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L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

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Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#121

Post by janandonly »

kylebenzle wrote: post #84
RustyRussell wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not seem accurate, but perhaps I'm too close to see it? Do you have a source for this?

Do you just spend your time in HN to spread lies, propaganda and misinformation about LN, lol? Lightening Labs, or whatever company owns, Lightning Network, should be able to pay for better quality shills I would think. Shame on a CEO like Elizabeth Stark for using poor innocent flobs like you to do their dirty work.

There are multiple companies building Lightning software like Wallets, serversoftware and SDK’s.

Lightning Labs is one of those companies, but they don’t own the protocol.

For example, https://acinq.co/, makes the Phoenix Wallet and Phoenixd, a node implementation that you can also run for yourself.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#122

Post by derangedHorse »

Rhapso wrote: post #94
throw10920 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing based on a PoW cryptocurrency should get any support from anybody. I'd rather have this than the status quo, which is...Patreon, basically, which is an utterly terrible micropayments platform from both a company-ethics standpoint and a user-experience standpoint. If you're concerned about carbon emissions, then tax energy enough to provide carbon capture to offset those carbon emissions, plus a little on to…

The problem with PoW is that it creates a system where any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates. If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok. Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocu…

This is based off a biased and incorrect assumption that "any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates". It ignores miner advantages bred from more efficient governance where externalities are covered by clear regulations and proper enforcement. Any venture can be made to have negative externalities and Proof of Work doesn't lend itself to either more or less of those than most other industries.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#123

Post by derangedHorse »

throw0101d wrote: post #113
DINKDINK wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There is no such thing as "wasted energy". Your argument's basis is detached from reality: https://orientalnewsng.com/global-gas-flare-heightened-by-15... Thankfully, there are market participants who are capturing this previously-wasted energy and putting it to use: https://hashrateindex.com/blog/flared-gas-bitcoin-mining-101...

How many coins were mined in 2023? How many transactions were completed in 2023? What percentage of each used this so-called "wasted energy"? 100%? 75? 35? Other? And in 2022? In 20221? How about the miners that are using coal plants? * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m... * https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/c... Is that using "wasted energy"?

At the end of the day you're just having a value disagreement with those of us who are Bitcoin proponents. You don't think the energy is worth what Bitcoin brings the world, while we do. Bitcoiners seem to jump through hoops to prove that they are leading the way in clean energy generation and consumption, yet to you *any* energy spent on Bitcoin will always be a waste.

This makes the only acceptable energy for Bitcoin to morally use be self-generated, clean, and has no impact to you whatsoever. A failure to recognize this fundamental belief will always lead to you belaboring your point. The only thing I can leave you to think about is whether you truly believe Bitcoin is the biggest "waste" of energy for you, or why there aren't as many conversations about the consumption of the rest of the 99% of energy demand (the CBECI estimates Bitcoin took about 0.1% - 0.9% of global electrictity demand[1]).

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#124

Post by Hizonner »

throw10920 wrote: post #114
Hizonner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lighting is built on Bitcoin. Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain. In fact, if Lightning-based Web micropayments caught on, it would drive the base transaction volume over the hard cap that's imposed by the current Bitcoin protocol. And it turns out that Bitcoin's energy usage responds not to the transaction volume, but to the total available miner inc…

> Lighting is built on Bitcoin So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. > Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain ...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that p…

> So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading.

You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.

> What does "caught on" mean? Show us the math, because you clearly can't be trusted to be truthful.

Bitcoin can do, charitably, six TPS, and there is massive community resistance to changing that.

It takes a minimum of two on-chain transactions to be able to use Lightning: one to get the Bitcoin to fund a channel (it is not legitimate to assume many people already have Bitcoin, because they don't), and a second to actually open the channel. In reality, anybody who used Lightning on a regular basis would also do multiple other on-chain transactions, to change the funding level, eventually to close the channel, probably to have multiple channels, and occasionally to lock in balances when counterparties misbehaved or were suspected of misbehaving.

But let's pretend it's just two. That means that, even if Lightning uses the entire capacity of the Bitcoin block chain, freezing out all other transactions. it can create at most three channels per second, worldwide.

According to Wikipedia, the New York Times has 9.9 million online subscribers. It would take 3.3 million seconds, (917 hours, 38 days) to onboard all the subscribers of that one Web site, if the Bitcoin chain were doing nothing else. And the fees would of course spike through the roof if that actually happened.

Now suppose this thing caught on to the level of, say, Instagram, which supposedly has 2.4 billion user accounts. I picked Instagram as an example of a "middling" platform, before I looked at any user numbers from any service. Let's be nice to you and say that people have three Instagram accounts apiece (they don't), but for some inexplicable reason each of them would only have one Lightning channel. Let's further say that only half of them would join "the micropayments system" (micropayments have no prayer of working if there are more than one or two systems with significant use). That's 400 million channels. Creating them would take 1543 days, or over four years, of the full capacity of the Bitcoin chain.

And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.

This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#125

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

theamk wrote: post #118
fragmede wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cryptocurrency, if you don't trust the person you're paying, you can check the program being called and its outputs and see the previous runs of the program distributing the currency to other accounts.

You are forgetting the most important cryptocurrency rule: all this works as long as it's all on-chain and real world is not involved. No amount of smart contracts or bitcoin magic can prevent me from taking someone's work (say by web scraping), stripping all attribution of original author, putting it on my server, charging people for it, and pocketing all the money.

Well duh, blockchains are for accounting. All they save you from is untrustworthy or overpriced accountants. The rest of the humans are still in the loop being potentially untrustworthy.

As with all accounting, participation of others is needed for it to be meaningful. It's no more of a fairy tale than intellectual property is in the first place, or money for that matter.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#126

Post by derangedHorse »

Animats wrote: post #39
mdouglass wrote: post #5

I'm not seeing anything in the protocol that stops the first human from paying for the resource and then sharing their macaroon+preimage with everyone else. Normally, I'd account for that by associating the preimage with a specific human (account) but this seems to be intended for use without accounts?

If it's just for one request, the capability ("macaroon" is just their word for a capability) could be tied to a source IP address, so that only one client can use the service. That's the least of the problems. The concept is that each user has a pre-purchased local store of some cryptocurrency. For some reason, they don't actually say that. Servers send an "invoice", with just enough info to get paid but not enough…

It doesn't need to happen within an http transaction nor does it have to be atomic. There is a way to present proof of payment to a recipient by showing them a preimage of a hash that's received by a lightning node on payment completion

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#127

Post by byteknight »

DINKDINK wrote: post #81
byteknight wrote: post #2

Can anyone tell me why this is any better than just logging in? This seems like its solving a problem that doesnt exist.

The cryptographic properties of an L402's HMAC provide stateless authentication/verification which sub services can then be provisioned with payments to compose API calls in novel ways. E.g. Prior to L402, services needed to conglomerate into siloed ecosystems because there's the need for statefull authentication (Backend: Is this user who is requesting inferences allowed to run this query? How much credit account ba…

This answers and solves nothing new. SSL exists.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#128

Post by Rhapso »

derangedHorse wrote: post #122
Rhapso wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with PoW is that it creates a system where any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates. If you have a USA-bitcoin that only accepted blocks by miners verified to be paying real costs for energy, then it would be different. But nobody wants that If making it "OK" requires global consensus on tax/externality policy, then it isn't ever going to be ok. Escaping regulation is the point of cryptocu…

This is based off a biased and incorrect assumption that "any jurisdiction with uncaptured externalities dominates". It ignores miner advantages bred from more efficient governance where externalities are covered by clear regulations and proper enforcement. Any venture can be made to have negative externalities and Proof of Work doesn't lend itself to either more or less of those than most other industries.

Yep. You are entirely correct but you miss the point.

That "regulatory efficiency" doesn't and can't exist in our current flavor of capitalism. Yes, it is the same as any other industry. But pointing it out about Bitcoin doesn't scare the population as much as pointing it out for their entire economy.

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#129

Post by throw0101d »

derangedHorse wrote: post #123
throw0101d wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many coins were mined in 2023? How many transactions were completed in 2023? What percentage of each used this so-called "wasted energy"? 100%? 75? 35? Other? And in 2022? In 20221? How about the miners that are using coal plants? * https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/feb/18/bitcoin-m... * https://www.indystar.com/story/news/environment/2023/12/05/c... Is that using "wasted energy"?

At the end of the day you're just having a value disagreement with those of us who are Bitcoin proponents. You don't think the energy is worth what Bitcoin brings the world, while we do. Bitcoiners seem to jump through hoops to prove that they are leading the way in clean energy generation and consumption, yet to you *any* energy spent on Bitcoin will always be a waste. This makes the only acceptable energy for Bitco…

> At the end of the day you're just having a value disagreement with those of us who are Bitcoin proponents. You don't think the energy is worth what Bitcoin brings the world, while we do.

There are two different points:

* Bitcoin is useful in some way

* Bitcoin 'soaks up' energy that would otherwise be "wasted"

In this thread I am saying there is no such thing as "wasted energy" (regardless of the pros and cons of Bitcoin).

Re: L402: The Missing Piece in the Internet's Payment Infrastructure

#130

Post by throw10920 »

Hizonner wrote: post #124
throw10920 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lighting is built on Bitcoin So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. > Using Lightning encourages Bitcoin, and in fact requires doing transactions on the base Bitcoin chain ...which is irrelevant to the fact that you intentionally used extremely misleading language in order to deceive readers into thinking that the same technology that p…

> So, your 1% figure was Bitcoin in general, not Lightning, and you intentionally used the wrong value to be misleading. You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin. And nobody is actually planning to change that so far as I know. I said that the "base system", which is Bitcoin, was what was using the power. I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.…

> You cannot use Lightning without using Bitcoin.

Irrelevant to the fact that you used intentionally misleading language to massively overstate the potential energy/climate impact of using L402 built on Lightning.

> I do expect that people reading technical discussions have some minimal knowledge of the systems involved.

An intentionally unrealistic expectation. You know very well that just because a person is "technical" doesn't mean that they have a base level of understanding of every single technical system in existence, and you exploited that to mislead readers.

> And, again, all of that is based on a bunch of rosy assumptions I made to rule out typical Bitcoin-lover objections. Ten times that would be more realistic.

This, and all of the above, are arguments about the scalability of Bitcoin. Not the power consumption or climate impact. You've convinced me that Lightning is fundamentally not a scalable technology, but you've provided zero evidence that it'll have any significant climate impact, much less that the impact is meaningful relative to the provided value of having a distributed micropayment system that replaces the brainrot that is ads.

> This should be intuitively obvious to anybody who has even the slightest idea how Bitcoin and/or Lightning work.

Another intentionally unrealistic expectation. I have a decent understanding of Bitcoin, but no prior knowledge of Lightning, nor knowledge of transaction throughput limits or power consumption. This is not "slightest idea" knowledge, this is details that most people will not know.

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