19 ms·

First Lightning mainnet release

144 points by edf13 9y ago

serg_chernata 9y ago
This is so incredibly exciting for bitcoin. I know this is only a beta and it's been in the works for a while, but many people didn't believe we'd see anything at all this soon.
- colordrops 9y ago
  You're kidding right? We were supposed to be seeing this over a year ago. They've been consistently behind on their promises.
  - nosuchthing 9y ago
    LN Dev: "We're 6 months away." Dec 14th, 2015 https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/6765995708984197... Something seems off with what LN claims is a p2p network, as the claim is they've created something better than BGP yet there's going to be many many race conditions if the network is ever actually used at scale and the only solution to those race conditions will be broadcasting updates to inform other nodes the route is inaccessible.. which will raise the bandwidth demand for anyone running nodes needing those updates. https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=635 https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=635 For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. What's the point than? Why not use venmo / stripe / square where there's less risk of scam for both consumer and retailer? Running a LN node will require a hot wallet with keys in memory, so if a Spectre/Meltdown style attack hits your node your key and funds are at greater risk of being stolen. LN also opens up the ease of money laundering, so will all LN nodes need to keep KYC/AML logs for future audits?
    - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
      LN will have all the problems of BGP, fused with all the problems of KYC/AML/legacy financial institutions. It's truly a beautiful monstrosity. It'd be hard to come up with a more objectively inferior solution if you really tried. No longer can a new user just send a transaction and have that magical user experience, instead they have to be given permission to transact by monolithic liquidity hubs, who of course must take their own fee. In fact as a rational lightning hub owner, I would want a rate of return similar to stocks but times some multiple to account for the very high risk of my hot wallet getting hacked and losing all my money. Full disclosure: I'm a BCH/XMR supporter although I no longer own either since I've been sitting out of the scene for the last few months while waiting for all this idiocy to blow over
      - hahainternet 9y ago
        I noticed you've posted the same thing in many different posts with increasing inaccuracy. > instead they have to be given permission to transact by monolithic liquidity hubs Completely false > who of course must take their own fee May, and routes aren't prescribed so they may take a fee on a payment that may be routed through them. > I would want a rate of return similar to stocks but times some multiple to account for the very high risk of my hot wallet getting hacked and losing all my money. What. This is completely disconnected from Lightning's functionality. Please stop spreading FUD.
        nosuchthing 9y ago
        blockcipher is refering to a new type of attack LN enables, which would be a (large) node/hub having the ability to ignore/drop transactions. It's roughly similar to how pool operators can create custom tools to suppress activity passing though their part of the network. https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-usd1-2-million-on-the-ethereum-blockchain-during-the-status-im-ico https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-u... The latter comment is in regards to the risk of providing liquidity in the more concerning design caveat of exposing keys in memory on an internet connected computer. The attack surface for theft of a LN node is now significantly higher than a normal bitcoin wallet.
    - dpc_pw 9y ago
      > For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. Except this isn't true.
      - nosuchthing 9y ago
        It is inherent to the architecture of the Lightening Network. Run a simulation with many p2p nodes in an adversarial payment routing network, and the inevitable statistical optimization will be centralized payment hubs controlled by wealthy users. Smaller less wealthy nodes will not be able to sustain routes and will be ignored. No one wants to keep paying fees to open up dozens of routes as if they're pre-depositing funds all the places they shop. What's the benefit here? Why not just use venmo, stripe, square, paypal?
aphextron 9y ago
So, what can I do with this?
- serg_chernata 9y ago
  Cheap and near-instant transactions.
  - M4v3R 9y ago
    I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.
    - CyberDildonics 9y ago
      Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions. If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?
      - cmer 9y ago
        It quickly gets very expensive to do so.
        CyberDildonics 9y ago
        How? If the proof of work only takes a few seconds, what prevents someone from spamming a new transaction every few seconds?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        darawk 9y ago
        Transaction fees.
jacob019 9y ago
Lightning in theory would allow for fast & cheap transactions, so BTC could really be used for payments instead of the "asset" it has become. Has been discussed for years with nothing to show. I remain skeptical. But if it works well, it could be a catalyst for mainstream adoption and increased price support.
- sidko 9y ago
  >Has been discussed for years with nothing to show Yes, it's literally an overnight success. I think they started coding this last night, and it's in beta today /s On a more serious note, a lot of work has firstly gone into making sure all the different implementations work well with each other, aka the standardization problem. That's a big win in and of itself. The routing problem isn't trivial either. Lightning currently uses an 'onion-like' routing scheme where, similar to TOR, the nodes have a very limited information on the origin and destination addresses. This is great news for privacy. The lightning network has been running on the testnet successfully for many months now, and some early adopter merchants even accepted testnet coins for small purchases. Over a 1000 lightning nodes are currently running.
__blockcipher__ 9y ago
Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets, need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...
- lawlessone 9y ago
  > BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization. Increasing the block size doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem bigger. other "coins" with larger faster block sizes are already running into storage issues.
  - gruez 9y ago
    >Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand edit: what's up with the downvotes? i'm providing a name to the phenomena and providing a wikipedia link to it.
    - osteele 9y ago
      > what's up with the downvotes? Maybe because you provided a link without summarizing it? (Just guessing — I thought your comment was sufficient, and I upvoted it. Also — I know it's policy not to discuss votes, but I'm also a fan of feedback loops that lead to desired behavior, and I don't see enough signal in this one.)
  - osteele 9y ago
    > then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization Because having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.) Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization. That's unattainable[1], but it's an intuition hook for the fact that the more expensive you make mining, the more centralized it becomes. [1] IOTA tries to get closer to this. It makes a couple of changes from Bitcoin / Ethereum / etc. (1) IOTA uses a graph instead of a chain — this is why mining is cheaper, and low-powered IOT devices can mine. (2) IOTA uses homegrown cryptography, (EDIT: that has been proven exploitable multiple times), instead of reviewed standards. (2) isn't necessary for (1), nor does it help decentralization; it just seems to be an attached vanity project.
foepys 9y ago
Did the Lightning Network solve the routing problem now or are they still emulating banks by requiring permanent online super nodes?
- knocte 9y ago
  You know what? All the hops where your TCP/IP connection has gone to allow you to write that message, were provided by devices that had to be online in order to provide you the services. EOM
  - foepys 9y ago
    Yes, but routers aren't responsible for keeping my money safe. If you don't constantly monitor all your LN channels, the other party can just steal your money by issuing fraudulent messages to the network.
    - Klathmon 9y ago
      Someone can setup "watchdog" services that you can give your revocation transactions to and they can watch the blockchain for any attempts to "steal" your money and if any are found they can instantly broadcast the revocation. Doing it this way you don't give the "watchdog" service any control of your BTC, just the ability to broadcast countersignatures, which means there is still no counterparty risk here. You could even give your revocation transactions to multiple 3rd parties that can all watch the blockchain for you if you don't trust any one of them to not backstab you.
      - foepys 9y ago
        But what happens if a watchdog has an outage? I need multiple backup watchdogs then, and no watchdog will work for free. So I'm now paying multiple entities to securely transact money to other people that themselves also need watchdogs to watch their channels. This sounds not like it will result in low fees. Transaction fees, maybe, but overall fees including middlemen will be quite a bit higher.
atomical 9y ago
Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.
- redm 9y ago
  Keep in mind Hashgraph and Blockchain are very different, in that Hadera is a permissioned network with public access (each round has a known number of nodes that must participate to exit the round).
  - atomical 9y ago
    What do you mean by round?
    - redm 9y ago
      "What do you mean by round?" Because Hashgraph is BFT, a round is a round of voting for confirmation. Its done virtually but you have to have 2/3rds of nodes agree on the state to close a round and have a confirmed state. To have 2/3rds you have to have a fixed and known number of nodes in the round. See BFT for more information. The point I was trying to make, is that they are very different in benefits and limitations.
- gruez 9y ago
  Bitcoin's electricity use isn't due to transaction volume, it's due to mining. A 1kb block takes about the same amount of energy to produce as a 1MB block.
  - atomical 9y ago
    Doesn't Bitcoin need mining to handle transactions?
    - Roujo 9y ago
apo 9y ago
For those who may not know the context, this has to do with long-term scaling of the Bitcoin network. The very first public response to Satoshi's announcement of Bitcoin was an expression of doubt about scalability: We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size. ... To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof. https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09963.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09... And the comment was spot-on. Naively implemented, Bitcoin can only scale linearly by putting every transaction onto the block chain. Double the transaction capacity means doubling the size of blocks. Lightning Network scales the Bitcoin network by offering a secure method for keeping many, if not most, transactions off the block chain. This is done through a clever use of Script, Bitcoin's built-in programming language. Two parties who want to transact at high speed jointly lock up some money with an on-chain transaction (thereby creating a "payment channel"). Then they send each other half-signed transactions spending the locked funds. Each transaction represents a kind of private ledger. Although any of these transactions can be published at any time, it will usually be mutually beneficial to avoid doing so and continue passing half-signed transactions back and forth. When it's time to call it quits, the last transaction is published. In other words, the intermediate transactions never need to hit the block chain. Only the final settlement transaction needs to be published. Lightning takes this one step further by providing a mechanism whereby a party can pay another party on behalf of a third party. This means that you can make Lightning payments without necessarily having an open channel with your intended payee. You just need an open channel and the network routes your payment. Lightning Network has been in development for years. The idea has been repeatedly disparaged as "vaporware." The first mainnet release is a big deal because that characterization no longer applies. It also means we're going to see a real-world test of an idea that up until now hasn't been widely-tested. The Bitcoin Cash split was due in large part to a group of Bitcoiners rejecting Lightning as a scaling option. They tend to believe not only that Bitcoin can scale by increasing block size, but that this is the best way.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
raise_throw 9y ago
Some commenters here appear to be asking why one should favour LN over raising the block size. The answer to that is that it's not a dichotomy. There's not a decision to be made _between_ 'LN' and 'Raise block size'. They're two independent things. The LN is an opt-in system on top of bitcoin. If we're lucky, LN works out well. If it doesn't - I'd be in favour of keeping the blocksize low anyway and I think a lot of technical folk would too. The reason why I don't think is difficult to understand, rather it's difficult to accept. Raising the block size beyond some value is problematic. A small increase is likely safe, but we really don't know what. This is both in order for full nodes to be usable on reasonable hardware, and also to ensure fee pressure (in a low/zero fee environment, inflation will likely have to be introduced to ensure enough mining happens for security). A good analogy might be with cars and cities. Imagine we lived in a world where public transport simply couldn't exist - for whatever reason it's just impossible. Would it be prudent then to bulldoze the streets of London, Paris, wherever else, to build more roads for capacity? I would argue not - you simply have a situation in which there's a limit on capacity and that's that. In addition, in the world where pub transport _does_ exist, investing in trains does not necessarily mean completely stopping work on roads entirely. They're different things.
Cypher 9y ago
The tech is great and it's still very early but it lacks any community consensus mechanism regarding important events. Recently there was a hack and a petition was created to ask the devs to allow the community to vote on how it should be resolved: https://www.change.org/p/colin-lemahieu-lets-ask-the-nano-devs-to-hold-a-vote-on-a-fork https://www.change.org/p/colin-lemahieu-lets-ask-the-nano-de...

144 points by edf13 9y ago

This is so incredibly exciting for bitcoin. I know this is only a beta and it's been in the works for a while, but many people didn't believe we'd see anything at all this soon.

colordrops 9y ago
You're kidding right? We were supposed to be seeing this over a year ago. They've been consistently behind on their promises.
- nosuchthing 9y ago
  LN Dev: "We're 6 months away." Dec 14th, 2015 https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712 https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/6765995708984197... Something seems off with what LN claims is a p2p network, as the claim is they've created something better than BGP yet there's going to be many many race conditions if the network is ever actually used at scale and the only solution to those race conditions will be broadcasting updates to inform other nodes the route is inaccessible.. which will raise the bandwidth demand for anyone running nodes needing those updates. https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=635 https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=635 For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. What's the point than? Why not use venmo / stripe / square where there's less risk of scam for both consumer and retailer? Running a LN node will require a hot wallet with keys in memory, so if a Spectre/Meltdown style attack hits your node your key and funds are at greater risk of being stolen. LN also opens up the ease of money laundering, so will all LN nodes need to keep KYC/AML logs for future audits?
  - __blockcipher__ 9y ago
    LN will have all the problems of BGP, fused with all the problems of KYC/AML/legacy financial institutions. It's truly a beautiful monstrosity. It'd be hard to come up with a more objectively inferior solution if you really tried. No longer can a new user just send a transaction and have that magical user experience, instead they have to be given permission to transact by monolithic liquidity hubs, who of course must take their own fee. In fact as a rational lightning hub owner, I would want a rate of return similar to stocks but times some multiple to account for the very high risk of my hot wallet getting hacked and losing all my money. Full disclosure: I'm a BCH/XMR supporter although I no longer own either since I've been sitting out of the scene for the last few months while waiting for all this idiocy to blow over
    - hahainternet 9y ago
      I noticed you've posted the same thing in many different posts with increasing inaccuracy. > instead they have to be given permission to transact by monolithic liquidity hubs Completely false > who of course must take their own fee May, and routes aren't prescribed so they may take a fee on a payment that may be routed through them. > I would want a rate of return similar to stocks but times some multiple to account for the very high risk of my hot wallet getting hacked and losing all my money. What. This is completely disconnected from Lightning's functionality. Please stop spreading FUD.
      - nosuchthing 9y ago
        blockcipher is refering to a new type of attack LN enables, which would be a (large) node/hub having the ability to ignore/drop transactions. It's roughly similar to how pool operators can create custom tools to suppress activity passing though their part of the network. https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-usd1-2-million-on-the-ethereum-blockchain-during-the-status-im-ico https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-u... The latter comment is in regards to the risk of providing liquidity in the more concerning design caveat of exposing keys in memory on an internet connected computer. The attack surface for theft of a LN node is now significantly higher than a normal bitcoin wallet.
  - dpc_pw 9y ago
    > For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. Except this isn't true.
    - nosuchthing 9y ago
      It is inherent to the architecture of the Lightening Network. Run a simulation with many p2p nodes in an adversarial payment routing network, and the inevitable statistical optimization will be centralized payment hubs controlled by wealthy users. Smaller less wealthy nodes will not be able to sustain routes and will be ignored. No one wants to keep paying fees to open up dozens of routes as if they're pre-depositing funds all the places they shop. What's the benefit here? Why not just use venmo, stripe, square, paypal?

aphextron 9y ago

So, what can I do with this?

serg_chernata 9y ago
Cheap and near-instant transactions.
- M4v3R 9y ago
  I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions. If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?
    - cmer 9y ago
      It quickly gets very expensive to do so.
      - CyberDildonics 9y ago
        How? If the proof of work only takes a few seconds, what prevents someone from spamming a new transaction every few seconds?
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        darawk 9y ago
        Transaction fees.

jacob019 9y ago

Lightning in theory would allow for fast & cheap transactions, so BTC could really be used for payments instead of the "asset" it has become. Has been discussed for years with nothing to show. I remain skeptical. But if it works well, it could be a catalyst for mainstream adoption and increased price support.

sidko 9y ago
>Has been discussed for years with nothing to show Yes, it's literally an overnight success. I think they started coding this last night, and it's in beta today /s On a more serious note, a lot of work has firstly gone into making sure all the different implementations work well with each other, aka the standardization problem. That's a big win in and of itself. The routing problem isn't trivial either. Lightning currently uses an 'onion-like' routing scheme where, similar to TOR, the nodes have a very limited information on the origin and destination addresses. This is great news for privacy. The lightning network has been running on the testnet successfully for many months now, and some early adopter merchants even accepted testnet coins for small purchases. Over a 1000 lightning nodes are currently running.

__blockcipher__ 9y ago

Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets, need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...

lawlessone 9y ago
> BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization. Increasing the block size doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem bigger. other "coins" with larger faster block sizes are already running into storage issues.
- gruez 9y ago
  >Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand edit: what's up with the downvotes? i'm providing a name to the phenomena and providing a wikipedia link to it.
  - osteele 9y ago
    > what's up with the downvotes? Maybe because you provided a link without summarizing it? (Just guessing — I thought your comment was sufficient, and I upvoted it. Also — I know it's policy not to discuss votes, but I'm also a fan of feedback loops that lead to desired behavior, and I don't see enough signal in this one.)
- osteele 9y ago
  > then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization Because having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.) Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization. That's unattainable[1], but it's an intuition hook for the fact that the more expensive you make mining, the more centralized it becomes. [1] IOTA tries to get closer to this. It makes a couple of changes from Bitcoin / Ethereum / etc. (1) IOTA uses a graph instead of a chain — this is why mining is cheaper, and low-powered IOT devices can mine. (2) IOTA uses homegrown cryptography, (EDIT: that has been proven exploitable multiple times), instead of reviewed standards. (2) isn't necessary for (1), nor does it help decentralization; it just seems to be an attached vanity project.

foepys 9y ago

Did the Lightning Network solve the routing problem now or are they still emulating banks by requiring permanent online super nodes?

knocte 9y ago
You know what? All the hops where your TCP/IP connection has gone to allow you to write that message, were provided by devices that had to be online in order to provide you the services. EOM
- foepys 9y ago
  Yes, but routers aren't responsible for keeping my money safe. If you don't constantly monitor all your LN channels, the other party can just steal your money by issuing fraudulent messages to the network.
  - Klathmon 9y ago
    Someone can setup "watchdog" services that you can give your revocation transactions to and they can watch the blockchain for any attempts to "steal" your money and if any are found they can instantly broadcast the revocation. Doing it this way you don't give the "watchdog" service any control of your BTC, just the ability to broadcast countersignatures, which means there is still no counterparty risk here. You could even give your revocation transactions to multiple 3rd parties that can all watch the blockchain for you if you don't trust any one of them to not backstab you.
    - foepys 9y ago
      But what happens if a watchdog has an outage? I need multiple backup watchdogs then, and no watchdog will work for free. So I'm now paying multiple entities to securely transact money to other people that themselves also need watchdogs to watch their channels. This sounds not like it will result in low fees. Transaction fees, maybe, but overall fees including middlemen will be quite a bit higher.

atomical 9y ago

Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.

redm 9y ago
Keep in mind Hashgraph and Blockchain are very different, in that Hadera is a permissioned network with public access (each round has a known number of nodes that must participate to exit the round).
- atomical 9y ago
  What do you mean by round?
  - redm 9y ago
    "What do you mean by round?" Because Hashgraph is BFT, a round is a round of voting for confirmation. Its done virtually but you have to have 2/3rds of nodes agree on the state to close a round and have a confirmed state. To have 2/3rds you have to have a fixed and known number of nodes in the round. See BFT for more information. The point I was trying to make, is that they are very different in benefits and limitations.
gruez 9y ago
Bitcoin's electricity use isn't due to transaction volume, it's due to mining. A 1kb block takes about the same amount of energy to produce as a 1MB block.
- atomical 9y ago
  Doesn't Bitcoin need mining to handle transactions?
  - Roujo 9y ago

apo 9y ago

For those who may not know the context, this has to do with long-term scaling of the Bitcoin network. The very first public response to Satoshi's announcement of Bitcoin was an expression of doubt about scalability: We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size. ... To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof. https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09963.html https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09... And the comment was spot-on. Naively implemented, Bitcoin can only scale linearly by putting every transaction onto the block chain. Double the transaction capacity means doubling the size of blocks. Lightning Network scales the Bitcoin network by offering a secure method for keeping many, if not most, transactions off the block chain. This is done through a clever use of Script, Bitcoin's built-in programming language. Two parties who want to transact at high speed jointly lock up some money with an on-chain transaction (thereby creating a "payment channel"). Then they send each other half-signed transactions spending the locked funds. Each transaction represents a kind of private ledger. Although any of these transactions can be published at any time, it will usually be mutually beneficial to avoid doing so and continue passing half-signed transactions back and forth. When it's time to call it quits, the last transaction is published. In other words, the intermediate transactions never need to hit the block chain. Only the final settlement transaction needs to be published. Lightning takes this one step further by providing a mechanism whereby a party can pay another party on behalf of a third party. This means that you can make Lightning payments without necessarily having an open channel with your intended payee. You just need an open channel and the network routes your payment. Lightning Network has been in development for years. The idea has been repeatedly disparaged as "vaporware." The first mainnet release is a big deal because that characterization no longer applies. It also means we're going to see a real-world test of an idea that up until now hasn't been widely-tested. The Bitcoin Cash split was due in large part to a group of Bitcoiners rejecting Lightning as a scaling option. They tend to believe not only that Bitcoin can scale by increasing block size, but that this is the best way.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

raise_throw 9y ago

Some commenters here appear to be asking why one should favour LN over raising the block size. The answer to that is that it's not a dichotomy. There's not a decision to be made _between_ 'LN' and 'Raise block size'. They're two independent things. The LN is an opt-in system on top of bitcoin. If we're lucky, LN works out well. If it doesn't - I'd be in favour of keeping the blocksize low anyway and I think a lot of technical folk would too. The reason why I don't think is difficult to understand, rather it's difficult to accept. Raising the block size beyond some value is problematic. A small increase is likely safe, but we really don't know what. This is both in order for full nodes to be usable on reasonable hardware, and also to ensure fee pressure (in a low/zero fee environment, inflation will likely have to be introduced to ensure enough mining happens for security). A good analogy might be with cars and cities. Imagine we lived in a world where public transport simply couldn't exist - for whatever reason it's just impossible. Would it be prudent then to bulldoze the streets of London, Paris, wherever else, to build more roads for capacity? I would argue not - you simply have a situation in which there's a limit on capacity and that's that. In addition, in the world where pub transport _does_ exist, investing in trains does not necessarily mean completely stopping work on roads entirely. They're different things.

Cypher 9y ago

The tech is great and it's still very early but it lacks any community consensus mechanism regarding important events. Recently there was a hack and a petition was created to ask the devs to allow the community to vote on how it should be resolved: https://www.change.org/p/colin-lemahieu-lets-ask-the-nano-devs-to-hold-a-vote-on-a-fork https://www.change.org/p/colin-lemahieu-lets-ask-the-nano-de...