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Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine
- feikal 9y agonice site. what does "capacity" mean? satoshis? mbtc?
- feikal 9y agoany good instruction on how to run an own node?
- sunsu 9y agoWhat does "capacity" mean in this context?
- Pada 9y agoThe sum of all channels capacity measured in satoshis.
- jerkstate 9y agowhat does capacity mean in that context?
- rymate1234 9y agoIt's the amount of bitcoins currently in the network
- Pada 9y agoWhen a user opens a channel it has to lock up some BTC. That is called channel capacity because for payments to be routed through that channel (even other people's payments) that channel at least needs to have the same or more amount of BTC available. If you want to route a bigger payment you need to find a channel with more capacity.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- zik 9y agoLightning Network seems very confusing. It's unclear to a casual user what "capacity" is and what it means to them. Or what any of this means, really.
- Pada 9y agoI don't think the end user needs to know anything about capacities or other technical details the same way a user doesn't need to know their internet speed. The end user experience will be having a hot wallet in your computer/phone or online service like coinbase that will handle all the routing, channel setup, etc for you. Like when you use bittorrent you don't need to manually connect to peers, the bittorrent client handles that for you.
- sp332 9y agoI found this article very helpful in explaining generally what happens in the lightning network. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/bitcoins-lightning-network-a-deep-dive/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/bitcoins-lightni...
- mOneThousand 9y agoAlice and Bob each commits $5 to open a channel. The capacity of that channel is $10. They can make as many transactions as they want between them
- GranPC 9y agoWhere does the $10 come into play? Can they only transfer up to $10's worth of currency?
- shlorn 9y agoFrom what I understand--yes. They would need to "settle" their transfer on the blockchain and then open a new channel. The solution to this from what I've read is an IOU mechanism and a third party that has a channel with almost everyone. If the third party is rich then each channel is theoretically huge. ALICE --(IOU to bob for 10k)---> CAROL --(IOU from alice for 10k)--> BOB
- tCfD 9y agoWhat happens to the engine trustless selling point of bitcoin when the only plausible scalability solutions entail reintroducing trusted third parties?
- daurnimator 9y agoThe great thing about lightning is that it doesn't introduce trusted third parties: it only requires that nodes have commited funds.
- betawaffle 9y agoYou don't need to trust the third parties, that's the point.
- remarkEon 9y agoI'm a bit of a BTC novice here, so help me understand something: Does this not mean that on the LN there will necessarily be BTC that's essentially "floating" in the network, that hasn't settled on the Blockchain? What does this mean for liquidity and the integrity of the network in general?
- AlexCoventry 9y agoWhat are the regulatory hurdles to operating a lightning node in the US? It makes you a money transmitter, right?
- Pada 9y agoI think the same could be said of any bitcoin node.
- xur17 9y agoBut a regular bitcoin node isn't transferring money. It's simply tracking the state of the network. A lightning node is creating transactions and financial agreements with other nodes in the network.
- Pada 9y agoBitcoin nodes propagate transactions created by users as well.
- FriedPickles 9y agoThey relay information about transactions, but do not receive and resend value as a lightning node does.
- ozmbie 9y agoYou're transmitting cryptocurrency, not fiat. So I'm unsure how it works.
- FriedPickles 9y agoIf FinCEN rules that operating a lightning node constitutes acting as a money transmitter, it would be unenforceable. It may still discourage operating an intermediate node in the US and shift the majority of nodes to other countries.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
- all_blue_chucks 9y agoBCH, it should be noted, has nothing to do with Bitcoin other than appropriating the name...
- a_t48 9y agoAnd forking the BTC blockchain.
- hndamien 9y agoAnd the blockchain history.
- dane-pgp 9y agoAnd living up to Satoshi's original vision of a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash".
- hndamien 9y agoNot really. I think Monero has that mantle. Mining was supposed to be decentralised and the cash was supposed to be fungible.
- dane-pgp 9y agoIs Bitcoin Cash mining not decentralised? https://cash.coin.dance/blocks/thisweek https://cash.coin.dance/blocks/thisweek Also I'm not sure what definition of fungible you are using that doesn't include Bitcoin Cash, but here's another spurious definition for you: A cryptocurrency isn't fungible if most wallets have balances that can't be spent because of fees. https://www.newsbtc.com/2017/11/17/bitpay-ceo-claims-current-average-bitcoin-fee-makes-57-26-wallet-balances-unspendable/ https://www.newsbtc.com/2017/11/17/bitpay-ceo-claims-current...
- hndamien 9y agoIt isn't as decentralised as Monero. 5 pools control 60% hashrate for BCH, the top 5 XMR pools control 13% (Yuge difference). Also, Monero has a dynamic block size, so it is somewhat future proofed while BCH has another hardfork if it is successful. And fungible means that each unit of the currency is indistinguishable from another unit. BCH and Bitcoin both leave trails, therefore, are not fungible.
- imaginenore 9y agoHave they solved the distributed routing problem? I watched many videos on the LN, and it's never addressed, it's always this hand-wavy explanation that a route is somehow found, on a network that changes, potentially, thousands of times per seconds, and has tens of millions of nodes.
- nosuchthing 9y agoNo. The LN white paper doesn't even explain how they plan to solve routing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE&feature=youtu.be&t=10m24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE&feature=youtu.be... Without decentralized routing, It seems like they're simply prioritizing nodes with large sums of BTC as the central operator hubs. Centralized payment processing hubs?
- dx034 9y agoSo like a Visa/Mastercard for Bitcoin? Probably not much to gain from that, I doubt it'll be more efficient than established networks (unless you want to deal in transactions that aren't allowed on those networks).
- hossbeast 9y agoThey are explicitly postponing the sophisticated routing solution until a later iteration, when we have more experience with how the network will become arranged. It's not an omission, it was done this way on purpose.
- imaginenore 9y agoThat sounds like a bullshit excuse. They don't know how to solve it. It doesn't really matter how the network is arranged, distributed routing is not a solved problem.
- nosuchthing 9y agoDoes anyone know how Lightening Network code actually routes nodes? The LN claim is basically decentralized BGP but much more complex and prone to race condition errors. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE&feature=youtu.be&t=10m24s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE&feature=youtu.be... The white paper doesn't even mention how LN routing works! 8.4 Payment Routing It is theoretically possible to build a route map implicitly from observing 2-of-2 multisigs on the blockchain to build a routing table. Note, however, this is not feasible with pay-to-script-hash transaction outputs, which can be resolved out-of-band from the bitcoin protocol via a third party routing service. Building a routing table will become necessary for large operators (e.g. BGP, Cjdns). Eventually, with optimizations, the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs. It seems impossible to implement true decentralized routing, so it's likely they're using some sort of hack to prioritize "masternodes" as the backbone routers instead of actual peer to peer routing.
- colordrops 9y agoThe whole thing is fishy. The lightning network is pushed by Blockstream, a company which has a large number of devs working on bitcoin core. They were responsible for all the propaganda and talking points against bumping the block size leading to the BCH fork, because they wanted the "correct" solution of their lightning network. The fact that it is so complex and ill defined is dangerous and an antithesis of decentralized system design and ethos, as it's not clear how trustless transactions are protected. How do we know that there isn't an easy backdoor that allows this network to be controlled for Blockstream's purposes?
- TimJRobinson 9y agowhat? There are 3 different implementations of the Lightning network, they all implement the same protocol and are all open source. You seem to be either very misinformed or just trying to spread FUD.
- alexbosworth 9y agoThis is confused or wrong. They don’t have a large number of devs working on Core. They did propose and code a solution which increased the block size. Saying things are fishy and that open source solutions widely reviewed over years by a broad set of people have some secret easy supposed backdoor, seems pretty wrong to me.
- fiiv 9y agoWhile everyone else argues about wether LN is evil or great, I'll just comment on your product. It's a nice tool, akin to the block explorers out there. One minor thing I noticed, where you define the node colour in the sidebar, sometimes if it is dark the hexcode cannot be seen. There's a way to fix this by dynamically determining the color in javascript for example, and changing the text atop of it to white.
- mOneThousand 9y agoThanks for the feedback. Fixed it with CSS text-shadow
- thisisit 9y agoI have watched couple of introductions on LN and had some questions, if someone can help: a. What effect does this have on transaction sizing? b. Does the the node owner charge fees for each transaction? c. How are the channel amounts calculated? Do they include mining and node fees?
- hayanno 9y agoa. Transaction on bitcoin's blockchain should be less than ever if everyone start using lightning. b. The node owner do charge fees every time someone use their node : https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/68767/how-are-fees-determined-in-the-lightning-network https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/68767/how-are-fe... c. There's not mining in lightning, it's only done on blockchain. What do you mean "channel amounts" ?
- keymone 9y agoa. LN transactions and Bitcoin transactions are different things, i will assume you mean "how does LN affect Bitcoin's chain capacity?" - to use LN you have to make at least one Bitcoin transaction - so called "funding" transaction which opens or refills a channel, afterwards you can make millions of LN micropayments - none of them will affect Bitcoin tx capacity. b. Yes, it's part of node configuration, you can set whatever fee you like, but most probably at this point everybody will just route around you. c. When creating the funding transaction you decide the amount of satoshi to be locked up in a channel for use in LN. Funding transaction is subject to normal Bitcoin transaction fees (x sat/byte, the higher you pay the faster it's committed and your channel becomes usable).
- polyomino 9y agoLN transactions are bitcoin transactions though they aren’t broadcast to the blockchain most of the time.
- keymone 9y agoyou could argue either way depending on your definition of what bitcoin transaction is. if it's a separate entry in the blockchain then no, LN transactions aren't bitcoin transactions. if it's transfer of value within bitcoin's network with same security characteristics, then yes, LN transactions are bitcoin transactions.