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Interesting. So it's like lots of little ledgers, each channel stays open until N number of transactions between two people complete, then the finally tally is

Interesting. So it's like lots of little ledgers, each channel stays open until N number of transactions between two people complete, then the finally tally is pushed onchain when the channel closes. Am I wrong to thing this sounds a little risky? Like, that channel could be "lost" after the goods/services were exchanged, leaving the seller holding the bag. I don't understand what kind of recourse the seller has to LN if LN screws up? It's kinda like escrow, but escrow agents are heavily regulated whereas is LN "trustworthy"? EDIT: ah, I think "nicpottier" explains a little more, below. about having an account on LN requires a certain amount of a deposit (like a debit account).

madacol 5y ago
Each update to the channel is a new transaction that references the opening transaction, on each update, this transaction is replaced with a new one, so in practice only the last transaction is kept (old transactions become dangerous to publish) To know how they update trustlessly you should read my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451184 LN eliminates the need of escrow completely by using bitcoin's script (smart contracts) in clever ways and a bit of cryptography
- SavantIdiot 5y ago
  > bitcoin's script (smart contracts I'm out of the loop, I didn't realize bitcoin had contracts yet. Cool.
  - madacol 5y ago
    It has always had, it is just much limited than ethereum's. But you can express things like "if X and Y cooperate they can spend this transaction or Y can spend after 1000 blocks or X can spend if it reveals the preimage of this hash ____" These logics are what LN uses in its update-transactions
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    The big difference is that bitcoin's scripting language is not turing complete. This is a security and scalability trade off that the bitcoin community isn't willing to compromise on, which drove people like Vitalik (started as a bitcoin dev) away to start Ethereum. Taproot is also a rad upgrade that is going to improve bitcoin's layer one scripting in some interesting ways, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it-and-how-it-will-benefit-bitcoin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it... I haven't looked into this much, but there are projects like Rootstock, https://www.rsk.co/ https://www.rsk.co/, that essentially recreate all of Ethereum's functionality as a bitcoin sidechain.

madacol 5y ago

Each update to the channel is a new transaction that references the opening transaction, on each update, this transaction is replaced with a new one, so in practice only the last transaction is kept (old transactions become dangerous to publish) To know how they update trustlessly you should read my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451184 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27451184 LN eliminates the need of escrow completely by using bitcoin's script (smart contracts) in clever ways and a bit of cryptography

SavantIdiot 5y ago
> bitcoin's script (smart contracts I'm out of the loop, I didn't realize bitcoin had contracts yet. Cool.
- madacol 5y ago
  It has always had, it is just much limited than ethereum's. But you can express things like "if X and Y cooperate they can spend this transaction or Y can spend after 1000 blocks or X can spend if it reveals the preimage of this hash ____" These logics are what LN uses in its update-transactions
- anonporridge 5y ago
  The big difference is that bitcoin's scripting language is not turing complete. This is a security and scalability trade off that the bitcoin community isn't willing to compromise on, which drove people like Vitalik (started as a bitcoin dev) away to start Ethereum. Taproot is also a rad upgrade that is going to improve bitcoin's layer one scripting in some interesting ways, https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it-and-how-it-will-benefit-bitcoin https://bitcoinmagazine.com/technical/taproot-coming-what-it... I haven't looked into this much, but there are projects like Rootstock, https://www.rsk.co/ https://www.rsk.co/, that essentially recreate all of Ethereum's functionality as a bitcoin sidechain.