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First Lightning mainnet release

blog.lightning.engineering

171–180 of 216 posts

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're kidding right? We were supposed to be seeing this over a year ago. They've been consistently behind on their promises.

LN Dev: "We're 6 months away." Dec 14th, 2015 https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/6765995708984197... Something seems off with what LN claims is a p2p network, as the claim is they've created something better than BGP yet there's going to be many many race conditions if the network is ever actually used at scale and the only solution to those race conditions will be broadcasting updates to inform other nodes…

> For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs.

Except this isn't true.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#172
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that due to the existence of LN, you would almost never need to settle on-chain. But because you theoretically could, you maintain all the benefits of genuine financial sovereignty without ever having to actually exercise it.

I haven't read most of the paper (59 pages!) so I might be missing something, but let's say I'm receiving Lightning payments from my employer and sending Lightning payments to my landlord. When my channel to my landlord runs out of funds, won't I need a couple on-chain transactions to withdraw funds from my employer channel and add them to my landlord channel? If I could somehow transfer my employer's IOUs to my land…

Just watch some YT videos. It has been explained many times in many videos.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#173
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LN Dev: "We're 6 months away." Dec 14th, 2015 https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/6765995708984197... Something seems off with what LN claims is a p2p network, as the claim is they've created something better than BGP yet there's going to be many many race conditions if the network is ever actually used at scale and the only solution to those race conditions will be broadcasting updates to inform other nodes…

> For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. Except this isn't true.

It is inherent to the architecture of the Lightening Network.

Run a simulation with many p2p nodes in an adversarial payment routing network, and the inevitable statistical optimization will be centralized payment hubs controlled by wealthy users.

Smaller less wealthy nodes will not be able to sustain routes and will be ignored. No one wants to keep paying fees to open up dozens of routes as if they're pre-depositing funds all the places they shop.

What's the benefit here?

Why not just use venmo, stripe, square, paypal?

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BCH's approach would eventually centralize the network. Remember that at least one of these blocks is generated every 10 minutes, and more than one might be flying around during a chain split. Remember also that nodes do actually need to iterate over all the transactions in the block to check they are valid when they receive a new block. Proof of stake prevents malicious actors from wasting CPU/DiskIO on full nodes w…

You're talking about the cost of future tx thruput and comparing it to today's storage prices. How can you not see what's wrong with that? >But bigger blocks is definitely not that solution. How easy it is to make a claim without any proof. >Originally with the 1MB block, there were quite a lot of full bitcoin nodes running on raspberry PI's under peoples desks in places with really shitty internet. Segwit kinda-sort…

>A non-mining node has no role in securing the network, except for SPV wallets (lite wallets).

I just noticed this snippet, and it's wrong enough that I feel I should address it separately. Safe to say you don't understand blockchain verification very well.

https://bitcoin.org/en/bitcoin-core/features/validation

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/54697/transactio...

Why would any non-mining node choose to assume that the mining nodes are non-malicious when they could just check? That's pretty much the whole point of the distributed ledger concept: not having to trust anyone else on the network, yet still being able to transact.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Riiight... well everyone accepts the USD. Not even the darknet vendors accept Nano / Raiblocks. Do you know any places where Nano XRP Raiblocks are being accepted? You might want to read these: http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/... https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support tl;dr cryptocurrencies don't really work for the real world.

Why do you have such a strong emotionally negative response to cryptocurrencies? It is pretty clear you are communicating disingenuously. The reasons for ending BTC support for many merchants and platforms were high fees and long tx confirmation times, which is what many altcoins have focused on addressing (eg Ether, Stellar, Litecoin, Nano)

Because most of the cryptocoin projects are designed as way to scam other users.

Why doesn't Nano Raiblocks allow more users to generate new Nano/Raiblocks? Would that hurt your investment if every user had equal access to the production of the supply?

Why are you so emotionally invested in trying to sell these beanie babies to other people? Is it because you need to profit off other buying into your scam?

Still no list of businesses accepting Nano/Raiblocks?

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#176
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens if they DDOS you (or your watchtower) at the right moment? Most peoples' bandwidth is shit enough that forcing them offline is fairly straightforward.

Locktimes are about 3 days, they would have to ddos you for the whole time in order to steal anything. If at any point during those 3 days you are able to broadcast your transaction in any way, you get all the money in the channel from both participants.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Except it's not. Disk space per dollar increases at a rate faster than linear.

Does it? This graph looks sub-linear to me https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/ There's also bandwidth and CPU costs. If any of those don't keep pace with transaction growth that's a centralizing force.

Gavin Andresen actually has a decent summary of some of different "O(n^2)" arguments on his blog http://gavinandresen.ninja/are-bigger-blocks-dangerous though I disagree with most of his conclusions.

Regarding all of these, they may not be literally O(n^2) but they are certainly more than O(n) and they compound each other.

His argument I disagree with most is the Metcalfe's Law one:

> I’ve transacted with probably under 100 other people or companies in the five years I’ve been using Bitcoin; the demand for transactions scales up linearly with the number of people using it.

As more people use Bitcoin then Gavin's personal demand for transactions would increase roughly linearly, but because there are more users the overall demand would increase quadratically.

Or is he saying his transaction volume wouldn't increase even as more people accepted Bitcoin? I don't believe that.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#178
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…

Par of the counter transaction system that LN has means that if someone tries to screw you over and you catch it, you get ALL of the money in the channel combined.

So if your channel was just $50 from both parties, you could broadcast your counter transaction with up to $50 in fees and still break even, since you are basically spending the fraudsters money.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#179
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that due to the existence of LN, you would almost never need to settle on-chain. But because you theoretically could, you maintain all the benefits of genuine financial sovereignty without ever having to actually exercise it.

I haven't read most of the paper (59 pages!) so I might be missing something, but let's say I'm receiving Lightning payments from my employer and sending Lightning payments to my landlord. When my channel to my landlord runs out of funds, won't I need a couple on-chain transactions to withdraw funds from my employer channel and add them to my landlord channel? If I could somehow transfer my employer's IOUs to my land…

You are correct, if you think about it as a payment channel between you and your landlord, and a separate channel between you and your employer, I believe. However, the way it's more likely to end up shaking out is as an interlocking network of trusted intermediaries, much like Visa/Mastercard are now.

Your employer will pay you, and then you will pay your landlord. But the only channel you'll have open is one to this 'visa' like entity that sits in the middle, and so will your employer and your landlord. So that trusted intermediary will ensure you don't double-spend to other parties in their channel, but who are the only parties you could double spend to. At least, that is my understanding of how the model works - I haven't read all 59 pages either, though.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you have such a strong emotionally negative response to cryptocurrencies? It is pretty clear you are communicating disingenuously. The reasons for ending BTC support for many merchants and platforms were high fees and long tx confirmation times, which is what many altcoins have focused on addressing (eg Ether, Stellar, Litecoin, Nano)

Because most of the cryptocoin projects are designed as way to scam other users. Why doesn't Nano Raiblocks allow more users to generate new Nano/Raiblocks? Would that hurt your investment if every user had equal access to the production of the supply? Why are you so emotionally invested in trying to sell these beanie babies to other people? Is it because you need to profit off other buying into your scam? Still no l…

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