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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.
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).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
What do you mean by round?
Because Hashgraph is BFT, a round is a round of voting for confirmation. Its done virtually but you have to have 2/3rds of nodes agree on the state to close a round and have a confirmed state. To have 2/3rds you have to have a fixed and known number of nodes in the round. See BFT for more information.
The point I was trying to make, is that they are very different in benefits and limitations.
Did the Lightning Network solve the routing problem now or are they still emulating banks by requiring permanent online super nodes?
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 having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.)
Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization.
That's unattainable[1], but it's an intuition hook for the fact that the more expensive you make mining, the more centralized it becomes.
[1] IOTA tries to get closer to this. It makes a couple of changes from Bitcoin / Ethereum / etc. (1) IOTA uses a graph instead of a chain — this is why mining is cheaper, and low-powered IOT devices can mine. (2) IOTA uses homegrown cryptography, (EDIT: that has been proven exploitable multiple times), instead of reviewed standards. (2) isn't necessary for (1), nor does it help decentralization; it just seems to be an attached vanity project.
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)...
Imagine for a minute a future where Bitcoin goes mainstream and needs to process ~2k transactions per second. (A reasonable estimate of the world's current credit card transaction rate, and 3 orders of magnitude more than Bitcoin's current max capacity.) Would that _really_ be possible to sustain just by raising the block size?
Bitcoin's block chain is already 150 GB after only a decade, and if we drastically increase its rate of growth like that (by 3 orders of magnitude) the hardware requirements for even storing the full chain are gonna get ridiculous pretty fast.
That's not to say that I think bigger blocks couldn't work, but I think if Bitcoin does go that route it then it will need to find a way to trim old blocks out of the chain without compromising security in any way. Otherwise there's a real possibility we might end up with a 100 TB chain on our hands within the next 10 years or so. (Assuming Bitcoin succeeds the way we might want it to.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Doesn't Bitcoin need mining to handle transactions?
That being said, having a lot of transactions going around is probably correlated with Bitcoin getting more popular, which is again probably correlated with more miners coming in, which would indeed lead to higher energy consumption. That's an indirect effect, however.
The very first public response to Satoshi's announcement of Bitcoin was an expression of doubt about scalability:
We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.
...
To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a substantial part thereof.
https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...
And the comment was spot-on. Naively implemented, Bitcoin can only scale linearly by putting every transaction onto the block chain. Double the transaction capacity means doubling the size of blocks.
Lightning Network scales the Bitcoin network by offering a secure method for keeping many, if not most, transactions off the block chain. This is done through a clever use of Script, Bitcoin's built-in programming language.
Two parties who want to transact at high speed jointly lock up some money with an on-chain transaction (thereby creating a "payment channel"). Then they send each other half-signed transactions spending the locked funds. Each transaction represents a kind of private ledger. Although any of these transactions can be published at any time, it will usually be mutually beneficial to avoid doing so and continue passing half-signed transactions back and forth. When it's time to call it quits, the last transaction is published.
In other words, the intermediate transactions never need to hit the block chain. Only the final settlement transaction needs to be published.
Lightning takes this one step further by providing a mechanism whereby a party can pay another party on behalf of a third party. This means that you can make Lightning payments without necessarily having an open channel with your intended payee. You just need an open channel and the network routes your payment.
Lightning Network has been in development for years. The idea has been repeatedly disparaged as "vaporware." The first mainnet release is a big deal because that characterization no longer applies. It also means we're going to see a real-world test of an idea that up until now hasn't been widely-tested.
The Bitcoin Cash split was due in large part to a group of Bitcoiners rejecting Lightning as a scaling option. They tend to believe not only that Bitcoin can scale by increasing block size, but that this is the best way.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
> then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization Because having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.) Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization. That's unattain…