Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

papers.ssrn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 448 posts

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#161

Post by toolz »

ABeeSea wrote: post #130
toolz wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

The physical fruits and nuts still have to be smuggled out of Iran and into a country supporting the sanctions for this to make sense. And the physical smuggling seems way more difficult than figuring out the payments.

They don't have to be smuggled out of Iran - Iran explicitly wants to enable that trade. Who inside of Iran are they smuggling the fruits away from?

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#162

Post by ftlio »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #68

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

For the last 8-10 years it's been the same thing. Bitcoiners believe you can't sacrifice its finality, but can scale at a different layer. Other "blockchain" people believe something different.

It is a weird line in the sand to me that something must either happen on a blockchain or not be the right solution, pretty much regardless of whether that blockchain's finality guarantees are worse if understood at all.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#163

Post by dboreham »

lairv wrote: post #107
wanderingbort wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer or accountant here but I think it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event. Until then, you have deposited some value in a number of lightening network nodes and have been negotiating a set of pairwise IOUs with them for later. DeFi/staking has a similar problem and I believe waiting until gains and losses are realized will be the way it goes down. For now, make…

> it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event wouldn't that be an easy way to bypass taxes ? make all your transactions off-chain and just withdraw once a year ?

How does that bypass taxes?

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#164

Post by Empact »

bendtheblock wrote: post #152
varajelle wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It keeps many of the properties of bitcoin: - decentralised - trustless - censure resistance Edit: - pseudonymous

but what's the benefit of these? - decentralised: why is this good? - trustless: I trust the companies I use, it works - censure resistance: OK, fringe case for most - pseudonymous: why do I want anyone to be able to see my transaction history?

> The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

— Satoshi, 2009-02-11 https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/p2pfoundation/1/...

> pseudonymous: why do I want anyone to be able to see my transaction history?

Transactions are viewable in the blockchain so that every party involved can audit the system and confirm the issuance.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#165

Post by yieldcrv »

wanderingbort wrote: post #38
TekMol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you handle the tax implications of streaming sats? As far as I know, every payment with Bitcoin triggers a taxable event? Do you record a gazillion log entrys "Paid $0.0000145 for listening podcasts, Paid $0.000142 for listening podcasts ...", crunch all the numbers and then at the end of the year put that gigantic list into your tax declaration?

Not a lawyer or accountant here but I think it would be reasonable to only treat the eventual on-chain withdraw as a taxable event. Until then, you have deposited some value in a number of lightening network nodes and have been negotiating a set of pairwise IOUs with them for later. DeFi/staking has a similar problem and I believe waiting until gains and losses are realized will be the way it goes down. For now, make…

hmmmmmmmm, you can't get those IOUs back though so you need to keep a record of transaction as they are no longer under your control, if you want to be compliant

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#166

Post by pirate787 »

varajelle wrote: post #146
TradingPlaces wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this better than Visa and MC?

It keeps many of the properties of bitcoin: - decentralised - trustless - censure resistance Edit: - pseudonymous

I'm confused by your comment, L2 transactions are by definition run by centralized entities.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#167

Post by olalonde »

bendtheblock wrote: post #152
varajelle wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It keeps many of the properties of bitcoin: - decentralised - trustless - censure resistance Edit: - pseudonymous

but what's the benefit of these? - decentralised: why is this good? - trustless: I trust the companies I use, it works - censure resistance: OK, fringe case for most - pseudonymous: why do I want anyone to be able to see my transaction history?

- decentralised: why is this good?

Imagine a world where the web is controlled by a single entity, say Facebook. They get to decide who is allowed to create a website. They get to decide how much it cost. If they're not happy with the site's content, they can take it offline. Do you believe that would be a better world to live in?

- trustless: I trust the companies I use, it works

That's because there's usually no alternative. But when there's a trustless alternative, you may find that it is less risky or costly. Many people chose e2e encrypted messengers because they don't trust a third party with their private messages.

- censure resistance: OK, fringe case for most

"[...] Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."

It may be fringe but it's a massive issue for those who are censored. It's also not that uncommon. It is estimated that there are over 1 billion unbanked people worldwide. Also, try "PayPal horror stories" on Google.

- pseudonymous: why do I want anyone to be able to see my transaction history?

What parent meant is you can transact with people without knowing their real identity. I could send you a BTC tip on HN without knowing your name or address. Regarding your concern about privacy, no one can really determine your transaction history by looking at the blockchain. It's possible to do some guessing but all you really see are transactions going from opaque addresses to other opaque addresses with no attached identity information. Also, this can be further solved with CoinJoin[0].

[0] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CoinJoin

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#168

Post by dboreham »

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.

If you prefer, there are LN-like systems that run with other L1 chains.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#169

Post by yieldcrv »

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…

podcast boosts? is bitcoin interesting again?

are there cool applications using Taproot and Schnorr? are lightning network openings and closings looking identical as any other transaction or script, improving confidentiality?

where are the current communities that talk about whats going on there? I don't visit bitcoin reddits anymore and the cryptocurrency communities are about pretty much everything else

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#170

Post by Imnimo »

toolz wrote: post #155
Imnimo wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What has stopped the fruit sellers from using bitcoin to avoid sanctions for the past five years?

It hasn't stopped them or anyone else, people have been using bitcoin to bypass censorship for years.

Then why are they still "suffering immensely" if they can already use bitcoin to bypass the sanctions?
Post reply on HN