slack).
  - 3dfan 11y ago
    The fork that is on the horizon looks like this: On chain A blocks bigger then 1mb will be valid On chain B blocks bigger then 1mb will be invalid Now when you sign a transaction and broadcast it, it will get executed on both chains. Unless the transaction has coins in one of its inputs that already went through a block bigger then 1mb. Then the transaction is only valid in chain A. This way you can double the value of a coins that are spendable on both chains. Because now you can sell them once on chain A and once on chain B.
    - josephpoon 11y ago
      This is correct. The simplest way to do this would be to include in your transaction a spend deriving from the coinbase block reward after the fork.
    - adrianmacneil 11y ago
      Right. But economically speaking, if exchanges started allowing you to trade both coins against each other, then supply has doubled while total Bitcoin demand remained constant. So the price would tank to at least 50% of its previous level on each side of the fork to reflect the new equilibrium. Anyway, I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, because: 1) It requires 50% of miners to cooperate to even create a >1MB chain 2) Anyone using the old chain would be insecure, due to lack of mining power making it susceptible to a 51% attack. 3) If that many miners were on board, it's unlikely that existing core developers would opt to continue working on an insure fork rather than admit defeat. 4) If that many miners were on board, it's unlikely that exchanges would opt to confuse users by letting them separately trade two different types of Bitcoin, rather than just switching to the more secure, more popular chain.
pstrateman 11y ago
The authors primary concern is that lightning will produce a hub and spoke model. The design has been a true peer-to-peer payments network without hubs for quite a while[1]. [1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2015-July/000019.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...
- mrblockchain 11y ago
  So if Lightning is better than Bitcoin at being a P2P payments network, why not just build an altcoin?!
  - supermari0_ 11y ago
    Because there's no good reason to implement it as an altcoin.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
josephpoon 11y ago
> It seems I wasn’t the only one with this concern as there’s been a fairly recent pivot away from the hub-and-spoke network topology to a more organic, wallet-to-wallet routing. The network is now envisioned as a more pure p2p payment layer without those large scale payment hubs. As the co-author of the Lightning Network, this is not true, there has been no pivot. The design has always designed around wallet-wallet topologies from the beginning (try doing a Find for the word "hub" in the paper). Will there be nodes more connected than others? Of course. But with LN, they are designed to be interchangeable and formless. It may look like other P2P topologies of ever-shifting "supernodes", but never irreplaceable "hubs" like Visa or Fedex's single primary Memphis, TN hub -- in fact you'd be challenged to find a P2P network with a topology of only a handful of static hubs (this makes sense because establishing connectivity is cheap in a virtual system, opposed to physical infrastructure like wires or an airport). I'm not particularly happy that "small-block skeptics" are using LN as some kind of punching bag against their pet ideas of who the enemies are (the arguments have become highly politicized in the bitcoin community). The LN paper itself presumes bigger blocks, and have never argued that LN is the sole solution, merely that a large component of scalability needs to occur via moving transactions off-chain. The alternatives are a failure of mining incentives (whether it be low-value transactions get crowded off bitcoin and moves to a bitcoin-backed centralized ledger, or the fee-market breaks down and miners reduce fees far too low due to commons externalities). There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems. It is is akin to assuming that systems are easily capable of a broadcast topology -- that everyone in the world can be on the same wifi access point. Bigger block capacity is desirable, but it's also desirable to be able to instantly transact a payment of $0.0001 without everyone in the world processing that payment. (I'm going to be intermittent with computer access today due to the holidays but I will reply to email or respond tomorrow :P)
- mike_hearn 11y ago
  The design has always designed around wallet-wallet topologies from the beginning (try doing a Find for the word "hub" in the paper). This is very clearly not true, and you don't do yourself any favours by saying such things. The paper discusses hubs that need to provide various guarantees, like being continuously online and routing payments for arbitrary third parties. This is not at all the same thing as a wallet and Chris is right to point out the distinction. With respect to your point about becoming a punching bag, I'm afraid I am not particularly sympathetic. When Blockstream started floating LN as an alternative to raising the block size (which is what they have consistently done) you should have condemned that and them right away, loudly and clearly, as it was obviously an absurd suggestion and not going to happen anywhere near in time. LN is a highly theoretical system that doesn't have any implementation that ordinary people could actually use. There is no practical experience with running such a network. It doesn't even have answers to basic design questions, like how routing and addressing would work. The chance of project failure is therefore quite high, as is always the case for research projects. Thus to imply LN is some sort of dead-cert thing is hubris. Academics have been producing e-cash white papers for decades. Almost none of them actually turned into real-world systems. Nobody will know if LN actually works better than Bitcoin does (or did) until it's built and has competitive usability, which is a very long time away. > There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems That's not very charitable is it? I can assure you, the CS understanding of the people who disagree with you (like Chris, Gavin, myself and Satoshi) is just fine, but I have to question your understanding of engineering. The calculations were done years ago that showed for typical payment network loads that global broadcast could work just fine. Computer science doesn't mean "some algorithms never work and some always work". It just gives us the tools to analyse costs. By simply ignoring complexity and engineering costs of LN, as well as some rather tricky algorithmic costs around pathfinding in global non-suspended networks, you can obviously make any actually existing system look bad in favour of a theoretical proposal.
dgenr8 11y ago
I'd be a lot more excited about Lighting Mightwork if there were one, 1, ONE merchant accepting GreenAddress. From a user perspective, the benefits of GreenAddress were similar (instant confirmation), and the hurdles to adoption were actually lower. GreenAddress and Lightning each require both sides -- sender and receiver -- to use something different, and more complex, than a regular bitcoin transaction. They both have to restart with 0 network effect. GreenAddress never got anywhere with users. Why will Lightning be any different? Because bitcoin itself won't work very well anymore?
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
throwaway95487 11y ago
Lightning networks can be huge, it just depends on the implementation. For example if you check Ethereum's and compare it to Bitcoin's, you see that both can be pretty helpful I their own ways: http://www.arcturnus.com/ethereum-lightning-network-and-beyond/ http://www.arcturnus.com/ethereum-lightning-network-and-beyo...
markkat 11y ago
My concern is that LN puts a premium on unpredictable transaction behavior, and private transactions are unpredictable by nature. Thus, LN trades privacy for efficiency. It's odd considering the struggle to keep the blocksize near 1MB for the purpose of keeping bitcoin decentralized. LN could centralize by making private transactions very expensive.

55 points by kushti 11y ago

3dfan 11y ago

Is there any rationale for LN? As I understand the situation: Bitcoin has a hardcoded limit for the number of transactions that can be processed every 10 minutes. Having such a limit is a good thing, because nobody can stress the network with an unlimited number of transactions. But the limit should be close to the normal usage of the network. So the hardcoded limit should rather be a setting that gets updated from time to time. So there are the Bitcoin Unlimited guys who propose a client that has a setting for the limit. And there are the LN guys, who propose a whole new layer on top of Bitcoin. Why?

pstrateman 11y ago
Lightning (which is shorthand for Hash Locked Bi-Directional Payment Channels) is a trust-less net settlement system built by leveraging the smart contracting capabilities of bitcoin. Such a system enables transactions to occur between a limited set of participants without the requirement that the entire world know about them. Avoiding telling the entire world reduces the cost of transaction processing by many orders of magnitude (something on the order of 1,000,000 times cheaper).
- 3dfan 11y ago
  reduces the cost of transaction processing I never heard anybody complain that the transaction processing is too expensive. Both miners and users seem to be quite happy.
  - tdryja 11y ago
    Check out /r/Bitcoin sometime for users complaining about transactions fees :) (Actually more the threat that some day there will be significant fees) Unfortunately Bitcoin has often been oversold as being "free"; but if transactions are free, and there's a fixed number of coins to mine, who pays for this whole network in 30 years? The motivation behind the design of LN is to minimize the number of transactions which need to be globally verified (which has a cost) while still adhering to the general model of Bitcoin (decentralized, pseudonymous, etc). You're right though that with tx fees being on the order of ~0.05 USD, you don't really need LN yet. I've long assumed that fees would become significant, pushing out some use cases. That's already happened with e.g satoshidice.
    - 3dfan 11y ago
      Uh oh ... for all I know, r/bitcoin is not a free community but gets heavily censored. A more balanced perspective can be found on r/btc: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc https://www.reddit.com/r/btc So you say LN is to solve future problems. Because transactions are free and in 30 years nobody will do the mining for free. Well, thats why bitcoin has fees. And a mechanism to let the market decide on those fees. This has been planned from the beginning. From what I can see, all is fine with bitcoin. And there is no need for the complexity LN brings.
      - josephpoon 11y ago
        It's already infeasible to directly make a single spend of $0.0001 on the blockchain itself (transaction fees are $0.02-$0.05).
        3dfan 11y ago
        What is the use case of spending $0.0001?
        deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
        Taek 11y ago
        Downloading a webpage, for example. Sending an email, giving someone an upvote, making use of a caching service. Basically any sort of payment you would want to do at the machine level. If I'm uploading a file to you, I would want you to pay per MB because I'm not sure if you're going to leave after you have 50% of the file.
    - freework 11y ago
      > who pays for this whole network in 30 years? Why pays to seed torrents? Who pays to run NTP servers? Who pays for running game servers? Its is wrong to assume that something has to be profitable in order for it to exist.
  - everlast32 11y ago
    For the past month there has been a backlog of 6000 to 10,000 transactions in the mempool. This is causing nodes to go offline. There are about 500 to 1000 rasberry pies operating as full nodes on the network and their 1 GB of ram is not enough to hold the backlog of tx. Blockstream is proposing to raise the limit to 2MB 2 years from now. That would be a disaster for the network.
tdryja 11y ago
"Bitcoin Unlimited" has no maximum block size, hence the name. There are many problems which arise from unbounded transaction rates in Bitcoin. The most fundamental is that long term the coinbase reward is zero, and transaction fees are the only reason to create new blocks. Without artificial scarcity of block space (artificial in the sense of beyond what hardware can support) transaction fees would tend to zero, and mining would no longer generate revenue. LN is proposed to allow many users and many transactions (when nodes cooperate) while keeping the security properties of Bitcoin (when nodes don't).
- freework 11y ago
  Mining does not need to be profitable. People always make the mistake in thinking that if mining ceases to be profitable that mining would suddenly stop. That is simply not how it works. It is more economical to buy tomatoes at the grocery store, but that doesn't stop people from growing tomatoes in their backyard.
  - maaku 11y ago
    Mining costs millions of dollars per day in electricity costs. I guess we can just expect a few people to burn a hole in their pocket for the good of the network?
    - Taek 11y ago
      Sorry to be pedantic, but I do believe the daily cost of mining is closer to $250,000 - $750,000. Not a small number, but also not millions per day.
      - maaku 11y ago
        I'm a physicist so naturally I do all back-of-the-envelope calculations to one-significant figure with rounding at each step. :) My own estimation is between $400k per day (hard lower bound) and $800k per day depending on assumptions about hardware efficiency, although around $100k / day was added in the last week in a trend that is continuing, so $1MM/day will very quickly be accurate.
martindevans 11y ago
Roughly: LN allows you to transact instantly, but with a limited group of people (it takes one normal bitcoin transaction to setup your group, but then transactions are instant). Whereas bitcoin allows you to transact slowly (block confirmation time, i.e. ~10mins) with anyone.
- pstrateman 11y ago
  Actually it lets you transact instantly with anybody you can construct a route to. That should be essentially everybody with even a pretty loosely connected graph.
  - mrblockchain 11y ago
    How do you know? There isn't even a working prototype yet!
TD-Linux 11y ago
The lightning network paper at https://lightning.network/ https://lightning.network/ addresses the rationale for its creation.

3dfan 11y ago

In case the blockchain forks, it will get really interesting. And how I understand it, some people will get stinking rich. Because you can then effectively double every old coin by mixing it with new coins. After that, it is valid and independently spendable on both forks. So people in the know will probably buy old coins like mad, mix them with new coins and immediately sell them on both chains. Then use the money to buy old coins again.

adrianmacneil 11y ago
Not how it works. If there was a fork, then coins on each side would become independent (you could not mix them together). Since the current price represents the total demand, the market cap must equal the sum of the parts, so coins on each side would become less valuable. I would expect the aggregate would actually go down, due to lack of faith in Bitcoin developers being able to get shit done (and possibility for other coins to pick up the slack).
- 3dfan 11y ago
  The fork that is on the horizon looks like this: On chain A blocks bigger then 1mb will be valid On chain B blocks bigger then 1mb will be invalid Now when you sign a transaction and broadcast it, it will get executed on both chains. Unless the transaction has coins in one of its inputs that already went through a block bigger then 1mb. Then the transaction is only valid in chain A. This way you can double the value of a coins that are spendable on both chains. Because now you can sell them once on chain A and once on chain B.
  - josephpoon 11y ago
    This is correct. The simplest way to do this would be to include in your transaction a spend deriving from the coinbase block reward after the fork.
  - adrianmacneil 11y ago
    Right. But economically speaking, if exchanges started allowing you to trade both coins against each other, then supply has doubled while total Bitcoin demand remained constant. So the price would tank to at least 50% of its previous level on each side of the fork to reflect the new equilibrium. Anyway, I think this is extremely unlikely to happen, because: 1) It requires 50% of miners to cooperate to even create a >1MB chain 2) Anyone using the old chain would be insecure, due to lack of mining power making it susceptible to a 51% attack. 3) If that many miners were on board, it's unlikely that existing core developers would opt to continue working on an insure fork rather than admit defeat. 4) If that many miners were on board, it's unlikely that exchanges would opt to confuse users by letting them separately trade two different types of Bitcoin, rather than just switching to the more secure, more popular chain.

pstrateman 11y ago

The authors primary concern is that lightning will produce a hub and spoke model. The design has been a true peer-to-peer payments network without hubs for quite a while[1]. [1] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2015-July/000019.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...

mrblockchain 11y ago
So if Lightning is better than Bitcoin at being a P2P payments network, why not just build an altcoin?!
- supermari0_ 11y ago
  Because there's no good reason to implement it as an altcoin.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

josephpoon 11y ago

> It seems I wasn’t the only one with this concern as there’s been a fairly recent pivot away from the hub-and-spoke network topology to a more organic, wallet-to-wallet routing. The network is now envisioned as a more pure p2p payment layer without those large scale payment hubs. As the co-author of the Lightning Network, this is not true, there has been no pivot. The design has always designed around wallet-wallet topologies from the beginning (try doing a Find for the word "hub" in the paper). Will there be nodes more connected than others? Of course. But with LN, they are designed to be interchangeable and formless. It may look like other P2P topologies of ever-shifting "supernodes", but never irreplaceable "hubs" like Visa or Fedex's single primary Memphis, TN hub -- in fact you'd be challenged to find a P2P network with a topology of only a handful of static hubs (this makes sense because establishing connectivity is cheap in a virtual system, opposed to physical infrastructure like wires or an airport). I'm not particularly happy that "small-block skeptics" are using LN as some kind of punching bag against their pet ideas of who the enemies are (the arguments have become highly politicized in the bitcoin community). The LN paper itself presumes bigger blocks, and have never argued that LN is the sole solution, merely that a large component of scalability needs to occur via moving transactions off-chain. The alternatives are a failure of mining incentives (whether it be low-value transactions get crowded off bitcoin and moves to a bitcoin-backed centralized ledger, or the fee-market breaks down and miners reduce fees far too low due to commons externalities). There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems. It is is akin to assuming that systems are easily capable of a broadcast topology -- that everyone in the world can be on the same wifi access point. Bigger block capacity is desirable, but it's also desirable to be able to instantly transact a payment of $0.0001 without everyone in the world processing that payment. (I'm going to be intermittent with computer access today due to the holidays but I will reply to email or respond tomorrow :P)

mike_hearn 11y ago
The design has always designed around wallet-wallet topologies from the beginning (try doing a Find for the word "hub" in the paper). This is very clearly not true, and you don't do yourself any favours by saying such things. The paper discusses hubs that need to provide various guarantees, like being continuously online and routing payments for arbitrary third parties. This is not at all the same thing as a wallet and Chris is right to point out the distinction. With respect to your point about becoming a punching bag, I'm afraid I am not particularly sympathetic. When Blockstream started floating LN as an alternative to raising the block size (which is what they have consistently done) you should have condemned that and them right away, loudly and clearly, as it was obviously an absurd suggestion and not going to happen anywhere near in time. LN is a highly theoretical system that doesn't have any implementation that ordinary people could actually use. There is no practical experience with running such a network. It doesn't even have answers to basic design questions, like how routing and addressing would work. The chance of project failure is therefore quite high, as is always the case for research projects. Thus to imply LN is some sort of dead-cert thing is hubris. Academics have been producing e-cash white papers for decades. Almost none of them actually turned into real-world systems. Nobody will know if LN actually works better than Bitcoin does (or did) until it's built and has competitive usability, which is a very long time away. > There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems That's not very charitable is it? I can assure you, the CS understanding of the people who disagree with you (like Chris, Gavin, myself and Satoshi) is just fine, but I have to question your understanding of engineering. The calculations were done years ago that showed for typical payment network loads that global broadcast could work just fine. Computer science doesn't mean "some algorithms never work and some always work". It just gives us the tools to analyse costs. By simply ignoring complexity and engineering costs of LN, as well as some rather tricky algorithmic costs around pathfinding in global non-suspended networks, you can obviously make any actually existing system look bad in favour of a theoretical proposal.

dgenr8 11y ago

I'd be a lot more excited about Lighting Mightwork if there were one, 1, ONE merchant accepting GreenAddress. From a user perspective, the benefits of GreenAddress were similar (instant confirmation), and the hurdles to adoption were actually lower. GreenAddress and Lightning each require both sides -- sender and receiver -- to use something different, and more complex, than a regular bitcoin transaction. They both have to restart with 0 network effect. GreenAddress never got anywhere with users. Why will Lightning be any different? Because bitcoin itself won't work very well anymore?

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

throwaway95487 11y ago

Lightning networks can be huge, it just depends on the implementation. For example if you check Ethereum's and compare it to Bitcoin's, you see that both can be pretty helpful I their own ways: http://www.arcturnus.com/ethereum-lightning-network-and-beyond/ http://www.arcturnus.com/ethereum-lightning-network-and-beyo...

markkat 11y ago

My concern is that LN puts a premium on unpredictable transaction behavior, and private transactions are unpredictable by nature. Thus, LN trades privacy for efficiency. It's odd considering the struggle to keep the blocksize near 1MB for the purpose of keeping bitcoin decentralized. LN could centralize by making private transactions very expensive.