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

141–150 of 448 posts

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#141

Post by ETH_start »

kevinak wrote: post #91
ETH_start wrote: post #69

LN adoption/capacity cannot possibly explain the reduction in Bitcoin congestion. At its peak, there was only $200 million worth of BTC as collateral in LN channels: https://www.defipulse.com/address-tag/lightning-network This is against an ATH market cap of $1.25 trillion. LN collateral isn't even a rounding error relative to outstanding BTC. The much more likely explanation for reduced congestion is that people sto…

It’s worth pointing out that you can only see public channels on these trackers. Large players probably have large private channels open with each other to guarantee better payment flows and less fees. Expedia, Steam and Microsoft not a likely reason cobnest ion got lowered. More likely exchanges and large players got better at handling their wallets.

The public LN channels define the routable space of the network, since a routing table is public by definition.

The collateral in these channels is therefore a fair proxy for the overall size and usage of the LN.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#142

Post by admax88qqq »

toolz wrote: post #115
_mhr_ wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

I don't think it's as hard as you think to track ships. They're all tracked already

Government will adapt and just ban shipping vessels from visiting sanctioned countries, or create a vast make work agency to inspect cargo on ships that visited sanctioned countries.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#143

Post by olalonde »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #138
olalonde wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume the implication is that doing off-chain transactions defeats the purpose of Bitcoin? It does not. Did you know that fiat doesn't even have a blockchain to withdraw to when you want to exit or switch payment network/provider?[0] Did you know that with fiat, the money supply can be changed arbitrarily? Those are problems that Bitcoin still solves when you use an off-chain transaction network (at least for the…

“Blockchain is better because non-blockchain payment systems don’t even have a blockchain."

That's almost the opposite of what I said. My whole point was that it's possible to use non-blockchain payment systems (e.g. Lightning) to transact in Bitcoin while still reaping many of its benefits. I guess if you wanted to sarcastically quote me, you should have gone with "Bitcoin is better because fiat currencies don’t even have a blockchain." (a statement I agree with).

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#144

Post by Centmo »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #129
victorvosk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this better than Visa and MC?

The 1.5-3.5% credit card processing fee for starters. Also, you can't use a CC to send money peer-to-peer globally at near-zero cost.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#145

Post by stonogo »

eldenwrong wrote: post #136
Grim-444 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're taking transactions off of the base currency, so it no longer matters what the properties of the base currency are.

You settle on the main chain, which has to follow consensus rules. It does matter. We are scaling BTC like the internet, in layers..

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.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#146

Post by varajelle »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #129
victorvosk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this better than Visa and MC?

It keeps many of the properties of bitcoin:

- decentralised

- trustless

- censure resistance

Edit: - pseudonymous

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#147

Post by stonogo »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #89
tvink wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quote to take maybe with a pinch of salt. Having been smart enough to invent Bitcoin, one could assume that Satoshi knew that waiting 10 minutes for a block time to be finalized along with a speed of 7tx/s was not going to be practical to go shopping ... regardless of tx fees. Something had to be invented, and this was just not there at the time of this whitepaper

So why didn't he write that instead of being so smart that he knew his followers would retroactively put those words in his mouth? Why not just take him literally and interpret his writings at face value?

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#148

Post by Centmo »

petefromnorth wrote: post #121

Why use LN when other simple L1 solutions already work great as money. Litecoin (LTC) has cheap fees and lots of room. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is constantly improving and has a ton of transaction room to grow, with increases if/when demand grows. Dogecoin (DOGE) not my favorite, but does work fine for the money use-case, but development, from what I can see is a bit stale. With these existing simple solutions, I don't see…

The holy grail is a cryptocurrency that can scale to billions of users while maintaining sufficient decentralization and security to be immune to state-level attack and corruption. BTC in combination with the higher level protocols such as Lightning (and others not yet conceived) is the only system that I believe can achieve this.

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#149

Post by [deleted] »

TradingPlaces wrote: post #129
victorvosk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How is this better than Visa and MC?

[deleted]

Re: The Lightning Network: Turning Bitcoin into Money

#150

Post by eldenwrong »

stonogo wrote: post #145
eldenwrong wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You settle on the main chain, which has to follow consensus rules. It does matter. We are scaling BTC like the internet, in layers..

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.
Post reply on HN