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It's a tab that I can also use with anyone else that has Bitcoin Lightning. I can pay for my VPN with it and buy gift cards online, or can settle it back to the

It's a tab that I can also use with anyone else that has Bitcoin Lightning. I can pay for my VPN with it and buy gift cards online, or can settle it back to the Bitcoin blockchain. So its more of a complete payment system than a tab. Oh the thing I use it most often for is micropayments on people commenting on Reddit. If you say !lntip 100 on reddit a bot will send a lightning micropayment of 100 satoshis to someone. Pretty cool! https://www.reddit.com/user/lntipbot https://www.reddit.com/user/lntipbot

bobthepanda 6y ago
Forgive me if I'm not understanding, but this basically sounds like BTC Venmo. Isn't the entire point of BTC avoiding centralization onto networks like this?
- solotronics 6y ago
  there is no centralization on Lightning, its a separate layer ontop of bitcoin
- rglullis 6y ago
  There is "some" centralization with Lightning, not just the type you are thinking of. Payment Channel networks are decentralized in the sense that any one can go and open up a node and participate with other nodes. The point where it gets tricky is that your node's capacity to make payments is determined by how much you have deposited in the channels that you opened and if the capacity of the all of the nodes that connect you with the node you want to reach. As an example, say that you have a Node A where you deposited 1 BTC in a channel with B, B has a channel open with C where they deposited 0.8 BTC. If you try to send 1 BTC to C, the transfer will fail for the simple fact that there is no A -> B -> C route where all channels have at least 1BTC capacity. Interestingly enough, it would be okay to make ~0.5 BTC separate transfers except for the fact that you will pay B twice for the mediation fees. So, the kind of centralization that happens on the Lightning network is that nodes with more funds will be the ones more likely to be used when routing transfers, therefore they will also be more likely to make more money due to collection of transfer fees. "Small" nodes will tend to have to connect with bigger "hub" nodes and only be used to send transfers, never to make money as mediators. The interesting thing with BlueWallet is, given that it is a custodial wallet, it operates with funds pooled from all of its users so they can make larger deposits on their Lightning node. This might seem bad as too much centralization, but as a mitigation they provide their own system as open source, so you can run your own deployment of their LndHub and invite your friends to join to "your own" hub. [0] (Source: I am working on Hub20[1], which can be easily described as "run your own Ethereum/ERC20 Venmo/Paypal" and was inspired by both lndhub and btcpayserver) [0]: https://medium.com/bluewallet/bluewallet-brings-zero-configuration-lightning-payments-to-ios-and-android-30137a69f071 https://medium.com/bluewallet/bluewallet-brings-zero-configu... [1]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20 https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20

bobthepanda 6y ago

Forgive me if I'm not understanding, but this basically sounds like BTC Venmo. Isn't the entire point of BTC avoiding centralization onto networks like this?

solotronics 6y ago
there is no centralization on Lightning, its a separate layer ontop of bitcoin
rglullis 6y ago
There is "some" centralization with Lightning, not just the type you are thinking of. Payment Channel networks are decentralized in the sense that any one can go and open up a node and participate with other nodes. The point where it gets tricky is that your node's capacity to make payments is determined by how much you have deposited in the channels that you opened and if the capacity of the all of the nodes that connect you with the node you want to reach. As an example, say that you have a Node A where you deposited 1 BTC in a channel with B, B has a channel open with C where they deposited 0.8 BTC. If you try to send 1 BTC to C, the transfer will fail for the simple fact that there is no A -> B -> C route where all channels have at least 1BTC capacity. Interestingly enough, it would be okay to make ~0.5 BTC separate transfers except for the fact that you will pay B twice for the mediation fees. So, the kind of centralization that happens on the Lightning network is that nodes with more funds will be the ones more likely to be used when routing transfers, therefore they will also be more likely to make more money due to collection of transfer fees. "Small" nodes will tend to have to connect with bigger "hub" nodes and only be used to send transfers, never to make money as mediators. The interesting thing with BlueWallet is, given that it is a custodial wallet, it operates with funds pooled from all of its users so they can make larger deposits on their Lightning node. This might seem bad as too much centralization, but as a mitigation they provide their own system as open source, so you can run your own deployment of their LndHub and invite your friends to join to "your own" hub. [0] (Source: I am working on Hub20[1], which can be easily described as "run your own Ethereum/ERC20 Venmo/Paypal" and was inspired by both lndhub and btcpayserver) [0]: https://medium.com/bluewallet/bluewallet-brings-zero-configuration-lightning-payments-to-ios-and-android-30137a69f071 https://medium.com/bluewallet/bluewallet-brings-zero-configu... [1]: https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20 https://github.com/mushroomlabs/hub20