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Asking as a noob, isn't the whole point of transaction fees to prevent malicious actors from flooding the network with spam. How does lighting networks prevent
by blocked_again 5y ago
Asking as a noob, isn't the whole point of transaction fees to prevent malicious actors from flooding the network with spam. How does lighting networks prevent that from happening and why can't one use a smiliar approach for the actual bitcoin blockchain?
- rawtxapp 5y agoThe blockchain settles the transaction and records the finality. Imagine a transaction as being a simple cryptographic signed message that sends 1 BTC to someone, you just broadcast it to the network and it gets recorded immediately. But if you expect to continue transacting with the same person, instead of broadcasting the transaction, you can hold on to it and keep iterating on top of it with new balances, each time signing the transaction so that your counterparty can always go to blockchain to claim their coins. There's obviously some mechanism to avoid broadcasting old state and making sure you actually have the funds, etc, but you can't flood the network, even if you tried, you'd only be flooding your immediate neighbor which still charges fees, but much smaller fees than the blockchain. There's also mechanism for connecting those channels, so you don't need to have a direct channel with someone you want to pay, you just need a path to them.
- nepthar 5y agoHigh level answer: Lightning transactions happen off network and only "sync up" once in a while. In a lightning transaction, only the two individuals transacting know that it has happened. But in an on-chain transaction, that info is public.
- eeegnu 5y agoWhat prevents someone from making the transaction on the lightning network, as well as the btc blockchain before the lightning network syncs up?
- random_kris 5y agoOther person node who would lose money if this happend can publish the original transaction that is construscted in a way that the attacker would lose all his funds. So attacker could potentially do this but if they get caught they get punished for losing everything and they get caught if the other side node is online when this happens. There are also watchtowers that can monitor the network for hacks like this
- drdeca 5y agoThe coins are essentially allocated to being on the lightning network, and cannot be used on the blockchain until the two are synced up.
- madacol 5y agoTo open a LN channel, both parties puts their funds in an address that can only be spent if both parties agree (both have to sign) But the way this swap happen trustlessly between onchain and LN channel funds it's complicated, I don't have it clear right now If you want to get an idea how later the balances updates happen trustlessly see my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451184
- scotty79 5y agoIt's mostly to provide miners incentive to mine beyond periodically halved builtin reward for mining a block.
- tiku 5y agoThis is called sharding in Ethereum and Zilliqa I believe.
- gruez 5y agoAFAIK it's different from sharding. The transactions aren't being recorded on a separate chain, they're kept between the two ends of the channel.