4 ms·

> If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless becau

by xur17 7y ago

> If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless because establishing a lightning network connection needs to go on the regular slow block chain, so it'll take as long as a regular payment. The "network" part of lightning network allows you to make a payment to anyone else on the network (trustlessly) through multiple hops. For example, if you opened a channel with a friend, and your friend had a channel open with Starbucks, you would be able to pay Starbucks through your friend without having to trust your friend. And this works today. I have one channel open on the lightning network, and regularly make payments to random nodes on the network. I pay << $0.01 in fees for these transactions, and they settle in ~a second.

codexon 7y ago
So what happens if you aren't linked even indirectly? What if the trust chain is 20 users long? Who's going to spend the resources to find this chain? And has it been tested to scale, or is it just like Bitcoin in the early days where people said it would scale and never tested it? People are going to gravitate to putting all their money into a large exchange like Coinbase to avoid these problems.
- keymone 7y ago
  There is no trust chain. You have no idea how lightning works. Every hop only knows the previous and next one, nothing else, not even the length of the chain. Your computer/phone finds the route and if you’re ok with privacy trade off you can outsource this task to your hub for a fee in single satoshis. People are going to gravitate towards convenient solutions making all sorts of security, privacy and financial risks, that’s why it’s important to have multiple alternatives with different trade offs.
  - codexon 7y ago
    There is a trust chain. If there was 0 trust involved then you could pick random nodes instead of needing to find a specific path. Sure there's cryptographic trickery involved so it is harder to steal the money, but it can still happen. Large centralized lightning nodes will form and they will act like banks and be able to stop payments to arbitrary entities like Paypal, and even make the payment get stuck for days or weeks depending on how long the timeout is. From the paper itself. "the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network"
    - keymone 7y ago
      No, you’re flat out wrong. There is no trust and it’s impossible to steal money. You need to find a path because path needs to have channel capacity required for your transaction, that’s why you can’t pick random nodes, not because you want to trust them. Stealing somebody’s funds from channel is just as hard as stealing bitcoin - you need to crack encryption or you need a private key. You have no idea how lightning works, please do some reading before making incorrect claims.
      - codexon 7y ago
        Nope, you are just echoing the basic understanding of the tech that is on every bitcoin propaganda outlet. Each node can still steal money from the node next to them by turning hostile such as not passing the secret and closing out their channel and getting time locks to expire, which is many magnitudes easier than cracking encryption or stealing a private key. The network has already been DDoSed. Now imagine the incentive to do it when it handles millions of dollars.
        keymone 7y ago
        Not passing the secret means not spending the output in HTLC, which will then be claimed back by sender due to timeout.
        codexon 7y ago
        You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret and then ddosing so the other party can't redeem his HTLC before his HTLC expires.
        keymone 7y ago
        > You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? You can’t spend your htlc without revealing the secret to the other party. If your stealing procedure involves ddosing random unknown party from being able to access any internet whatsoever to lock them out of minuscule amounts lightning payments are used for - good luck with that.

by xur17 7y ago

codexon 7y ago

So what happens if you aren't linked even indirectly? What if the trust chain is 20 users long? Who's going to spend the resources to find this chain? And has it been tested to scale, or is it just like Bitcoin in the early days where people said it would scale and never tested it? People are going to gravitate to putting all their money into a large exchange like Coinbase to avoid these problems.

keymone 7y ago
There is no trust chain. You have no idea how lightning works. Every hop only knows the previous and next one, nothing else, not even the length of the chain. Your computer/phone finds the route and if you’re ok with privacy trade off you can outsource this task to your hub for a fee in single satoshis. People are going to gravitate towards convenient solutions making all sorts of security, privacy and financial risks, that’s why it’s important to have multiple alternatives with different trade offs.
- codexon 7y ago
  There is a trust chain. If there was 0 trust involved then you could pick random nodes instead of needing to find a specific path. Sure there's cryptographic trickery involved so it is harder to steal the money, but it can still happen. Large centralized lightning nodes will form and they will act like banks and be able to stop payments to arbitrary entities like Paypal, and even make the payment get stuck for days or weeks depending on how long the timeout is. From the paper itself. "the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network"
  - keymone 7y ago
    No, you’re flat out wrong. There is no trust and it’s impossible to steal money. You need to find a path because path needs to have channel capacity required for your transaction, that’s why you can’t pick random nodes, not because you want to trust them. Stealing somebody’s funds from channel is just as hard as stealing bitcoin - you need to crack encryption or you need a private key. You have no idea how lightning works, please do some reading before making incorrect claims.
    - codexon 7y ago
      Nope, you are just echoing the basic understanding of the tech that is on every bitcoin propaganda outlet. Each node can still steal money from the node next to them by turning hostile such as not passing the secret and closing out their channel and getting time locks to expire, which is many magnitudes easier than cracking encryption or stealing a private key. The network has already been DDoSed. Now imagine the incentive to do it when it handles millions of dollars.
      - keymone 7y ago
        Not passing the secret means not spending the output in HTLC, which will then be claimed back by sender due to timeout.
        codexon 7y ago
        You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret and then ddosing so the other party can't redeem his HTLC before his HTLC expires.
        keymone 7y ago
        > You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret Do you not see the contradiction in your statement? You can’t spend your htlc without revealing the secret to the other party. If your stealing procedure involves ddosing random unknown party from being able to access any internet whatsoever to lock them out of minuscule amounts lightning payments are used for - good luck with that.