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Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

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Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#31

Post by betawaffle »

tCfD wrote: post #25
shlorn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I understand--yes. They would need to "settle" their transfer on the blockchain and then open a new channel. The solution to this from what I've read is an IOU mechanism and a third party that has a channel with almost everyone. If the third party is rich then each channel is theoretically huge. ALICE --(IOU to bob for 10k)---> CAROL --(IOU from alice for 10k)--> BOB

What happens to the engine trustless selling point of bitcoin when the only plausible scalability solutions entail reintroducing trusted third parties?

You don't need to trust the third parties, that's the point.

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#32

Post by AlexCoventry »

FriedPickles wrote: post #27
AlexCoventry wrote: post #11

What are the regulatory hurdles to operating a lightning node in the US? It makes you a money transmitter, right?

If FinCEN rules that operating a lightning node constitutes acting as a money transmitter, it would be unenforceable. It may still discourage operating an intermediate node in the US and shift the majority of nodes to other countries.

Why unenforceable?

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#33

Post by sp332 »

zik wrote: post #9
sunsu wrote: post #4

What does "capacity" mean in this context?

Lightning Network seems very confusing. It's unclear to a casual user what "capacity" is and what it means to them. Or what any of this means, really.

I found this article very helpful in explaining generally what happens in the lightning network. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/bitcoins-lightni...

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#34

Post by urza »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #11

What are the regulatory hurdles to operating a lightning node in the US? It makes you a money transmitter, right?

Here is something from Andreas Antonopoulos on this topic: https://youtu.be/c4TjfaLgzj4?t=14m35s

I think the most important aspect is that Lightning Nodes are just sending bitcoin transactions, the whole system is trustless, the node relying your transaction to destination can't steal your money any more then bitcoin full node relying your transaction to miners can.

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#35

Post by apo »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #11

What are the regulatory hurdles to operating a lightning node in the US? It makes you a money transmitter, right?

I've seen nothing to suggest that a LN operator would be considered a money transmitter. Whats your best reason for thinking so, and why does your definition of money transmission not include miners?

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#37

Post by nosuchthing »

imaginenore wrote: post #21

Have they solved the distributed routing problem? I watched many videos on the LN, and it's never addressed, it's always this hand-wavy explanation that a route is somehow found, on a network that changes, potentially, thousands of times per seconds, and has tens of millions of nodes.

No. The LN white paper doesn't even explain how they plan to solve routing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE&feature=youtu.be...

Without decentralized routing, It seems like they're simply prioritizing nodes with large sums of BTC as the central operator hubs.

Centralized payment processing hubs?

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#38

Post by nosuchthing »

Does anyone know how Lightening Network code actually routes nodes?

The LN claim is basically decentralized BGP but much more complex and prone to race condition errors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug8NH67_EfE&feature=youtu.be...

The white paper doesn't even mention how LN routing works!

  8.4 Payment Routing

  It is theoretically possible to build a route map 
  implicitly from observing 2-of-2 multisigs on the 
  blockchain to build a routing table. Note, however, 
  this is not feasible with pay-to-script-hash transaction 
  outputs, which can be resolved out-of-band from the 
  bitcoin protocol via a third party routing service. 
  Building a routing table will become necessary for 
  large operators (e.g. BGP, Cjdns). Eventually, with 
  optimizations, the network will look a lot like the 
  correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs.
It seems impossible to implement true decentralized routing, so it's likely they're using some sort of hack to prioritize "masternodes" as the backbone routers instead of actual peer to peer routing.

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#39

Post by hndamien »

dane-pgp wrote: post #36
hndamien wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the blockchain history.

And living up to Satoshi's original vision of a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash".

Not really. I think Monero has that mantle. Mining was supposed to be decentralised and the cash was supposed to be fungible.

Re: Show HN: Lightning Network Search and Analysis Engine

#40

Post by qsucvatz »

dane-pgp wrote: post #36
hndamien wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the blockchain history.

And living up to Satoshi's original vision of a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash".

And support by the original developers of Bitcoin, for scaling by blocksize and exponential growth of computing, bandwidth, and storage.
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