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The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

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Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#111

Post by once_inc »

lawn wrote: post #99
joosters wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'reference' implementation of the protocol, https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd is still in beta, with warnings about how users could lose all their money. AFAIK, there's no stable/reliable software out there. And don't forget, ordinary users need to monitor the blockchain 24/7 in order not to lose their money by a counterparty closing their channel fraudulently. It's far from ready for use.

To get a pleasant experience today you also need to rely on third-parties to manage your channel, the very thing Bitcoin was set out to avoid.

Define pleasant. There a quite a few people happily using umbrel or similar products that allow you on the LN with minimal hassle.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#112

Post by kordlessagain »

JofArnold wrote: post #109

The problem I have with Lightning is it further validates the existence of Bitcoin - a decrepit and highly polluting technology which has at best has failed to achieve any of objectives in any meaningful way, and at worst recreated a financial system more exploitative and toxic than anything that came before it. Let it die already.

So you blame Lightning not for what it is, but what it enables? That doesn't make a lot of sense, especially given the creators built it to address the issues you raise here.

With Lightning, micropayments for the Web can be a thing. Just because nobody has implemented it yet, doesn't mean it doesn't have a killer use case worth the cost of mining (which will decrease over a long period of time). Moving payments for API calls to Lightning becomes very efficient, given the (nearly instantaneous) transactions can occur off chain.

I'm a big fan of mining with solar. Wish more miners were investing in this.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#113

Post by _mhr_ »

toolz wrote: post #97
TradingPlaces wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say “less important;” I say “vast majority.” How is this better than Visa or MC?

for one, the base currency in question is uncensorable. e.g. I for one find it detestable that fruits and nuts sellers in Iran suffer immensely because of US sanctions. The idea that innocent citizens are being made to suffer for their governments policy (especially in more authoritarian countries) is gross. I see it akin to punishing a child for their parents behavior.

What do you mean by uncensorable? What does censorship have to do with sanctions hurting innocent economic participants?

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#115

Post by toolz »

_mhr_ wrote: post #113
toolz wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for one, the base currency in question is uncensorable. e.g. I for one find it detestable that fruits and nuts sellers in Iran suffer immensely because of US sanctions. The idea that innocent citizens are being made to suffer for their governments policy (especially in more authoritarian countries) is gross. I see it akin to punishing a child for their parents behavior.

What do you mean by uncensorable? What does censorship have to do with sanctions hurting innocent economic participants?

if you sanction Iran, limiting their fruit sellers, you have to have means to track the trades in order to enforce those sanctions - lightening network is effectively untraceable at the moment (and tools built on top of bitcoin can make tracing payments provably impossible) which means the sanctions can't be easily enforced - no country is going to spend resources proving their businesses aren't doing fruit trades with sanctioned countries, so if you can't trace the money, you're going to have an incredibly hard time enforcing sanctions - which I would suggest means Iranian fruit sellers aren't going to be nearly as limited in their trade. Iran certainly isn't going to limit them and the sanctioning country (US in this example) isn't going to have the resources to audit every single import to every other country.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#116

Post by bearjaws »

victorvosk wrote: post #87
TradingPlaces wrote: post #68

“We can make the blockchain actually work for payments if we take payments off the blockchain.” Sounds about right.

BTC and a lot of other chains are Level 1 (L1). Final settlement layers for transactions. To compare that to normal banking, your credit card is like an L5. Tons of things go on in-between your CC transactions before its actually settled even if it appears to be instant and final to the end user. Truth is crypto enthusiasts have been overly ambition in this space, insisting a single L1 chain will come along and be th…

That just sounds like banking with extra steps.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#117

Post by gregwebs »

arcticbull wrote: post #9

Lightning is a solution that does not do what it says on the tin. It requires an on-chain transaction to open a channel, which at current block size limits requires about 75 years for everyone on earth to have one, and somewhere in the trillion dollar range in fees and the entire outstanding block reward. Factor in quadratic routing complexity, and even if you did onboard everyone it wouldn't work anyways. This is as…

It's still a WIP. The new taro protocol that leverages Bitcoin taproot and Lightning can help address some scaling issues.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#118

Post by JofArnold »

kordlessagain wrote: post #112
JofArnold wrote: post #109

The problem I have with Lightning is it further validates the existence of Bitcoin - a decrepit and highly polluting technology which has at best has failed to achieve any of objectives in any meaningful way, and at worst recreated a financial system more exploitative and toxic than anything that came before it. Let it die already.

So you blame Lightning not for what it is, but what it enables? That doesn't make a lot of sense, especially given the creators built it to address the issues you raise here. With Lightning, micropayments for the Web can be a thing. Just because nobody has implemented it yet, doesn't mean it doesn't have a killer use case worth the cost of mining (which will decrease over a long period of time). Moving payments for A…

Correct. If you're going to build something like this, why on top of Bitcoin which - as I say - is rotten to its core. With Ethereum and its L2s instant, practically-free micropayments are already a thing. With Solana even... and others I'm not particularly in to but I hear work to various degrees.

To be clear, the tech itself is interesting and broadly I remain fascinated in blockchain technologies and engaged with them to various degrees as you can see from my GitHub. But Bitcoin though? It's the oil of our time; dirty and corrupting.

Edit: to address your point about solar (which along with using mining for heating is clearly a good way of reducing direct CO2 emissions) it's only part of the problem... e-waste is another and a pretty big one at that.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#119

Post by BbzzbB »

tvink wrote: post #81
azangru wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That definitely wasn't the original goal of Bitcoin though. What was the original goal of gold?

To quote the Bitcoin Whitepaper: >A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution It's fine that we've moved the goalpost as we've come to understand the limitations of this kind of blockchain, but it's also fine to highlight that "store of value that you can't directly transact with" was not what…

It's also fine to highlight Satoshi talked about Bitcoin like gold since the beginning, as well as electronic cash, which people always omit when saying he deemed it to be cash not gold. He introduced the terminology of mining as a direct reference to gold mining [0]. Sure it didn't make it to the title, but the whole premise of Bitcoin being non-falsifiable and it's distribution outside of central banks' control is very much core to the whole thing. Arguably more so than being an e-cash, if it was just about sending cash on the Internet, he would've been making CashApp.

FWIW, I don't even own a dime of crypto, I just find it disingenuous every time people bring up "it's failed to live up to it's email title so bitcoiners moved goalposts" as some sort of smack down, when those goalposts were set before the network even went live.

0: https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/quotes/mining/

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#120

Post by ghaff »

Grumbledour wrote: post #63
teekert wrote: post #5

A cool use of the Lightning network is the podcast 2.0 initative. Currently, as I listen to podcasts, I stream back satoshis (sats), value for value (I use Castamatic on iOS, fountain.fm is also an option on Android). You can also send messages with sats attached, called “boosts”. Creators can transparantly split the sats they receive over various goals (i.e. FOSS projects [opensats], or guests on shows). There are n…

I really dislike this whole initiative and much prefer the patreon model. One reason of course might be that i am listening to Jupiter Broadcast and Chris pushes this stuff hard, really annoying me with the constant talk about lightning and especially the boosts, which seem to take over half the show, because somehow he seems not to realize that the problem he has in getting regular supporters is the insane price he…

I'd put open source in a different category. Most people who make a reasonable living doing open source do so because a company is paying them to do so as their day job. There are certainly exceptions but, for most, writing (non-custom) software, writing books/articles/podcasts/video mostly works as either strictly a hobby or as something a company is paying them a salary to work on--at least in part.
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