First Lightning mainnet release • Hacker News Board

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#181

Post by Poikanen » Thu, Mar 15, 2018, 11:48 PM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #175

brendanw wrote: post #164

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…

https://usenano.org/ there you go.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#182

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 12:23 AM UTC

Sir_Substance wrote: post #109

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #9

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 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…

[deleted]

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#183

Post by def_true_false » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 12:45 AM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #146

def_true_false wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a pretty good way to drive adoption.

Only for early adopters who know they'll be able to exploit late adopters. Users clearly become incentivized to market their free tokens as an opportunity at wealth, as they exit and sell them to late bag holders. Satoshi could easily have designed the PoW to distribute more slowly, and favor long term growth as more users join the network. Instead only early adopters control the supply. The risk of this is catastrop…

On the other hand, late adopters will benefit from the stronger network effects.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#184

Post by Erlangolem » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 12:57 AM UTC

darawk wrote: post #159

Erlangolem wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold isn’t in all of our electronics over a fantasy. Platinum isn’t a unique catalyst over a fantasy. Neither are fungible only in a fantasy. Investing in materials with industrial value, and thousands of years of aesthetic value, and perfect fungibility bears no real resemblance to ”Investing” in crypto. As a bonus, the SEC isn’t breathing down the neck of precious metals. Bitcoin has no real value, outside of a con…

> Gold isn’t in all of our electronics over a fantasy. How much influence do you think the sum of Gold's industrial uses exert over its value? I'll tell you: nearly zero. It's all speculation. > Bitcoin has no real value, outside of a consensual fantasy. All currencies have a value endogenous to their ecosystem. Bitcoin is no different. Bitcoin is used to pay transaction fees in the Bitcoin network. US dollars derive…

73% of gold is used in jewelry, a significant portion of the remainder is used in electronics and aerospace. To be honest though, if I were going to invest in a precious metal, I’d pick platinum, because it’s primary use is industrial, but it’s no less fungible than gold.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#185

Post by brendanw » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 1:39 AM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #175

brendanw wrote: post #164

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…

I am excited about the technology. I had taken a light look at the space 4-5 years ago and did not form a strong impression. I didn't take a look at the technology again until last September.

One of the topics I enjoyed deep diving on the most was the lightning network. The two pain points I observed for lightning were: (1) It takes a non-trivial amount of energy to understand hashed time lock contracts well enough to be able to prove the concept to yourself. Not having as easy mastery of a topic off the bat leads to feeling less secure about one's ability to reason about security. (2) The specter of rising on-chain fees for commitment transactions to open payment channels.

With regard to Nano, I was happy to see a different approach to the same problem that was more intuitive. I run a small business and am waiting for the desktop and mobile wallets to come out of beta before I offer the ability to pay with Nano.

I'd be happy if something came along that was better than Nano. I have it on my todo list to look into Byteball Bytes. I am optimistic about larger scale benefits that society will enjoy from the cryptocurrency space if certain projects are successful (eg improved ease of financial auditing, information-sharing platforms with strongly reduced odds of astroturfing, disappearance of credit card fees, increased financial transparency, reduced exchange fees when traveling, banking for the unbanked, etc). Since I am optimistic about the societal benefits from the space as a whole, I want to see more developers interested in getting involved.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#186

Post by raise_throw » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 1:41 AM UTC

Some commenters here appear to be asking why one should favour LN over raising the block size.

The answer to that is that it's not a dichotomy.

There's not a decision to be made _between_ 'LN' and 'Raise block size'. They're two independent things. The LN is an opt-in system on top of bitcoin.

If we're lucky, LN works out well.

If it doesn't - I'd be in favour of keeping the blocksize low anyway and I think a lot of technical folk would too. The reason why I don't think is difficult to understand, rather it's difficult to accept.

Raising the block size beyond some value is problematic. A small increase is likely safe, but we really don't know what. This is both in order for full nodes to be usable on reasonable hardware, and also to ensure fee pressure (in a low/zero fee environment, inflation will likely have to be introduced to ensure enough mining happens for security).

A good analogy might be with cars and cities. Imagine we lived in a world where public transport simply couldn't exist - for whatever reason it's just impossible. Would it be prudent then to bulldoze the streets of London, Paris, wherever else, to build more roads for capacity? I would argue not - you simply have a situation in which there's a limit on capacity and that's that.

In addition, in the world where pub transport _does_ exist, investing in trains does not necessarily mean completely stopping work on roads entirely. They're different things.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#187

Post by tobik999 » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 1:52 AM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #175

brendanw wrote: post #164

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…

You are wrong, not everyone accepts USD. If you are outside of the US it can be hard to spend those.

Rearding usenano.org, you have to keep in mind that adaption barely started like 4 months ago after the distribution ended.

You get access to Nano like with every other currency, work to receive a bit of it or exchange it with another currency.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#188

Post by EGreg » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 3:16 AM UTC

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #128

lawlessone wrote: post #14

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.

I don't buy the increased centralization argument. It usually comes down to the problem of orphan blocks / block propagation, a problem which has been made significantly better over time. Even Satoshi was convinced that the block limit would be increased (it was only added for ddos protection reasons). He didn't even foresee the "block size debate" as an issue because it was never a debate. Of course the transaction…

How is it instant? It takes 30 - 60 mins to have enough confirmations to be sure, and also pay a fee for miners to even take your transaction.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#189

Post by hndamien » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #61

brendanw wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 add…

And Charlie Lee is a scam artist, so no surprises there.

In light of the downvotes with no response, here is some reasoning. He bought in at around $30, and the first thing he did was clone BTC with minor negligible modifications. Philosophically at that time, this shows a remarkable lack of commitment to the underlying goal. Then, during the recent boom he completely cashes out of his own project while the market cap shows nothing close to the transformative goal of the creation of Bitcoin. Ultimately what he does doesn't matter, but his actions speak louder than words. In addition, the tactics employed within Coinbase for the LTC listing and his involvement in a proof of stake coin leave me completely unsurprised. This isn't to say Nano has no merit, I congratulate the team there, but proof of stake, unfortunately, results in all rewards to creators and an unsatisfying amount of control among people where distribution was guaranteed for no "work".

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#190

Post by clarky07 » Fri, Mar 16, 2018, 4:34 AM UTC

nosuchthing wrote: post #175

brendanw wrote: post #164

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…

There is no new generation of nano. All of it is already created. There is no new production of supply. https://usenano.org/