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The idea here is that the blockchain model where everyone checks everything that happens doesn't scale to billions of users. Fortunately for people who disagre
by askmike 7y ago
The idea here is that the blockchain model where everyone checks everything that happens doesn't scale to billions of users.
Fortunately for people who disagree, there are hundreds of crypto projects that think this is possible. Including straight up copies of Bitcoin like Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.
- DagAgren 7y agoIt doesn't even scale to millions of users. And basically every project that tries to claim different is just ignoring the problem and trying to pump their own price. Everything in cryptocurrencies is a scam.
- icelancer 7y agoThis is absurd hyperbole. There are people working on legitimate answers to your concerns, such as the Lightning Network and other initiatives.
- jcranmer 7y agoIs Lightning usable yet? I recall hearing it's been "imminent" since at least 2017...
- askmike 7y agoYou're clearly listening to the wrong people. It's usable for sure, but that doesn't mean billions of people can (nor want) to use it now. I'm using it just fine.
- ppf 7y agoIt's less usable than it's parent blockchain!
- askmike 7y agoThat's subjective. It's a lot cheaper and fast to send money.
- ppf 7y agoWhat's the most I could send without network liquidity issues?
- askmike 7y agoI don't know the answers to this strange question. What's the most you can send to another bank account without compliance issues?
- ppf 7y agoLightning network is limited to the liquidity offered by channel operators. What is the current situation like?
- askmike 7y agoSituation is great, note that I operate my own channels and I'm not sending millions around every day.
- scott_s 7y agoWhat do you mean by "compliance" issues? If you meant that the sum of money you send cannot trigger someone, somewhere to check to make sure the transaction is legit, and we're assuming a transfer from a "normal" bank to another, then I would guess on the order of $10,000. But companies and organizations routinely transfer millions and billions between normal banks. Yes, the transactions may cause someone or many someones to investigate, but the transfers still succeed.
- askmike 7y agoWhat does OP mean with "liquidity issues"? Lightning is a routing network, and you can connect directly to your counterparty, circumventing all potential liquidity issues. > But companies and organizations routinely transfer millions and billions between normal banks Just like companies have direct lightning channels between each other, they can send billions of they please.
- alwillis 7y agoYes; I use LN more than standard Bitcoin. There are many apps already and things are just now getting started: https://www.lapps.co/ https://www.lapps.co/
- DagAgren 7y agoFor Lightning to work at scale, we need solutions for problems that nobody on earth has solved yet, nor have any idea how to solve. Sure, it kind of sort of works for small network sizes. It will die a fiery death the second it attempts to become popular with no known way out of the mess.
- arcticbull 7y agoLightning is worthless because it requires an on-chain transaction to open and close, so it inherits all the same scaling issues as Bitcoin.
- alwillis 7y agoThis is false. Once a channel is funded, it can stay open for as long as it needs to. I can have a payment channel open with my local coffeeshop and we can transact dozens of times; only the final bill has to be broadcast to the bitcoin blockchain. Well connected LN nodes can be connected to hundreds of other nodes and route transactions accordingly. In the short time LN has been available, there are over 10,000 nodes and growing; the network capacity is almost $8 million USD: https://1ml.com/statistics https://1ml.com/statistics
- arcticbull 7y agoSo only 35 years?
- alwillis 7y agoLet me further clarify: Lightning is not worthless and has already become the basis of a new industry of apps and services. Like any low-value transaction using bitcoin, like the proverbial cup of coffee, it’s not necessary to wait for even one confirmation before doing anything. Plain vanilla lightning uses a UTXO (that’s what a bitcoin on the blockchain is, an unspent transaction) to open a channel. But you don’t have to wait 10 minutes for at least 1 confirmation before using the payment channel. I’ve received multiple LN transactions with various LN apps and it’s always been instant. Once the payment channel is opened, it stays open as long as it needs to. But the killer feature is being able to transact without requiring the underlying bitcoin blockchain; it’s only required once the parties decide to close the channel. Same thing with multi hop payments. There are many enhancements being worked on, like loop-in, loop-out and submarine swaps, which handle providing liquidity to enable transactions and the ability to make swaps between chains, like being able to “swap” between bitcoin and light coin if that was desired. There’s also work happening to enable one on-chain UTXO to fund multiple payment channels in one go. So tens of thousands of transactions can take place without touching the underlying blockchain. So there’s no lag when it comes to opening or closing a payment channel. There are no scalability issues; we’ll have more LN nodes than Bitcoin full nodes (about 55,000 worldwide) by this time next year and it’ll be fine.
- askmike 7y agoThe internet didn't support millions of users after a decade either. Is the internet a scam? I'm not sure why you are saying all efforts go into a flawed second layer? a) Dozens of teams are working on other efforts. b) Many do not consider lightning flawed.
- anyfoo 7y agoThe Internet was always at capacity. Until we had the pervasive networking we have today, there were always more people wanting to have Internet access more persistently and with more performance than what was available. Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. As a result, enormous advances in technology were made to implement today’s pervasive networking. New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them.
- askmike 7y ago> Almost everyone who had the opportunity to use the Internet, would. I'm too young to have experienced this. But I've seen countless of clips and interviews of people claiming they would never use the internet because they can send post and use a telephone instead. "Computers are for geeks", etc. > New use cases manifested immediately all the time. Nobody ever said “we implemented this world wide network thing, now we are looking for use cases”, there were, and are, always more use cases to choose from than resources to implement them. It took a dotcom bubble to find the use cases we actually use today. Would you have not said the exact same thing back then about the internet?
- Nursie 7y agoNobody said that back then, no. They said there had been an over-exuberant market with people throwing stupid money at any old idea, but nobody was saying "the internet is a bust" or even "we don't know the use-cases" because there were a ton of other useful, successful things going on with it. You said it yourself - you're too young to actually know a lot about that, but you use it to bolster your arguments anyway.
- mraudiobook_com 7y agoBitcoin Cash is not a copy you dope, it is Bitcoin, just with scaling enabled.