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Are the security problems with Lightning fixable without resorting to centralised custodians? If people need Paypal to transact with Bitcoin, it undermines Bitc

Are the security problems with Lightning fixable without resorting to centralised custodians? If people need Paypal to transact with Bitcoin, it undermines Bitcoin's selling point of decentralisation. Might as well use Paypal to transact in gold, which has the same economic properties as Bitcoin, but doesn't involve expending enormous amounts of energy doing Proof Of Work. I've never owned BCH, and I was once an owner of BTC who steered clear of BCH, but I have to admit that the BCH solution has the major advantages of simplicity and tried-and-provenness. It's tried-and-proven because it doesn't make any additions to the algorithm Bitcoin uses, which after 11 years of experience we know works. If you want a computationally secure system, then you want it to have exactly the aforementioned qualities. I guess if gigabyte/USD prices for storage devices were to drop fast enough, and if it were possible to turn down the latency of transactions without compromising the safety of the network, then maybe the Big Block solution could work? I'd still be worried about surges in latency when there are increases in demand. The LN approach seems very complicated and experimental, and involves playing with real money. It's been in development since 2017 and is perpetually 12 months away from being ready. Some papers introducing attacks list numerous difficult tradeoffs that need to be made to make the network secure against them. The descriptions of it I've seen online seem naive and simplistic compared to the reality. Complexity is antithetical to security and correctness.

dmm 5y ago
> because it doesn't make any additions to the algorithm Bitcoin uses I haven't paid attention to BCH in a while but when it was released they had changes to the difficulty calculation that allowed difficulty to drop before the normal 2016 block interval. In principle this could give miners greater control over inflation. I'm not saying it's good or bad but it is a change to the bitcoin algorithm.
- deleted 5y ago
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- smoyer 5y ago
  Was the algorithm changed or just a constant/variable. I'm not as familiar with how mining difficulty changes but the reward halvening is based on a relatively simple algorithm that uses a constant of 210000 (blocks). Changing that constant doesn't change the algorithm but certainly changes the behavior of the system. In this case, the security of the system is clearly not changed when the constant is changed. My understanding of mining difficulty is that you could tune it without compromising security so long as it's hard enough to provide dampening to the system. Right now it's adjusted to produce one block every 10 minutes on average. Ultimately, if you want to keep the algorithm you need to either allow bigger blocks or allow blocks to be produced more often.
- lawn 5y ago
  This is a necessity for a minority chain, as it has to adjust the difficulty more often than Bitcoin, otherwise large variance would cause the difficulty to rise so much that it wouldn't be profitable to mine, effectively killing the chain.

dmm 5y ago

> because it doesn't make any additions to the algorithm Bitcoin uses I haven't paid attention to BCH in a while but when it was released they had changes to the difficulty calculation that allowed difficulty to drop before the normal 2016 block interval. In principle this could give miners greater control over inflation. I'm not saying it's good or bad but it is a change to the bitcoin algorithm.

deleted 5y ago
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smoyer 5y ago
Was the algorithm changed or just a constant/variable. I'm not as familiar with how mining difficulty changes but the reward halvening is based on a relatively simple algorithm that uses a constant of 210000 (blocks). Changing that constant doesn't change the algorithm but certainly changes the behavior of the system. In this case, the security of the system is clearly not changed when the constant is changed. My understanding of mining difficulty is that you could tune it without compromising security so long as it's hard enough to provide dampening to the system. Right now it's adjusted to produce one block every 10 minutes on average. Ultimately, if you want to keep the algorithm you need to either allow bigger blocks or allow blocks to be produced more often.
lawn 5y ago
This is a necessity for a minority chain, as it has to adjust the difficulty more often than Bitcoin, otherwise large variance would cause the difficulty to rise so much that it wouldn't be profitable to mine, effectively killing the chain.