The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money • Hacker News Board

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#231

Post by hnthrow1010 » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 6:58 PM UTC

samatman wrote: post #219

hnthrow1010 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The existence of Lightning is a failure of Bitcoin's designers to create a system that can scale well, they instead chose to focus on something that was going to be maximum profitable for the miners in the short term and dumped responsibility off onto "L2 chains" as a kludge. The Lightning Network also doesn't "work just fine", the network is fundamentally slow, insecure and unreliable and this will likely never be f…

I'm only replying to say that, for all I know, you're correct in all of this. I don't think so, but that's a weakly held conviction about an entire ecosystem I don't use and understand only vaguely. The fact that I personally know people keeping hundreds of thousands of dollar-equivalent-sats on Lightning, who are happy with that arrangement, is what I'm balancing against that guy on the internet with strong opinions…

But you know that most people wouldn't put hundreds of thousands of dollars in a system like that. It would fall apart if that happened. Also, I don't know how they could be happy with it given the extreme crash over the last few months.

Regarding my name: The short explanation is, I have a throwaway account in protest. If Satoshi's anonymity was enough to convince your friends to put down large sums of real money based solely on a hope, it should be enough for you to consider my (non-monetized) comments on this internet forum that's mostly pseudonymous anyway.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#232

Post by snapcaster » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #199

Lightning network is a hack. It doesn't actually work. - There are many ways for a malicious entity to rollback a payment and prevent it from being detected (just DoS the watchtowers). - You still need to make an on-chain transaction to open a new channel which incurs on-chain fees and limits the scalability of LN. It's incredible how money can corrupt large groups of people into convincing themselves that a solution…

How can you say it doesn't work? isn't it working right this moment?

edit: not rhetorical question, actually curious since it appears to be working already

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#233

Post by jayd16 » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #176

bearjaws wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just sounds like banking with extra steps.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know the steps involved in opening a bank account (hint: many people can't), accepting online payments using a bank account (hint: hope you have deep pockets), using a bank for sending interbank/international payments (hint: might need to collect a page worth of information from your recipient. second hint: their bank might refuse to receive the payment), etc. Bonus steps: do all the a…

You know you're still supposed to collect all the same info for a BTC transaction, right? Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's not tax evasion.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#234

Post by bubersson » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:05 PM UTC

joshstrange wrote: post #198

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 pay for 5 podcasts, I do it via Patreon, Memberful, and a custom (stripe-based) solution. I'm not really sure what problem needs to be solved in this space. I pay for 2 podcasts that I haven't listened to in months, I do it because I pay to support these creators. I don't need/want my listen history to directly correlate to sending money to hosts I like (nor do they, they'd much rather have the constant stream inst…

Patreon bans podcasters sometimes, you also have to be in one of the lucky countries to be able to use it - other people are excluded. There are annoying fees that Patreon (and credit card providers) take on each transaction (afaik around 10%), so the actual podcasters get quite smaller amount compared to what you send...

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#235

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

bytelines wrote: post #207

olalonde wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know the steps involved in opening a bank account (hint: many people can't), accepting online payments using a bank account (hint: hope you have deep pockets), using a bank for sending interbank/international payments (hint: might need to collect a page worth of information from your recipient. second hint: their bank might refuse to receive the payment), etc. Bonus steps: do all the a…

Would lightning network approach comply with KYC laws?

[deleted]

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#236

Post by lxgr » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:06 PM UTC

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

All of that remains to be proven in practice.

The incentive structure of Lightning to me seems to heavily incentivize the formation of a few centralized nodes affiliated with wallet providers – a structure which would forfeit many, if not all, of these properties.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#237

Post by olalonde » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:11 PM UTC

bytelines wrote: post #207

olalonde wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know the steps involved in opening a bank account (hint: many people can't), accepting online payments using a bank account (hint: hope you have deep pockets), using a bank for sending interbank/international payments (hint: might need to collect a page worth of information from your recipient. second hint: their bank might refuse to receive the payment), etc. Bonus steps: do all the a…

Would lightning network approach comply with KYC laws?

That question is highly dependent on jurisdiction. The prevailing opinion right now is that Lightning nodes are not subject to KYC regulations in the US.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#238

Post by olalonde » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:13 PM UTC

jayd16 wrote: post #233

olalonde wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like someone who doesn't know the steps involved in opening a bank account (hint: many people can't), accepting online payments using a bank account (hint: hope you have deep pockets), using a bank for sending interbank/international payments (hint: might need to collect a page worth of information from your recipient. second hint: their bank might refuse to receive the payment), etc. Bonus steps: do all the a…

You know you're still supposed to collect all the same info for a BTC transaction, right? Just because it's easy doesn't mean it's not tax evasion.

No, you are not supposed to. KYC is a legal requirement for money transmitters[0]. It does not apply to Bitcoin users.

[0] Money transmission is the act of receiving currency from one party and transferring it to another party. Basically, middlemen in a transaction (e.g. banks).

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#239

Post by kevinak » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC

nailer wrote: post #42

jstanley wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't lightning the layer 2 scaling solution? What other promising options are there?

> What other promising options are there? Fast layer 1s. That way I don't have to worry about integration between n layer 2s that my users are on (considering my users are unlikely to be on the same layer 2).

No Layer 1 Blockchain can effectively scale to billions of users when you also take into account that you want the system to be decentralized.

In practice, for Bitcoin, there is only one real L2 and that is the Lightning Network.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#240

Post by stonogo » Wed, Jul 13, 2022, 7:16 PM UTC

eldenwrong wrote: post #150

stonogo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet does not scale in layers. This sounds more like Bitcoin is not scalable, so we're introducing abstractions to work around its limitations.

Are you familiar with OSI and TCP/IP architecture? Because it definitely works in layers.

Scaling is not a goal of the OSI model, and TCP/IP predates (and does not adhere to) the OSI model anyway. For insight into how and why this came about, I recommend Padlipsky's "The Elements of Networking Style."