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The protocol itself? Why do you think so?
by TekMol 4y ago
The protocol itself? Why do you think so?
- TimJRobinson 4y ago1. All payments have to be routed across channels of arbitrary size across an arbitrary network. It's a small travelling salesman problem that only gets worse as the network increases in size. 2. It requires a transaction to L1 to open/close a channel. If 1B+ people used it the Bitcoin network itself couldn't cope with that. At 7tps it can handle a max of 220M transactions per year. 3. You need enough liquidity in all channels to your destination to send a payment. This is fine for micro transactions but it can't handle $1k+ transactions well at all. 4. You have to re-balance channels or they stop working. 5. You need some sort of watchtower / guardian node to prevent the other person from being able to steal your funds. ZK-Rollups completely obsolete the lightning network. If Bitcoin did a hard fork to make them possible every single person would migrate to them. Lightning is not a long term solution, it's mostly a meme to throw back at people who say Bitcoin doesn't scale.
- null0pointer 4y agoOne thing I don’t like about the protocol is that LN nodes must stay online or risk having the other parties of their channels steal their funds. I know there are watchtower services to help guard against this but needing to trust a 3rd party to make sure you don’t lose your money goes against trustlessness, a core principle of cryptocurrencies. This is the reason I abandoned the idea of running my own LN node. I didn’t want to risk losing money in the case of an extended outage of my node.