Bitcoin Forum

Just read this article you Jimmy Song - Segwit2x: What you need to know about the 2x Hard Fork (aka 2MB non-Segwit Transaction Capacity per block/8MB Total Block Size Hard Fork)
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/segwit2x-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-2mb-hard-fork-

In the "What this means for you" section, it mentioned about that we may have Lightning Network soon after 2 months.

"Practically speaking, as long as Segwit2x releases something that works for mining by July 21, we should get Segwit on the network around August 23. That means that Lightning Network transactions should be available soon after and everyone will be watching to see if block congestion and transaction fees reduce."

Am I interpreting it wrong?  How many transactions per second can it precesses?  How fast will it be compared to what we currently have now?

well it needs an app to be used and that may take some time to become ready for users and be friendly. you can take a look at litecoin, it already has SegWit and LN is not yet ready for it last time i checked. so your dates may be extended a little.
although like i said before LTC has made things faster for BTC since everything is nearly the same, so maybe the timing becomes faster.

and according to the website https://lightning.network/:
"Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network"

I understand the same thing from this news and according to the increase in the block size then new update in the Bitcoin blockchain will result into 4 times more fast , so probably we need to pay minimum fee of 0.0001btc ( which is good indication for the small amount of Bitcoin users ).
But still here we can't sure anything because the main reason is , anyone can claim he did better but reality will came when we use it .
Here already the digibyte coin claiming that Thier network is 40 times more faster then old segwit chain , but I don't think so because Thier not much user of dgb like btc .
Well here instead to get any type of the confusion , wait for last of week in August .

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-the-lightning-network-cannot-be-a-decentralized-bitcoin-scaling-solution-1b8147650800

This is awesome!


But this one is definitely not a good news if it is true.


If Bitcoin can effectively solve the scaling issue, that will be a big game changer.

Scaling issue is entirely political/business/economic/social.

Technically, there is not a problem.  Dash just released a roadmap with 400MB blocks.  Chew on that.

How quick can they process one block?  So after 1000 blocks, the file may have a max size of 400GB?

Dash is a new coin created after Bitcoin, si it has the advantage to use more robust solutions.  Whereas Bitcoin, it is kind of stuck to the current basic infrastructure.  It is like building a new subway or road system is always easier in a brand-new city.

So does anybody know if LN will be implemented in the Segwit?   This will affect the price significantly.

if they activate segwit the LN will come, but miner don't like the LN this was the reason for not activate the segwit but i could be wrong here, but the LN is not needed for now if they activate segwit because the fee will be lowered by much with segwit, the LN is needed for far greater numbers of transaction

spammers are always gonna spam
1. they will avoid using segwit transaction types and avoid using the LN side service.

2. segwit does not address spammers. it needs to stop letting 1tx have 100kb of space allowed. it needs to stop allowing more than a few thousand sigops per tx.(needs dropping lower than 4k (16k cludgy maths)

segwit is cludgy and doesnt fix the issues it promises. it stupidly HOPES malicious people will use segwit keypairs/ln.. yet psychologically spammers wont.

3. LN is not going to be useful as a 'throw all your hoard in' service or a 'lock your funds forever' service.. it will end up with channels opening and closing every fortnight on average holding just enough funds for them couple weeks average spending, which means that onchain blocks will still get filled, due to all the open/closing sessions

4. as for the utility of LN. it all depends on channel connections(routes) which is the game theory of "the 6 degree's of separation". this involves people having to have more than one 'channel' funded and accepted as a route on certain LN dns seeds.

do not accept LN as the ultimate solution of utopia. atleast research and understand its niche and limitations.. not just the reddit false adverts of utopia

It seems like you know a lot about LN and the technical side of Bitcoin.  If LN is not a good solution, then what else can be implemented?  I just want Bitcoin and Ether to be better

Luke Dash Jr.?  I didn't think he'd go in for such things

We have to wait until Segwit (Segregated Witness) comes along and that won't happen until August 1st with the UASF (User Activated Soft Fork) BIP-148. That's the first step than the implementation of the Lightening Network.

Surely the economic incentive to develop such a solution for bitcoin would be greater but the testing would need to be more extensive too. Lighting network has great capabilities but doesn't sound like something that could be implemented on the near future due to the lack of extensive testing. SegWit could probably help ease things out a bit but overall the congregation largely depends on demand.

Lightning Network could start soon.

Source: Article in Cointelegraph: "Lightning Network Will Come to Bitcoin ‘From Tomorrow’: Reports"
https://cointelegraph.com/news/lightning-network-will-come-to-bitcoin-from-tomorrow-reports

I hope that this article is true. Once again we are witnessing a long queue of unconfirmed transactions (around 30,000 as of now), and delays in confirmations. My friend told me that yesterday he paid 200 Sat/Byte as fee for a transaction and it took 2 hours to get the three confirmations.

Hi friends,
I hope this  article is correct.Bitcoin can do this soon.Bitcoin is reaching every country every day.Bitcoin will one day successfully reach every member of each house.

It is really true that bitcoin will have a lightning network soon. Considering that it had a fork just a few weeks ago and it will have one again soon, probably bitcoin will solve the slow transaction problem that it got now. The current fork might still not be activated but like what OP said, transaction might get lightning fast by August 23, and I hope that it will really solve the problem at hand.

The segwit2x will be activated in the few months and i think it will make bitcoin more unstoppable because the lightning network of bitcoin will become the fire for itself and its price will go crazy like what happen in litecoin and that litecoin will become useless because bitcoin will have it also and there is a lot of good things to wait once the segwit is fully activated.

This is discussed in the past, after the activation of SegWit, bitcoin will undergo the Lightning Network. Yes it is good, but as far as I know, this will be having an effect to miners. How about them? Did they agree about this? I don't know if that is the thing, but I think that is how I understand the matter. Sorry if I'm wrong though.

I really don't see how Lightning Network would affect miners, unless you are comparing it to having much larger blocks which would mean more money for miners. But if the idea is same block size and lots of congestion then bitcoin will die anyways because it won't be a viable payment platform and the price will stop going up and everyone will then jump ship, so that is a lose for miners. Use of bitcoin will continue to increase, lightning network will just allow it to scale much much more, but blocks will still be getting transactions from txs that aren't on lightning network plus anytime a payment channel is opened and closed, which I would think companies would want to close them at least every couple of weeks in order to get their money.

I'm not too aware of the current state of the lightning network, but I'm pretty sure it won't activate on bitcoin for quite some time. There is probably lots of testing to do on it. Plus wallets and other bitcoin software would have to add the lightning network software to their software right?

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the way I understand the LN is that several different companies are creating their own LNs, they will act as the LN provider. And basically wallets will need to decide which provider they use. As more clients choose a given LN implementation that LN will grow and when a client (a bitcoin user or a bitcoin using merchant/store) opens up a payment channel they will be able to send and receive funds through the LN from anyone on that provider's LN. The LN provider will still charge a small fee since they are running this LN service, from what I read based on a % (maybe 0.1%) of the each LN transaction, which would suggest LN would only make more sense from a fee perspective for non-large transactions, say like a few hundred dollars or less, but still that would probably be the majority of transactions. This will allow small purchases (like a $4 coffee with a 0.4 cent fee instead of a ~20 cent on-chain fee) or online micropayments of a few cents where the fee is only a tiny fraction of a cent. And the only thing recorded on the blockchain is the initial opening of each payment channel and then the closing of the payment channel.

Is a payment channel just between two users? Or once you open a payment channel can that money be routed to anyone in the network? Or is it like I open a payment channel with Target, I send them money, the channel is still open, they have a ton of other channels open with people/companies, then can they send money to say a company through another of their payment channels to buy more product using the money I and others sent them through our own channels? And when we close our channel it doesn't matter where else that money went, all that matters is the final amounts for the transactions between me and Target? And when the channel is closed Target would pay the on-chain tx fee.

I think as long as the UX around using LN doesn't differ much from normal on-chain bitcoin use LN can be popular and could potentially provide massive scaling for bitcoin. Though I'm not sure how, from a UX perspective, the inconvenience of having funds tied up in a payment channel would work. Would people just accept that they're gonna lock away maybe a few weeks worth of spending money on bitcoin at a time. I guess it could work if its just a button to close up the payment channel anytime you want, and if a given LN implementation is connected to most merchants eventually so you can route the money easily through the network to most merchants with a single payment channel.

If anyone has any more insight into how the LN would work from a technical or UX perspective please comment :)

I think we will not have this soon, but in the long term, yes, first we have the problem of the segwit and the hardfork, the  Lightning Network can be easily implemented with we have the Segwit, but if we have the hardfork, the hashpower of the currency will be smaller and maybe thats will be a problem of any upgrade in the network.

I thought miners and the community voted 80-20 towards the implement of segwit so as far as I see, its already been supported widely. But the lightning network may take more time to settle down. It is a great thing for all the users of crypto currency as many left btc recently because of the delay and high fees.

He guys, I just tried Eclair Wallet Testnet on Android, it can open a LN payment channel on testnet, you can find it on the Play store. Install it, get some testnet coins from a faucet (https://testnet.manu.backend.hamburg/faucet (https://testnet.manu.backend.hamburg/faucet)). Wait for a few confirmations and then in the wallet swipe to the right and add a payment channel, select auto-connect, put some coins in the channel and then wait for 2 confirmations. Now you have a payment channel with some other node (no idea who's), but you can then try to buy some coffee at https://starblocks.acinq.co/#/ (https://starblocks.acinq.co/#/), worked for me!

The wallet can also show Network Overview with known nodes and channels. I tried to open a channel with saopaulo by (manually) typing over its address but that didn't work, says invalid uri. I belief the wallet can only create payment channels charged with your coins. For the rest I am pretty impressed!

What ever may be the case it is high time they do something about the network,i thought things will change after the fork,but it makes me sick that even after inputting a higher fees over seven dollars and still i am waiting for more than four hours to get one confirmation,this is just ridiculous to see these kind of delays even with higher transaction fees.

From the said I conclude LN won't be activated today/tomorrow?
Hope something will be done soon, to lower the TX fees - it's really outrageous at the moment.   :-\