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First Lightning mainnet release

blog.lightning.engineering

101–110 of 216 posts

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#101
post #55

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)…

Endorsements and nifty tech are nothing without actual use. Nano suffers from the same problem that 99.9% of cryptocurrencies suffer from: no useful information on how an average person might actually USE it. Google brings various ways you can BUY Nano in order to speculate. I want to see real world usage, I want to buy VPN/Hosting/Alpaca Socks using Nano. PS Nano is also 100% pre-mined which means one would have to…

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=raiblocks https://www.statista.com/statistics/268225/countries-with-th...

You do not see it because you likely fall outside of the demographic of cryptocurrency first users: businesses and citizens in countries facing hyperinflation, black markets, gambling, porn users seeking anonymity, legal pot businesses in the west cut-off from traditional banking in the west, legal porn businesses cut-off from traditional banking in the west.

Bear in mind there is a lag in adoption of the best technology. Just 4-5 months ago bitcoin was still the dominant currency on darknet markets, now it is monero.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#102
post #76
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there will be a liquid market in such nodes. Finding them will never be a problem.

> Yes, but there will be a liquid market in such nodes. How? You need to trust those nodes to provide not only a secure but also reliable service that will be online 24/7. A single outage, even if its only a minute long, can possibly lose you all your money in all channels. This means that centralization will happen almost immediately as high-availability is a very complex topic that is not achievable by amateurs. Es…

>A single outage, even if its only a minute long, can possibly lose you all your money in all channels

do elaborate on how that's the case.

edit: nvm, already discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16595042

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#103
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you need to store the whole blockchain? Older blocks can be pruned. The whitepaper discussed this. The UXTO set is all that's needed for block validation, and that's quite small (currently ~50M).

Sounds great. Why haven't we done that yet? Like I said, the blockchain is currently ~150 GB. Seems to me it's already overdue for a good pruning.

pruning was added almost 3 years ago https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-n...

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#104
post #33

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)...

If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's 8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's ~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period. Another important factor is the 10 minutes c…

0-conf transactions are instant and work great on BCH.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#105
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 8000GB drives cost about $150 now That's enough to handle the blockchain size increasing by one order of magnitude. I just talked about a scenario where it could conceivably increase by 3. Storage is indeed cheap, but not _that_ cheap. Unless you're envisioning a scenario where only large stakeholders like miners and exchanges ever have to store a full copy of the blockchain.

What makes you think you need to store the whole blockchain? Older blocks can be pruned. The whitepaper discussed this. The UXTO set is all that's needed for block validation, and that's quite small (currently ~50M).

>currently ~50M

actually, 2.7G https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-outpu...

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#106
post #80
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but if you're someone who wants to see Bitcoin succeed then you probably don't want to use a scaling solution which only works if you assume Bitcoin will never achieve mainstream adoption.

> you probably don't want to use a scaling solution which only works if you assume Bitcoin will never achieve mainstream adoption But, that's exactly what happened with segwit. Why is that worth doing but increasing the block size is not?

The main thing Segwit fixes is transaction malleability (which is necessary for Lightning).

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#107
post #103
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds great. Why haven't we done that yet? Like I said, the blockchain is currently ~150 GB. Seems to me it's already overdue for a good pruning.

pruning was added almost 3 years ago https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/doc/release-n...

My point is: why do people still store full copies of the chain? If there are no downsides to this, why didn't we purge that 150 GB of useless data from the network a long time ago?

And if people still _do_ need the full chain, then obviously that solution isn't sufficient to eliminate the problem I outlined in my previous comments.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#108
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think you need to store the whole blockchain? Older blocks can be pruned. The whitepaper discussed this. The UXTO set is all that's needed for block validation, and that's quite small (currently ~50M).

>currently ~50M actually, 2.7G https://statoshi.info/dashboard/db/unspent-transaction-outpu...

Thanks for the correction. I was looking at the # of transactions. Still, quite small though.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#109

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 with spam attacks, but the transactions in a block with PoS signature still need to be validated, ideally before the next block arrives.

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-sorta actually increased the block size from 1MB to up to 4MB. 16% of Malaysia gets internet slower than 256kbps. Running a bitcoin node today takes up ~20% of a connections total bandwidth in these places. Increase the block size to 20MB, and it will not be possible to run a node in some areas of Malaysia, because 20MB/10min is too fast for the connection.

At 20MB of transactions per 10 minutes it's also possible that the diskIO on a gen-1 Raspberry PI using a cheap SD card might not be enough to scan and validate every transaction in an incoming block. Remember that a node might have to scan very far back in the blockchain to find the last time an unspent output was interacted with. I'm not sure how big a block has to be before that IO overhead starts eliminating entry-level hardware.

But you don't actually get much for increasing to 20MB blocks. Another poster said that bcash going from 1MB to 8MB blocks increased the throughput from 7tx/s to 62tx/s. Lets take that as gospel, assuming that's 1MB blocks vs 8MB blocks, and extrapolate like madmen. To get to that posters desired 7,000tx/s "Visa scale", we'd need blocks of around...1GB.

That's 13.3mbps 24/7. Now most of Australia and the USA can't host a full node, and that's before we start talking not just about disk IO but even hard drive space. If new blocks are being created at the rate of 1 Gigabyte per 10 minutes, you'll need to provision 4 terabytes of new storage every month to compete with Visa.

Look, short version is this: scaling by increasing the block size eventually ends in performance requirements that force datacenter scale hardware requirements. If bcash ever reaches that point, it will have lost the decentralized, censorship resistant attributes that make cryptocurrencies valuable in the first. If your cryptocurrency isn't decentralized, you might as well use a bank. There's better regulation and much less uncertainty in being a customer of a bank.

So anyway, the Lightning network developers think that LN provides a better scaling solution. Maybe they're right. If they're not, someone will try something else. Maybe there's no solution that can scale to Visa scale, we just don't know. But bigger blocks is definitely not that solution.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#110

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.

> leading to centralization Repeating this propaganda over and over and over doesn't make it true. No centralization will occur with an increase in block size, as there will still be enough participants to prevent attacking the block chain. If what is meant by centralization is the reduction of people who can run nodes, then keeping the block size small also increases centralization by this definition, as there is a…

I guess that's true based on your definition of "trustless". But I wouldn't consider a network where as a practical matter I have to rely on a small number of centralized servers for validation "trustless".
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