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

First Lightning mainnet release

blog.lightning.engineering

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 216 posts

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#151

Post by Erlangolem »

darawk wrote: post #120
Erlangolem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people invest in precious metals becaus the rate of new precious metals entering the market is bound to be a trickle, demand is high, and it has value (and has for thousands of years). The fact that precious metals are fungible assets shouldn’t be lost on you either. A small minority of rubes do buy gold because they entertain apocalyptic fantasies in which they’d A. Survive and B. Be able to retain their money.…

> A small minority of rubes do buy gold because they entertain apocalyptic fantasies in which they’d A. Survive and B. Be able to retain their money. You don't have to entertain the fantasy yourself to invest in it. You just have to trust that others do. That is what gold investment is, at a fundamental level.

Gold isn’t in all of our electronics over a fantasy. Platinum isn’t a unique catalyst over a fantasy. Neither are fungible only in a fantasy. Investing in materials with industrial value, and thousands of years of aesthetic value, and perfect fungibility bears no real resemblance to ”Investing” in crypto. As a bonus, the SEC isn’t breathing down the neck of precious metals.

Bitcoin has no real value, outside of a consensual fantasy.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#152

Post by wmf »

SnowProblem wrote: post #140
osteele wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then there will be more demands to make the blocks bigger again, eventually leading to centralization Because having a bigger block size raises the barrier to being a miner. (CapEx and OpEx are both greater.) Imagine the other extreme: mining is so cheap that every phone, watch, and — oh let's just throw in every mouse and pigeon cortex — can be a miner. This is near one extreme of decentralization. That's unattain…

If anyone can be a miner, then malware can be used to do a 51% attack. Something like that happened with Monero recently [1]. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/sites-are-using-your-brows...

Bitcoin is not vulnerable to botnets because it effectively requires ASICs.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#153

Post by Sir_Substance »

__blockcipher__ wrote: post #142
Sir_Substance wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

You're talking about the cost of future tx thruput and comparing it to today's storage prices. How can you not see what's wrong with that? >But bigger blocks is definitely not that solution. How easy it is to make a claim without any proof. >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-sort…

>You're talking about the cost of future tx thruput and comparing it to today's storage prices. How can you not see what's wrong with that?

There is nothing on the horizon that suggests a 4TB/month growth rate will be serviceable by anything less than data-center grade hardware at any point in the next 10 years. Beyond then, it's a crapshoot.

I'd /like/ to see bitcoin operate at Visa scales before then, so I must look for a solution that can work with a reasonable extrapolation of the state of storage today.

Never the less, I sense that you have an agenda and that you will not be dissuaded from it. Continue to preach as you see fit. Before I head off, I'll say the following: I'm lightly invested in bitcoin, litecoin and vertcoin, with perhaps $150USD spread across the three. I have no investment in bitcoin cash.

Care to share your crypto investment portfolio with our fellow comment-readers?

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#154

Post by tobik999 »

nosuchthing wrote: post #61
brendanw wrote: post #38

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)…

Nano / Raiblocks is a scam in the sense it is created for free, and old users need new users to dump their nano at a profit to new bag holders. The initial distribution of XRB was performed through "manual mining" limited via a captcha. The distribution rate was 17 XRB (Raiblocks) per hour per ip4. This method was easy to automate, and easy to bypass with the plethora of VPNs and users who own hundreds of IP4/IP6 add…

You are describing the problem of all currencies, ie also dollar. If no one accepts your dollar you are screwed.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#155

Post by xur17 »

tobik999 wrote: post #148
xur17 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very curious about this as well. In this example [0] someone was able to precompute 30k transactions in 5 hours with a single 1070. A mining farm with 100 video cards (capital cost of $40k) could generate a sustained load of 10k transactions per second. With precomputation, you could easily do an order of magnitude more damage. All of these transactions are stored permanently on the ledger as far as I can tell.…

Your calculation is wrong. One 1070 is able to produce about 1.6 txs, so 100 x 1070 are able to produce 160 txs. For a full transaction you need to do two time POW (send and receive), so if you use the same cards to receive the tx also you are only able to produce 80 txs. Right now I do not think you would harm the network up to about 10k - 50k txs (a simple laptop is able to monitor about 1k txs). So you may want to…

My calculations are based on the numbers from the article I linked to. I'm guessing they might have changed the difficulty since that blog post was written?

Regardless though, I can precompute the PoW for each transaction, so I could preprocess for a month to get a higher tps.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#156

Post by SnowProblem »

wmf wrote: post #152
SnowProblem wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anyone can be a miner, then malware can be used to do a 51% attack. Something like that happened with Monero recently [1]. [1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/sites-are-using-your-brows...

Bitcoin is not vulnerable to botnets because it effectively requires ASICs.

Yep. Just pointing this out because some in BTC want to change the PoW to make mining more decentralized.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#157

Post by tobik999 »

sireat wrote: post #55
brendanw wrote: post #38

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…

Funny fact, there is a VPN provider accepting Nano, there are hosting providers accepting Nano, there is even a sport socket shop accepting Nano (sadly no Alpaca from what I know) In regards to premine, yes it was premined, but because 95% were distributed by the captcha faucet, 5% went to the dev fund. Since the nano protocol does not need miners it was in my eyes a pretty good idea to get even non crypto people on board.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#158

Post by tobik999 »

tlrobinson wrote: post #58
brendanw wrote: post #38

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)…

Nano and other non-linear/DAG chains are interesting, but it seems more difficult to reason about the consensus properties. Have any (neutral) 3rd parties done thorough analyses of them? I saw Charlie Lee's reddit post asking questions about Nano ( https://www.reddit.com/r/nanocurrency/comments/80c6fg/questi... ). Did he follow up with an endorsement?

Devs said they are researching for a audit company currently, but there will be a major change in the protocol pretty soon, so I guess it will be done afterwards.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#159

Post by darawk »

Erlangolem wrote: post #151
darawk wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A small minority of rubes do buy gold because they entertain apocalyptic fantasies in which they’d A. Survive and B. Be able to retain their money. You don't have to entertain the fantasy yourself to invest in it. You just have to trust that others do. That is what gold investment is, at a fundamental level.

Gold isn’t in all of our electronics over a fantasy. Platinum isn’t a unique catalyst over a fantasy. Neither are fungible only in a fantasy. Investing in materials with industrial value, and thousands of years of aesthetic value, and perfect fungibility bears no real resemblance to ”Investing” in crypto. As a bonus, the SEC isn’t breathing down the neck of precious metals. Bitcoin has no real value, outside of a con…

> Gold isn’t in all of our electronics over a fantasy.

How much influence do you think the sum of Gold's industrial uses exert over its value? I'll tell you: nearly zero. It's all speculation.

> Bitcoin has no real value, outside of a consensual fantasy.

All currencies have a value endogenous to their ecosystem. Bitcoin is no different. Bitcoin is used to pay transaction fees in the Bitcoin network. US dollars derive their value because the US government accepts them for taxes. These are equivalent properties, each contingent on the success of the thing that issues them. Owning bitcoin is a bet on future demand for bitcoin, which is a bet on future demand for bitcoin transactions, which necessarily cost BTC to perform. If you believe Bitcoin will come to mediate a significant fraction of global commerce, it's a good investment. If you don't, it's not. It's as simple as that.

Re: First Lightning mainnet release

#160

Post by darawk »

Erlangolem wrote: post #78
darawk wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Trusting them might be, and of course it presents a perfect attack vector for a state to take a long ropey piss all over your “ultimate sovereignty” while chuckling deeply. That assumes that for some bizarre reason Bitcoin doesn’t bottom out when no more greater fools are left to hold the bag. Bitcoin hasn’t become a household word because more than a fraction of a percent want “ultimate sovereignty” over their money…

> Trusting them might be, and of course it presents a perfect attack vector for a state to take a long ropey piss all over your “ultimate sovereignty” while chuckling deeply

And what attack vector is that? You're not really trusting these nodes. They can't steal your money.

> When that music stops, the whole thing is going back to its ground state, which is zero.

People have been predicting that since Bitcoin hit $10. Sure hasn't worked out well for them.

Post reply on HN