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First Lightning mainnet release

blog.lightning.engineering

61–70 of 216 posts

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#61
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's 8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's ~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period. Another important factor is the 10 minutes c…

It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the block lattice. https://nano.org/en/whitepaper I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase)…

Nano / Raiblocks is a scam in the sense it is created for free, and old users need new users to dump their nano at a profit to new bag holders.

  The initial distribution of XRB was performed through 
  "manual mining" limited via a captcha. 
  The distribution rate was 
  17 XRB (Raiblocks) per hour per ip4.

This method was easy to automate, and easy to bypass with the plethora of VPNs and users who own hundreds of IP4/IP6 addresses. Presumably the dev team has the vast majority, millions of Rai/Nano.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch...

https://github.com/nanocurrency/raiblocks/wiki/Design-featur...

These users need new people to buy their Raiblocks / Nano in order to profit off this scam.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#63
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why trusted intermediaries like banks will arise. They will be responsible for monitoring the channels, and they'll do a good job of it. The important distinction, however, is that you will still have the option of broadcasting transactions to the main blockchain for a fee. Which means that you still have ultimate sovereignty over your funds.

So like banks, but with a much darker recent history of taking the money and running, none of the stability, and none of the insurance. All traded for the dubious benefit of broadcasting transactions to the blockchain, which seems like an empty sop to principle. I don’t care how many times “ultimate sovereignty” gets thrown around like it means anything important outside of a few narrow circles. As a currency Bitcoin…

>but with a much darker recent history of taking the money and running

there's nothing to steal. nobody is "holding" your money for you.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#64
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? If the proof of work only takes a few seconds, what prevents someone from spamming a new transaction every few seconds?

Transaction fees.

I thought the whole point is free (or very low) transaction fees?

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So like banks, but with a much darker recent history of taking the money and running, none of the stability, and none of the insurance. All traded for the dubious benefit of broadcasting transactions to the blockchain, which seems like an empty sop to principle. I don’t care how many times “ultimate sovereignty” gets thrown around like it means anything important outside of a few narrow circles. As a currency Bitcoin…

>but with a much darker recent history of taking the money and running there's nothing to steal. nobody is "holding" your money for you.

Whoever is running my node 24/7 is, if I want the convenience of money. If I’m using a paper wallet and a bank vault, I might as well buy platinum, for which demand is more than a phantom.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#66
post #29

For those who may not know the context, this has to do with long-term scaling of the Bitcoin network. 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…

This is an excellent high level description. Lightning network allows for an arbitrary high number of tx, but can only tx on value that has specifically been locked to do so. Essentially you end up creating a bidirectional link for each on-chain tx, the weight of each link is the amount of value that can flow in that direction. Joining a bunch of these links together potentially allows for just locking up funds with…

There is no added risk of double spend in lightning. The risk in lightning is that your counterparty can close the channel on an old state that benefits them. If you, or your watchtower (not yet implemented) is not there to punish fast enough, they can run away with your bitcoin.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but using a "virtual" money that doesn't have counterparty risk, and cannot be counterfeited by anyone.

Since when eliminates Bitcoin counterparty risk? Also, counterfeit notes may be an issue, but counterfeit transfers are not.

I think he meant counterparty risk on the payment side (ie. no chargebacks).

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#68
post #27

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)...

I can't speak for anyone else, but for me personally I just don't like the approach of trying to solve the problem by throwing more disk space at it. It feels... inelegant, and probably unsustainable long term. 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 magnitu…

This is a really bizarre rational, disk space is insanely cheap and simply storing the blockchain does nothing to actually validate transactions or contribute to the network.

8000GB drives cost about $150 now. Storage is getting cheaper.

Why not change the PoW hash algo to avoid costly ASICs and help decentralize the more important aspect of blockchain transaction verification?

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#69

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)...

In computer science terms, a block size increase is a O(n) solution to a O(n^2) problem (at least).

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#70
post #15

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.

>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.

> what's up with the downvotes?

Maybe because you provided a link without summarizing it?

(Just guessing — I thought your comment was sufficient, and I upvoted it. Also — I know it's policy not to discuss votes, but I'm also a fan of feedback loops that lead to desired behavior, and I don't see enough signal in this one.)

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