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?
Miners only register a transfer of value and validate it against their perspective of the current ledger. Transfer routed through a lightning channel involves explicit exchange of funds between intermediaries.
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 blockch…
The whole thing is fishy. The lightning network is pushed by Blockstream, a company which has a large number of devs working on bitcoin core. They were responsible for all the propaganda and talking points against bumping the block size leading to the BCH fork, because they wanted the "correct" solution of their lightning network. The fact that it is so complex and ill defined is dangerous and an antithesis of decentralized system design and ethos, as it's not clear how trustless transactions are protected. How do we know that there isn't an easy backdoor that allows this network to be controlled for Blockstream's purposes?
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.
They are explicitly postponing the sophisticated routing solution until a later iteration, when we have more experience with how the network will become arranged.
It's not an omission, it was done this way on purpose.
And living up to Satoshi's original vision of a "purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash".
This is a really bad catchphrase by the bcash crowd because it sets up bcash as “electronic cash” vs btc “store of value”, when bcash is actually both, as in Satoshi’s vision. Shame bcash is spearheaded by such an untrustworthy team. Their argument is in the right but held back by poor tactics.
Where does the $10 come into play? Can they only transfer up to $10's worth of currency?
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
I'm a bit of a BTC novice here, so help me understand something: Does this not mean that on the LN there will necessarily be BTC that's essentially "floating" in the network, that hasn't settled on the Blockchain? What does this mean for liquidity and the integrity of the network in general?
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 blockch…
> 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.
What do you mean "impossible to implement true decentralized routing"? Many examples of decentralized distance vector and link state algorithms exist. I'm not sure what they are doing but routing isn't some mystical thing that requires a master node.
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 blockch…
The whole thing is fishy. The lightning network is pushed by Blockstream, a company which has a large number of devs working on bitcoin core. They were responsible for all the propaganda and talking points against bumping the block size leading to the BCH fork, because they wanted the "correct" solution of their lightning network. The fact that it is so complex and ill defined is dangerous and an antithesis of decent…
what? There are 3 different implementations of the Lightning network, they all implement the same protocol and are all open source. You seem to be either very misinformed or just trying to spread FUD.
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
I'm a bit of a BTC novice here, so help me understand something: Does this not mean that on the LN there will necessarily be BTC that's essentially "floating" in the network, that hasn't settled on the Blockchain? What does this mean for liquidity and the integrity of the network in general?
Yep basically. BTC is tied up in channels and when you want to take it out of the lightning network you write a transaction to the actual block chain. Though with the way lightning routing works you can keep your money in the network for months or even years making hundreds of transactions. It's kind of like having a debit account (bitcoin lightning) and a savings account (bitcoin stored in cold storage) with your bank.