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

Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 141 posts

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#21

Post by grondilu »

Bitcoin is both a currency and a payment method. Everybody knew right from the beginning that it's not a great payment method. The 10 minutes delay is a long time if you want to prevent double-spending.

For fast payments nothing beats a server with credit accounts. Naysayers will say that it defeats the purpose of bitcoin, but nobody thought bitcoin would entirely make banks and their fractional reserves system disappear. If anything, people will still want to borrow money.

Banks could function on top of cryptocurrencies, the difference would be that their clients would be able to withdraw their funds out of the banking system alltogether at any time, that is not just turning one credit into an other.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#23

Post by gruez »

jxub wrote: post #13
marsRoverDev wrote: post #8

Or perhaps replacing bitcoin with something that doesn't have fundamental flaws in its design. Hence why a lot of us think it has no inherent value into the future. Of course, those in on the ponzi scheme will disagree with this sentiment.

Nano previously called Raiblocks is an amazing candidate for fee-less, instant transactions. The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed. Stellar is also a worthy contender although it wasn't designed with the purpose of payments, but decentralised currency/crypto exchanges. The Lightning Network daemon codebase on Github is a beauti…

>The block-lattice approach is a fundamental breakthrough that overcomes the limitations of blockchain in terms of cost and speed.

Not really. DAG/lattice based cryptocurrencies offer different security guarantees compared to blockchain based ones.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#24

Post by binarybits »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #15

Lightning appears to add more problems than solutions. It has a whole bunch of critical issues. Here is a short list. 1. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. 2. The lightning network works by routing payments through a network to your destination. The issue here is that the routing for the lightning net…

(1) is false. If you're not online, counterparties might decide to close open channels. But that just means you get your share of the funds in that channel refunded to you. You would need to pay a transaction fee to the bitcoin network for the on-chain transaction, but the other party doesn't get any of your money.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#25

Post by ericb »

binarybits wrote: post #24
lalaland1125 wrote: post #15

Lightning appears to add more problems than solutions. It has a whole bunch of critical issues. Here is a short list. 1. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. 2. The lightning network works by routing payments through a network to your destination. The issue here is that the routing for the lightning net…

(1) is false. If you're not online, counterparties might decide to close open channels. But that just means you get your share of the funds in that channel refunded to you. You would need to pay a transaction fee to the bitcoin network for the on-chain transaction, but the other party doesn't get any of your money.

> You would need to pay a transaction fee to the bitcoin network

So a micro-transaction is a 10 cent payment that can turn into a 20 dollar fee plus 10 cent payment?

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#26

Post by r3demon »

grondilu wrote: post #21

Bitcoin is both a currency and a payment method. Everybody knew right from the beginning that it's not a great payment method. The 10 minutes delay is a long time if you want to prevent double-spending. For fast payments nothing beats a server with credit accounts. Naysayers will say that it defeats the purpose of bitcoin, but nobody thought bitcoin would entirely make banks and their fractional reserves system disap…

0-confirmation transactions were working excellent before Bitcoin Core added SegWit and other useless stuff. You don't need to wait for a new block if your signed transaction is in the mempool, and it's secure enough for small payments.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#27

Post by gruez »

haolez wrote: post #12

Bitcoin Cash seems to be doing just fine with on-chain scaling. There are concerns about centralization on miners with it, but in my understanding the incentives planned in the original Bitcoin paper account for that.

>Bitcoin Cash seems to be doing just fine with on-chain scaling

Has it though? AFAIK it still has lower transaction volume than bitcoin.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#28

Post by lalaland1125 »

binarybits wrote: post #24
lalaland1125 wrote: post #15

Lightning appears to add more problems than solutions. It has a whole bunch of critical issues. Here is a short list. 1. You need to have a computer constantly online or your counter party can easily steal all your money. This leaves you vulnerable to all sorts of attacks. 2. The lightning network works by routing payments through a network to your destination. The issue here is that the routing for the lightning net…

(1) is false. If you're not online, counterparties might decide to close open channels. But that just means you get your share of the funds in that channel refunded to you. You would need to pay a transaction fee to the bitcoin network for the on-chain transaction, but the other party doesn't get any of your money.

See section 9.5 of the lightning whitepaper:

> 9.5 Forgetting to Broadcast the Transaction in Time

> If one does not broadcast a transaction at the correct time, the counterparty may steal funds.

You need to be online all the time (or at least frequently enough) so that you can publish a penalty transaction if your counter party tries to steal coins from you.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#29

Post by binarybits »

lambdadmitry wrote: post #19

I was wondering recently, why Bitcoin is even needed for a Lightning-like network? Just settle the channels in cash (or even bank transfers), it won't be any more traceable than Bitcoin. Moreover, there is a successful precedent of such network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala Seems like a large enough "overlay network" over cache reserves and bank accounts can be made barely traceable and pretty efficient.

Lightning's core innovation is the use of the Bitcoin blockchain as a cryptographic backstop for payment channels. If the other party in a payment channel stops cooperating, you can broadcast the current commitment transaction to the blockchain, which effectively refunds the current balance back to each party. There's a similar mechanism for enforcing the hashed time lock contracts that make Lightning payment chains possible. I don't know how you could do anything similar with conventional bank transfers.

Re: Bitcoin has a huge scaling problem–Lightning could be the solution

#30

Post by gruez »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #28
binarybits wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(1) is false. If you're not online, counterparties might decide to close open channels. But that just means you get your share of the funds in that channel refunded to you. You would need to pay a transaction fee to the bitcoin network for the on-chain transaction, but the other party doesn't get any of your money.

See section 9.5 of the lightning whitepaper: > 9.5 Forgetting to Broadcast the Transaction in Time > If one does not broadcast a transaction at the correct time, the counterparty may steal funds. You need to be online all the time (or at least frequently enough) so that you can publish a penalty transaction if your counter party tries to steal coins from you.

This can be easily be solved by pre-signing that transaction and having a third party service broadcast that transaction if you're not online.
Post reply on HN