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First Lightning mainnet release

blog.lightning.engineering

11–20 of 216 posts

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#11
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap and near-instant transactions.

I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions.

If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#12
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

Let's stop and think for a moment about how practical it is to promise everyone free and instant transactions. If they prevent spam with proof of work, why couldn't someone just do the proof of work and constantly spam the network anyway?

It quickly gets very expensive to do so.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#14

Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets, need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...

> BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size?

Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization.

Increasing the block size doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem bigger.

other "coins" with larger faster block sizes are already running into storage issues.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#15

Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets, need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...

> BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization. Increasing the block size doesn't solve the problem, it just makes the problem bigger. other "coins" with larger faster block sizes are already running into storage issues.

>Because increasing the block size is an inelegant approach that will only work briefly and then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

edit: what's up with the downvotes? i'm providing a name to the phenomena and providing a wikipedia link to it.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#16
Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#17

Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s approach of not neutering the block size? LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets, need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...

> need liquidity provided at both ends

False. You can open a bidirectional payment channel where only one end deposits money at first.

> (kyc/aml)...

I'm sorry, how is KYC/AML related to any of these technical conversations? I don't get it.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap and near-instant transactions.

I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

>I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

It's worth nothing that lattice/DAG based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones, so it's not fair to compare them on transaction fee/volume alone. Sort of like it's not fair to compare SQL vs NoSQL.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#19

Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.

Keep in mind Hashgraph and Blockchain are very different, in that Hadera is a permissioned network with public access (each round has a known number of nodes that must participate to exit the round).

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#20

Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.

Bitcoin's electricity use isn't due to transaction volume, it's due to mining. A 1kb block takes about the same amount of energy to produce as a 1MB block.
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