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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

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...

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...