6 ms·

Lightning network solves this as do many other things (liquid sidechains)

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
- corporate_shi11 7y ago
  Can you explain why you think it's a convoluted mess?
  - themagician 7y ago
    If you read the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions." It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.
    - pshc 7y ago
      Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though. I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.
      - phillipsjk 7y ago
        Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.
        nullc 7y ago
        That was a conservative assumption at a multiple of the entire worldwide financial transaction volume... utilizing old technology. The same volume without lightning would require blocks that were terabytes, which is obviously unworkable at the current state of technology.
        phillipsjk 7y ago
        I disagree that the LN paper made conservative assumptions. A "black swan" event like a major lightning hub going down may force more channel closings than the network (as currently implemented) has time to process before time-out. The LN simply does not work if the base layer is congested.
- I_am_tiberius 7y ago
  Comparing the lightning network with a bank is totally incorrect. Your funds cannot be seized and the middlemen privacy aspect is very similar to the Tor network. I don't think there is a better way of solving a decentralized payment system.
  - wayoutthere 7y ago
    Tor is a privacy nightmare; not sure what the situation is currently but at one point the US government ran something like 10% of the exit nodes. This is how a lot of the "dark web" operators got caught until folks caught on and switched up their opsec.
  - bduerst 7y ago
    Lightning is the same as writing a check. Until it's verified on the bitcoin network, it's just like a bank in that regard.
    - I_am_tiberius 7y ago
      But there's no way the bitcoin network doesn't accept the settlement. A bank can just throw checks away if they like.
      - bduerst 7y ago
        Bitcoin will not accept a settlement if the wallet no longer has funds. Banks throwing away checks is not a problem. Bouncing checks are a fraud problem, which is why most everyone have moved on from using checks is many situations. Lightning's solution is to just 'watch' everyone you do transactions with, which is a lazy, non-viable solution analagous to continuously watching an anonymous stranger's bank account when they write you a check.
- pshc 7y ago
  In what sense is Lightning not peer-to-peer? It seems permssionless in that any two people can agree to open a channel.
  - breavyn 7y ago
    You're missing the keyword 'network'. If you're routing a payment across the lightning network, then it is technically not peer to peer. You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on. As you said, any two parties are able to open (and close) a channel. However, these actions require an on chain transaction, and your funds are locked until you close the channel. Unless you're going to be exchanging many transactions in a short period of time with your peer, you would be better off creating transactions directly on chain. I won't get into this here, but the lightning 'network' has its own set of scaling problems, which imo are much worse than that of the bitcoin network itself.
    - nullc 7y ago
      > You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on. It's not technically a payment at that point, since the payments is atomic end to end. But yes, you send a message your peer, which sends it to another peer, which sends it to another peer... like any other P2P network.
      - shilch 7y ago
        I don't think that "Peer-to-Peer" in the whitepaper's title ("Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System") refers to the network structure being p2p - and that's probably also not what most people mean when they talk about bitcoin being peer-to-peer. The very first sentence makes it pretty clear that peer-to-peer means person-to-person without any intermediary: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] Furthermore, the previous title was "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" [2]. So reading "Peer-to-Peer" as "Person-to-Person" would mean that the title hasn't changed in meaning, it just became a bit more catchy. Also, when analysing the incentives of participants in the bitcoin network, it turns out that network nodes do not actually form the ideal-typical p2p mesh network (where all nodes are equally distributed and connect to a few other nodes) but a more densely connected network where connectivity to mining nodes is strongly incentivised. This topic has been researched and discussed by Dr. Wright (See [3] for more information). [1] https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf [2] https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/ https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/ [3] https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-world-vs-mesh-dr-craig-wright-tokyo-2018/ https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-wo...
6nf 7y ago
No it does not. LN is terrible for all kinds of reasons and nobody uses it.
- Empact 7y ago
  Based on what I last heard from merchants that accept it (e.g. Bitrefill), it's about tied with Ethereum for second in payment volume, after Bitcoin.
  - 6nf 7y ago
    Thats bullshit. ETH has loads of transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin. Lightning network transaction volume is almost zero right now.
    - nullc 7y ago
      You have no idea what lightning transaction volume is, for all you can tell I'm currently making 1000 transactions per second in a loop between a set of lightning wallets. :) Because lightning is actually relatively scalable it doesn't broadcast every action to everyone.
      - 6nf 7y ago
        The current implementation of LN does broadcast to everyone. At any given moment, every node on the network needs to know the size of every open channel on the network (for routing calculations) so every time a transaction happens, the updated channels sizes get broadcast to everyone. The volume is almost zero right now.
        nullc 7y ago
        That isn't so. You learn that a channel doesn't have enough capacity by attempting to use it, failing, then updating your knowledge and trying again. It typically takes something like 1.25 tries on average in the current network. See Bolt 7: > Note that the htlc_maximum_msat field is static in the current protocol over the life of the channel: it is not designed to be indicative of real-time channel capacity in each direction, which would be both a massive data leak and uselessly spam the network https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/07-routing-gossip.md#the-channel_update-message https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/maste... See also: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/80830 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/80830
mathiasrw 7y ago
You have to pre-setup a connection to others that you know and hope they know someone that knows someone that has a connection to the person you are trying to buy from. This is how the design of lightning network incentivises mega hubs that know most people. So if facebook made a big hub with all its users it would work smoothly. Also: You can not receive payments if the computer/wallet that hosts your lightning node is not online. Not super smooth.
- nullc 7y ago
  > and hope they know someone The system has routing, and it turns out that it doesn't take much for the probability of a graph to be connected with low average diameter. See: The six degrees of kevin bacon. If lightning doesn't work for a particular payment, you can simply make a payment without using it, potentially by splicing out funds from one of your channels. Yes, Lightning has trade-offs. You have to be online (though there is ongoing research into changing that), and some moderately complex software had to be written to create it. But in return you get get massive efficiency increases and instant irreversible payments. For the transactions that it's intended, I think for these are pretty good trade-offs... though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.
  - phillipsjk 7y ago
    > though if you don't like them you're free to not use it. No true: due to limited block space on the base-layer. I am not convinced you get any efficiency increase with the LN: just more difficult capacity planning because everything is suddenly so hard to measure. Sending a payment, whether on the first or second layer, will take a certain amount of: bandwidth, processing and storage. Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires. Even is we assume the processing and storage requirements are equal: it will be more expensive on the LN. On the base layer, your data is protected from Byzantine faults by having each node verify the transactions as they come in. With the LN, state is local to each node. That implies you need redundant hardware to protect against Byzantine faults. I have been migrating my machines to ECC RAM and redundant storage: it is not cheap. What I save on hardware costs by buying old servers I pay in extra power use. The above paragraph did not even mention the capital requirements of maintaining a Lightning node.
BigBubbler 7y ago
Lol, no LN does not solve almost anything. It will be good for some centralized and KYC-rich uses by businesses and their customers. It will not make BTC into a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. Among the "Bitcoins", only Bitcoin Cash is keeping that dream alive.

Lightning Network is not peer to peer which is what most of us signed up for with bitcoin. I don’t want centralized middlemen and their channels, might as well use a bank at that point. Lightning Network isn’t simple and elegant, it is a convoluted mess. The peer to peer foundation of bitcoin is literally in the title of the white paper from Satoshi. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

corporate_shi11 7y ago
Can you explain why you think it's a convoluted mess?
- themagician 7y ago
  If you read the Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network) it highlights it quite well under "commitment transactions." It takes something that is, in human terms, relatively simple and makes it so convoluted that it's hard to even follow.
  - pshc 7y ago
    Wikipedia is often notoriously convoluted for technical topics though. I read the Lightning paper and found it simple enough to understand (conceptually at least) how the channels are opened, updated, closed, and penalized. Of course the actual implementation is a more complicated and nuanced than what the paper covers.
    - phillipsjk 7y ago
      Since you read the Lighting whitepaper, you know that an uncongested base-layer is assumed. The paper suggests something like 133MB blocks at scale.
      - nullc 7y ago
        That was a conservative assumption at a multiple of the entire worldwide financial transaction volume... utilizing old technology. The same volume without lightning would require blocks that were terabytes, which is obviously unworkable at the current state of technology.
        phillipsjk 7y ago
        I disagree that the LN paper made conservative assumptions. A "black swan" event like a major lightning hub going down may force more channel closings than the network (as currently implemented) has time to process before time-out. The LN simply does not work if the base layer is congested.
I_am_tiberius 7y ago
Comparing the lightning network with a bank is totally incorrect. Your funds cannot be seized and the middlemen privacy aspect is very similar to the Tor network. I don't think there is a better way of solving a decentralized payment system.
- wayoutthere 7y ago
  Tor is a privacy nightmare; not sure what the situation is currently but at one point the US government ran something like 10% of the exit nodes. This is how a lot of the "dark web" operators got caught until folks caught on and switched up their opsec.
- bduerst 7y ago
  Lightning is the same as writing a check. Until it's verified on the bitcoin network, it's just like a bank in that regard.
  - I_am_tiberius 7y ago
    But there's no way the bitcoin network doesn't accept the settlement. A bank can just throw checks away if they like.
    - bduerst 7y ago
      Bitcoin will not accept a settlement if the wallet no longer has funds. Banks throwing away checks is not a problem. Bouncing checks are a fraud problem, which is why most everyone have moved on from using checks is many situations. Lightning's solution is to just 'watch' everyone you do transactions with, which is a lazy, non-viable solution analagous to continuously watching an anonymous stranger's bank account when they write you a check.
pshc 7y ago
In what sense is Lightning not peer-to-peer? It seems permssionless in that any two people can agree to open a channel.
- breavyn 7y ago
  You're missing the keyword 'network'. If you're routing a payment across the lightning network, then it is technically not peer to peer. You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on. As you said, any two parties are able to open (and close) a channel. However, these actions require an on chain transaction, and your funds are locked until you close the channel. Unless you're going to be exchanging many transactions in a short period of time with your peer, you would be better off creating transactions directly on chain. I won't get into this here, but the lightning 'network' has its own set of scaling problems, which imo are much worse than that of the bitcoin network itself.
  - nullc 7y ago
    > You send a payment to the next hop in the route, then they send a payment to the following hop, and so on. It's not technically a payment at that point, since the payments is atomic end to end. But yes, you send a message your peer, which sends it to another peer, which sends it to another peer... like any other P2P network.
    - shilch 7y ago
      I don't think that "Peer-to-Peer" in the whitepaper's title ("Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System") refers to the network structure being p2p - and that's probably also not what most people mean when they talk about bitcoin being peer-to-peer. The very first sentence makes it pretty clear that peer-to-peer means person-to-person without any intermediary: "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution." [1] Furthermore, the previous title was "Electronic Cash Without a Trusted Third Party" [2]. So reading "Peer-to-Peer" as "Person-to-Person" would mean that the title hasn't changed in meaning, it just became a bit more catchy. Also, when analysing the incentives of participants in the bitcoin network, it turns out that network nodes do not actually form the ideal-typical p2p mesh network (where all nodes are equally distributed and connect to a few other nodes) but a more densely connected network where connectivity to mining nodes is strongly incentivised. This topic has been researched and discussed by Dr. Wright (See [3] for more information). [1] https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf https://bitco.in/bitcoin.pdf [2] https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/ https://nakamotostudies.org/literature/ecash/ [3] https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-world-vs-mesh-dr-craig-wright-tokyo-2018/ https://nchain.com/en/blog/bitcoin-network-topology-small-wo...

6nf 7y ago

No it does not. LN is terrible for all kinds of reasons and nobody uses it.

Empact 7y ago
Based on what I last heard from merchants that accept it (e.g. Bitrefill), it's about tied with Ethereum for second in payment volume, after Bitcoin.
- 6nf 7y ago
  Thats bullshit. ETH has loads of transaction volume, second only to Bitcoin. Lightning network transaction volume is almost zero right now.
  - nullc 7y ago
    You have no idea what lightning transaction volume is, for all you can tell I'm currently making 1000 transactions per second in a loop between a set of lightning wallets. :) Because lightning is actually relatively scalable it doesn't broadcast every action to everyone.
    - 6nf 7y ago
      The current implementation of LN does broadcast to everyone. At any given moment, every node on the network needs to know the size of every open channel on the network (for routing calculations) so every time a transaction happens, the updated channels sizes get broadcast to everyone. The volume is almost zero right now.
      - nullc 7y ago
        That isn't so. You learn that a channel doesn't have enough capacity by attempting to use it, failing, then updating your knowledge and trying again. It typically takes something like 1.25 tries on average in the current network. See Bolt 7: > Note that the htlc_maximum_msat field is static in the current protocol over the life of the channel: it is not designed to be indicative of real-time channel capacity in each direction, which would be both a massive data leak and uselessly spam the network https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/07-routing-gossip.md#the-channel_update-message https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/maste... See also: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/80830 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/80830

mathiasrw 7y ago

You have to pre-setup a connection to others that you know and hope they know someone that knows someone that has a connection to the person you are trying to buy from. This is how the design of lightning network incentivises mega hubs that know most people. So if facebook made a big hub with all its users it would work smoothly. Also: You can not receive payments if the computer/wallet that hosts your lightning node is not online. Not super smooth.

nullc 7y ago
> and hope they know someone The system has routing, and it turns out that it doesn't take much for the probability of a graph to be connected with low average diameter. See: The six degrees of kevin bacon. If lightning doesn't work for a particular payment, you can simply make a payment without using it, potentially by splicing out funds from one of your channels. Yes, Lightning has trade-offs. You have to be online (though there is ongoing research into changing that), and some moderately complex software had to be written to create it. But in return you get get massive efficiency increases and instant irreversible payments. For the transactions that it's intended, I think for these are pretty good trade-offs... though if you don't like them you're free to not use it.
- phillipsjk 7y ago
  > though if you don't like them you're free to not use it. No true: due to limited block space on the base-layer. I am not convinced you get any efficiency increase with the LN: just more difficult capacity planning because everything is suddenly so hard to measure. Sending a payment, whether on the first or second layer, will take a certain amount of: bandwidth, processing and storage. Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires. Even is we assume the processing and storage requirements are equal: it will be more expensive on the LN. On the base layer, your data is protected from Byzantine faults by having each node verify the transactions as they come in. With the LN, state is local to each node. That implies you need redundant hardware to protect against Byzantine faults. I have been migrating my machines to ECC RAM and redundant storage: it is not cheap. What I save on hardware costs by buying old servers I pay in extra power use. The above paragraph did not even mention the capital requirements of maintaining a Lightning node.

BigBubbler 7y ago

Lol, no LN does not solve almost anything. It will be good for some centralized and KYC-rich uses by businesses and their customers. It will not make BTC into a real peer-to-peer electronic cash for the world's people. Among the "Bitcoins", only Bitcoin Cash is keeping that dream alive.