Bitcoin Forum

* The maximum amount you can pay in a certain route is determined by the guy with the LEAST amount of money in his channel
* Users can defraud each other in a channel, so they have to continually check if somebody is defrauding them.
* Unless you have a direct channel to your target, there is NO guarantee AT ALL that you can pay the person you want to pay.
* Users need to be online 24/7 if they want to be part of a payment route. If a user is offline, this particular route is not possible which of course has huge impact on the possible routes.
* Insane amounts of data are being sent because the network needs to be aware of EVERYBODY's payment channel's state (otherwise it can't discover a route)
* You still have huge fees if you want to wire money into/outside the channel.
* It's not feasible at all for bigger payments. Let's say you have to pay $1500 rent/month, are you going to open a payment channel and deposit 3 years rent in it ? Most people have difficulties enough coughing up the next month. But if you have to wire every payment into the channel, then you could just as well pay on-chain because you're paying that exact same on-chain fee.
* It's also not feasible for very small payments/channels. If you open a $30 channel with your coffeeshop to buy a few cups of coffee per week, then the price of your coffee doubles because of the huge fees to open/close the channel. Your only option is to route and HOPE there IS a route.
* Who is going to lock up his money in several channels anyway ? Liquidity, needed for routing money, is going to be a problem
* Very difficult to use and explain to users. No way your mother let alone grandmother is going to understand all this.

This is good for bitcoin!

Frankly, I'm not very knowledgeable in the matter and maybe some of your points are in fact quite valid but others certainly not. As I suspect, most transactions are made between just a few big operations like top exchanges and major online wallets, and LN will definitely help them lower the number of transactions to be written on the blockchain. So even a few payment channels will suffice to substantially decrease the load on the network.

It would not fall.. all those who are saying that it will be a total failure are probably being paid by Roger Ver in order to spam this forum with all that crap. Just relax, it will work fine if that is your real problem at all. And it will fix a lot of things in here.

Apart from half of the points you state are just untrue, do you know of any feasible solution?
Bigger blocks don't solve the problem. DAG structures don't solve the problem.

IMHO a proper decentralized secure base protocol with second layer scaling beats any other proposals we have now, they all decrease decentralization and/or security at the base level.

Yeah, just look at Bcash's 100s tx's vs 80+thousand for Bitcoin. It's so funny to watch the deserted highway.  https://txhighway.com/    Bcash did nothing but make money for the creators.  No one actually uses it.

I believe Litecoin is used much more than bcash and there should be a reversal on bcash/ltc price.  

Well, you are just doing copy and paste of that without kwnowing anything about the tech  (:


what you don't consider is that it will be incredible easy to partecipate to the network, as it will be profitable to partecipate also with small amounts (it's indeed more secure, because you are less a target of attacks).



so we will see it growing exponentially reaching easily hundreds of thousand of nodes, so what does it matter if a channel has not enough funds? you just
use more than one

it is in fact happening : as you can see here , https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ , the numbers of channels grown 40% a day in the last few days :)

I will be honest I only know the surface of Lightning Network but I will say this. All the problems you listed are technical and if there is anything I know it is that technical problems with Bitcoin can be solved. We have seen that last year and we will continue to see that with the development of Bitcoin. The main problem I see it now is the price of getting money to the channels (if this is true), if we can reduce that the system will function well. Again, I am not well versed in the tech I just knew that LN would lower fees overall and wait time, I don't know the nitty gritty.

i agree, i was thinking the same , the only problem is sending to and back from the channels
if transactions continues to be so slow , everytime it would be a pain

but, you don't have to do everytime this transaction, and also if you want to maybe litecoin with the atomic swap would have its use case ;D

Which points are untrue?

Every channel you open is an on-chain transaction so you pay high fees. Besides that, who wants to have money locked up in several channels? That's just a horrible situation.

It depends very much on users, does it not?

Segwit got activated 6 months ago and only 10% of users use it. It's likely that if the lightning network proves too complicated for users, they'll go down an easier route, which is to use another alt.

Great point, I added it to my opening post. Most people here don't even understand how LN works. How are you going to explain all this to your mother or grandmother? For something like this to become mainstream it has to be simple to explain and to use and that's really not the case here.

It's the same with cryptocurrency as a whole. How do you explain it to your grandmother?
LN is nothing special and person who already has vague knowledge about cryptocurrency should get the idea without a problem.
Despite its flaws, LN is the best option for bitcoin upgrade we have so far, there is no need to depreciate it.

It's far more complicated. Crypto currency is easy cause it's pretty much like traditional banking. LN is far more complicated. Even when all the tech terms are hidden behind a simple GUI: How to check if a user in a channel defrauds you ? What to do when you're defrauded? How long do you have to respond to fraud? With whom to open channels? How to manage your money over all your open channels? How much does a transaction cost? When does the channel expire? How to indicate that I don't want to open up my channel for routing? How to sign for a transaction? Etc etc etc

You are right in most points, but I think LN will be successful for daily usage in cafeterias and similar places.

I think LN have /limited/ future.

I somewhat agree with you here. LN is a second layer solution to Bitcoin blockchain, so it can't be easier than the blockchain itself. Nevertheless, to explain something in layman's terms, you don't need to have a detailed and profound knowledge about something and how it works in every detail. You just need to understand it conceptually to be able to explain its concept to your grandma.

Do you feel confident investing in a coin where the creator has recently sold
all of his holdings? He justified it with a "conflict of interest", which is odd
in my opinion, because he saw no conflicts of interest when he was working
at Coinbase or in the time before Litecoin made all-time highs.

Would Litecoin have ever been added to Coinbase if Charlie Lee would
have never started working there?

To be honest, Lightning Network is too long and difficult to understand to become mainstream, it adds difficulty to understand cryptocurrencies. The LN is so complex (Lightning Network - A Puzzle With Missing Pieces (https://www.yours.org/content/lightning-network----a-puzzle-with-missing-pieces-e9553cf71009/)) so I would say I agree with some posts here (and no, I am not paid by Roger Ver)
It may be easy to understand for you but not for everyone (including me)

I posted weeks ago why Lightning Network is also a trojan horse to recreate the same usury banking system that already exists:

That's because segwit was badly implemented. There's no buttom on QT to create segwit addresses, you have to use a console command.

You cant expect the average user to be writing console commands, specially when most of them dont even have patience to synch the entire blockchain, and prefer smartphone wallets instead.

Also, segwit only gave me a 15% discount when I tested it. To send 100k satoshis, you still need to pay approximately 80k satoshis in fees, sending from a segwit address.

Isn't it possible to make lightning network work in an easier way so that the average user won't even know they are using it?

If you really know how to use it, i think that everybody would start using it in order to avoid having to pay more than $18 worth of fees.

I prefer to pull out my ass to pay $0,01 of fees, instead of doing it by the easy way to pay $18 for the SAME.

It should come with time when it gets traction. And don't forget that in most cases it is not up to the users to deal with all the gory details of Lightning Network intricacies because most users don't even use desktop wallets in the first place. They use online wallets like }{apo and Coinbase or even exchange accounts as their wallets.

In the meantime BCH gains mass adoption ;)

uups i said jehovah(BCH)  ;D

Mass adoption? You been smoking to much of the Bhash stuff. LOL   Just look at the transactions on each. 10's of thousands on BTC and a few hundred at most on Bcash.  It's another useless altcoin but you can still believe what you like.

Here go admire the BCH ghost highway.  https://txhighway.com/

Why is BCH coming up in this discussion?  They have exactly the same root problem as BTC, with no LN or equivalent (unless they intend to just copy it over).

Back to the matter and the original points raised, which ones are wrong?  Maybe not every detail is correct, seems to be a fair assessment overall.  LN is not going to solve much unless firstly its embedded into bitcoin clients as the default, and secondly people go through hubs.  Obvious candidates for this are the exhcnages that have large liquidity and most people will have used as some time.  Embrace this, or bitcoin will not succeed, because the alternative of no LN is bitcoin suffocates under the weight of its use.

That would be a huge pile of hypocrisy when in the end they will have to copy LN from Bitcoin Core after it takes off big time with regular Bitcoin. Right now the only advantage that BCash enjoys is fast and cheap transactions. Well, it is actually two advantages but both will quickly disappear when LN takes root for real.

Because it is a fork of bitcoin and does not have these problems.

thats an argument by assertion and not true

Core has been delaying proper segwit function at the GUI level because they don't want to push it into the system prematurely so they only let experienced users to access segwit functionality with the command lines.

With 0.16 it will be on the GUI and anyone will be able to use it as usual just like legacy addresses.

Coinbase has said that they are working on segwit and also on lightning network, check their twitter. So soon enough we will see a massive increase in segwit usage and late on on lightning transactions.

Concerns explained by OP will be taken care off eventually by making user friendly GUI's.

Ultimately, we will find out if it's a failure or not once it's working at scale. What is clear that will be a failure is the "blocks-as-big-as-needed" route (BCH)

Some of the points the OP mentions (particularly point 1, 2, 6 and 7) have some truth in it. These points are the reason why I think that LN won't be used for very big payments.

But even then, it can be a huge success. Imagine it as the Bitcoin equivalent of a prepaid card which you can use to shop online and offline, pay your coffee, etc. etc. And with a channel to your exchange you will be able to "reload" your account at any time.

In my opinion, LN will not be the "second layer", but the third or even fourth layer of the "final" Bitcoin ecosystem. For me the most likely candidate for Layer 2 are sidechains (including slight variations of the concept like child-chains or extension blocks); their tokens would be pegged to BTC via mechanisms like "Drivechain" (or perhaps better ones) and would be easily tradeable for other sidechain tokens via atomic swaps.

There would be no need for a separate LN on top of each sidechain as LN is also capable to achieve connections between different blockchains (a concept TenX, for example, is exploring) and thus it would be a single third layer on top of all sidechains. While sidechains would be used for mid-to-large transactions, LN would be the micropayment layer.

1 - True, but LN is meant (in my opinion) for small transactions anyway, so this is less of a problem than you're claiming it to be. Also, at a certain adoption level there will be multiple payment routes.
2 - Correct, but why is this such an issue? Is this a manual thing you have to do all the time?
3 - Correct, but there are no guarantees in many things. If you care about all your intended payments being possible in the early stages you will make sure you are connected via multiple channels which will reduce this risk.
4 - I think a lot of people will run nodes 24/7 to earn fees and they will become (mini) hubs. I know hubs are bad for decentralization, but not if there are many of them.
5 - Not sure on how the amount of data would compare to for instance the data stream for huge blocks so we can all buy beer (why does it always have to be coffee?) with our BTC
6 - They don't have to be huge if LN is used and that reduces the load on the blockchain. I also think the blocks will eventually be increased, just not to the gigabyte blocks bcash is talking about, but to whatever is needed and doesn't lead to centralization (8mb? 32mb? who knows?)
7 - LN is not meant for these amounts in my opinion, but still you don't have to have a channel with everyone you interact with. Payment providers could solve this.
8 - You don't have to do it directly with the coffee shop, lowest level users will end up having a channel with a payment provider who will have a channel or routes to the shop.
9 - I have several bank accounts, I see no problem here. Why do you see the funds as 'locked up'? They are in a channel so they can be used. Do you consider your money at the bank as 'locked up'?
10 - I doubt your mother or grandmother know how a phone signal works or maybe even how a car engine works. Doesn't mean they can't call or drive.

I'm happy that you agree with pretty much all of my points. The other ones:


This really is something different. You can ALWAYS pay ANYBODY from each of your bank accounts. In LN this is not the case, in fact, you open the channel BECAUSE this is not the case. If it was the case why have several channels in the first place?


A lot of functionality can be hidden behind the GUI. But still there are essential parts that can't be hidden and you really need to understand quite a bit of LN in order to operate. For example, when is it a good idea to open a channel ? How to do that? When to route? How long is the money locked up my channel? How can I get it out? Etc etc. This is way more complicated than regular banking. Of course in theory you can even hide all that to the user so that all that's left is a simple 'sendto' button. But this is highly uneconomical, which user wants to risk the high on-chain fees when he buys a simple cup of coffee?

So you'll end up taking a different route, most likely without you even noticing.  You aren't forced to route through people with insufficient funds.



But if someone does attempt to defraud you and you catch them, you can take their funds.  That's a rather strong disincentive to try ripping people off.



Which is why Lightning is completely optional and you can still send regular payments to be confirmed directly on the blockchain, just like you always have done.

I don't see how any of these will result in LN "failing".  The more accurate thread title would have been "There are occasions when LN transactions will be less viable than normal transactions", but I guess that doesn't have the same kind of alarmist fearmongering tone you felt the desire to convey.

My point is that there simply might not be a route with enough funding.


It is. But you're never 100% sure, which means that you actively NEED to monitor all of your channels for fraud. That's really a big downside.

This is no argument at all.

These are some serious problems with LN which will most certainly ensure this will never become a big success.

This may be a valid point. But I suppose that it could be possible to send the money in smaller packets, one after the other. Or sending a part of the amount on one route and the rest on another one - most likely this would be the easier method, because in this case both partial payments could be managed simultaneously.

But I think that would be an exceptional situation and should be treated as one. LN isn't really made for big payments anyway. Most likely, the higher the payment amount, the harder it would be to find a "decentralized" route which evades the big nodes like exchanges or specialized LN hubs. So if people started to use it massively for big payments a more centralized structure could emerge. I would prefer instead to use sidechains for mid-to-large payments.

For micropayments it will probably work better. But for anything above, say, $200 it already might become unusable. And who is going to use bitcoin to pay $200 when they need to pay $70 on-chain fee?

You don't need to pay $70 for $200 transfer, you are not forced to use Bitcoin if you are not limited by traditional system, you could use LN like people are using Electrum, normal users would connect to LN hubs. you could have $200 when you pay a hub $200, your money is always there for you to spend from, that hub has to be a centralized hub for you to leave your money with them, even if they close their channel, they would fund another one.

Hubs would never block your $200, nobody would trust them if they do. you could even give them another coin, if you don't want to pay a high fee sending your $200 to fund a channel.

Bitcoin or other coins are not fiat money to be used for beer, a nation of 80 Million terrorists could use them and pay the high fees if they could send and receive $200 Million without the thieves in the US blocking their funds.

Why wouldn´t you use the main blockchain for mid-to-large payments? After all the main blockchain
will work just fine after the Lightning Network is widely adopted and you can still decide to use it
instead of making a transaction using the Lightning Network.

Using a sidechain seems unnecessary if you can simply continue to use the main layer.
For mid-to-large payments the fees are negligible as a percentage anyway.

Lightning Network is just getting off it feet! Just like the Internet was in the 90's. IPv4 was the only main protocol to route, we now have IPv6 implemented. Did you know DNS Resolution was a text file that was updated and sent to other computers/nodes?

Who knows, once LN becomes main stream, they may find out ways to implement a "routing table" or "BGP" to help determine payment channels. Payment channels may become more dynamic and can be open and closes freely without incurring onchain cost.

In other words, you can not say "Lightning Network will fail" without understanding all the possibilities of what this concept/technology can do. You really need to think 5/10/15/20 years from now, not what is happening now, else you may as well say Bitcoin is a failure! In fact all Crypto are failures.

Very interesting post. I did not know about a lot of the aspects of the LN that you have mentioned here, and I think that is probably the case for many of the others here on this forum. It seems like the LN solves some problems while creating others.

The only "problem" it creates is that you now have a choice which you didn't have before.  There will be times where you might use Lightning because it's cheaper, more convenient, or both.  There will be other times where it won't be those things and you can transact as you always have done.  But even if you aren't using LN for that particular transaction, you might still see a small benefit since anyone who is routing an off-chain payment through LN at the time won't be competing with you for a space in the next block.

No one rational is saying Lightning is perfect, or that it's going to be used for all your transactions.  But at the same time, it's not going to fail either.  That's just the opposite extreme of irrationality.

For the thread as a whole, particularly to the OP, I honestly don't understand why everyone on the internet has to be so polarised about everything.  This thread is just further evidence that people can't even discuss topics without becoming some sort of extremist, which is unfortunate for the community as a whole.  It's hardly ever that black and white, so stop talking in terms of "moon" and "fail", when the reality is clearly going to occupy some happy middle ground.

Because it can only process 7 transactions per second, world wide !! Pretty much NOBODY was even using it and fees already rocketed to $65/transaction. Now imagine that bitcoin ever becomes a success and most transactions > $150 still need to be processed via the main net. What do you think will happen?

Everybody here seems to agree, LN is ONLY suitable for small payments. But a system will never work if it can ONLY be used for small payments.

There is no middle ground man. Yeah sure for some tech nerds maybe who don't care about adoption. But bitcoin either becomes a success or it will fail, simple as that. And with all the current scalability problems I just don't see how adoption will increase

Yes, everyone who's currently working on Lightning is doing so because they don't care about adoption.   ::)

So you think they're just working on it for a bit of fun?  Something to pass the time, perhaps?  Also, saying that all of these "nerds" are working on a scaling solution because they don't care about adoption sounds quite counter-intuitive if you think it through.  Why would someone work on something that could help with greater adoption if they don't care about adoption?  If those people building it shared your concerns, maybe it would be a different story, but as things stand, it just sounds like you're pissing into the wind here.  Either way, whether you understand it or not, they're going to keep working on it.



So we should all give in to your limited perception in regards to how we perceive Bitcoin going forward?  Please explain why we should care about what you can't see.  What makes you qualified to say this is a waste of everyone's time?  I think this is where we get to the crux of the matter, which is where you simply won't be able to perceive the benefits until you understand Lightning a little better.  I can see how it's not the easiest concept to grasp right away.  It does take a while to get a sense of how and why it works the way it does.  But until you're there, I can't give your mudslinging from the sidelines much credibility.



"Small" is a matter of perspective.  While it's in beta, just as a precaution, LN is currently capped at a maximum of 0.16777216 BTC in each channel and 0.04194304 for each transaction.  At current prices, 0.04194304 BTC is ~$480.  There are plenty of places in the world where that's not considered a small amount of money.  It's roughly the yearly minimum wage in Tajikistan, for example.  You sound like one of those "first world problems" people who think that just because it isn't directly of benefit to you, it can't be of benefit to anyone at all.

When i first heard about LN and done some reading. Concepts and Ideas popped into my head. They are effectively mimicking the internet and how packets are transmitted from computer to computer without having to be directly connected for Instant Payments! Absolute Genius!

If i was VISA/MC/AMEX or any payment processor, maybe WU, i would jump on quick smart. They could be a Major NODE! earn fees just for routing BTC having channels opened to other smaller nodes.

It reminds me of Blockbusters, imagine if they were creative enough to stream over the internet.

Regardless of what people think, we need TX Fees. When block rewards ceases. Miners are going to need as much TX fees as possible to keep doing what they are doing.

I did not know about that. It is clear that I need to study much more to understand NL. I hope that more solutions to continue decreasing the value of Fees are being developed since the risk of LN does not work as we wish is very high.

Have you witnessed the massive difference of the tax you have to pay for the mining fees since the introduction of Segwit ?
I don't really see an major difference after the implementation of LN . The developres obviously looked out for the naive users and the freshmen and didn't make it too complicated to understand . What can possibly be the other way of escaping the previous problems related to bitcoin before the introduction of LN .
Talking about people shifting to other alts , they will sooner or later find the same problems they found with bitcoin without the LN technology .
Immense improvements and developments are being made everyday and i am sure that sooner or later they will come up with an even better substitute .

Damn, if this is true I really don't see it becoming mainstream as well. I should really research Lighting Network more in depth.

Scammers such as Roger Ver and Craig Wright are trying to push their BCash scam by FUDding Bitcoin with videos like "How The Banks Bought Bitcoin | Lightning Network", if you haven't seen it, im not going to link it for you and give them more views.

Andreas Antonopoulos made a video in his channel explaining why that video is bullshit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4TjfaLgzj4

Lightning Network will be a success. It will be easy as fuck to use, and everyone will be using it for shopping. Give it 2 years and really nice looking, user friendly interfaces will be all over the world. Steam will be accepting Bitcoin again for their games in 2 years thanks to LN, as well as a ton of other merchants, all of this while still being able to run your own Bitcoin node unlike BCash.

Let all the idiots sell now and stockpile on cheap BTC. In the next 2 years everyone that sold now will kill themselves in regret.

It's one of those things where you just need to give it a bit of time.  Lightning is still in beta and it hasn't even been on mainnet that long yet.  All the stuff that will make it easy and user-friendly will come later.  Also, not everyone has to be using Lightning for it to take some of the pressure off layer 0.  Any payment-channel-routed transaction is a transaction not taking up space in the blockchain.  If all the people using it only have to use up space in blocks when they open and close channels, they could still send thousands of transactions that will never touch the blockchain until the final balance is settled, so that's still going to be less traffic than we see generally.  It all helps reduce congestion on the network.

Sorry, but I had to quote this.

So do you support Bitcoin or don't you? I'm a little confused. I swear that not too long ago you were fudding left and right that Bitcoin was surely going on a death spiral down and "die".

Does that mean our favorite fudster has now become a hodler? ;)

Thanks for the post as it really cleared my mind on situation. I also think that bitcoin will be increadibly useful in 2 years when lightning network installed, many people selling their btc to btc cash is really weird, hard for me to understand.

you have a point there mate,theres no impossible with roger ver as he was against this setting,no matter how much he will spent as long as hes intentions will happens.better get rid of such issues and news as we are scaping from the problem of yesterday

Did you read any of my points?

dash seems so solve eg master nodes can afford to brute force to with  hardware

?? What are you talking about?

LOL

Did you read any of mine?  I'll make a few more just in case:



The more you use Lightning and the more channels you have open, the greater the potential savings on fees.  Each time you can avoid making on-chain transactions, that's one less mining fee to pay.  Financial incentive will be the driving force for having multiple channels open.  Incentive itself will provide the liquidity.  Users can also incentivise routing by adjusting the fees they charge, even charging negative fees (effectively paying anyone who routes through them), so there may be situations where you can rebalance a channel rather than having to open a new one.



Lightning opens up two new choices for how to transact.  Opening a new channel, or routing through one of your existing open channels.  If this scenario of no sufficiently funded channels occurs, you might not be able to route through an existing channel, true enough.  So you open a new channel.  Or you send a regular on-chain transaction.  Not exactly rocket science.  Plus, that's still more options overall than you previously had, so if one of the two new choices isn't available, that doesn't constitute a failure.  I'd rather not repeat myself, but, "the only "problem" it creates is that you now have a choice which you didn't have before.  There will be times where you might use Lightning because it's cheaper, more convenient, or both.  There will be other times where it won't be those things and you can transact as you always have done".  How can something that gives you more freedom and choice than you previously had possibly be a bad thing?  I can see how it might look bad if you haven't taken the time to comprehend how it works, but that means the failure is on your part and not Lightning's.



You don't have to personally sit there and stare at it 24/7.  By "monitor", you mean your software simply has to be online.  I know plenty of people who are online 24/7.  It won't be a downside to any of them.  Work has also started on an idea for what they're calling "watchtowers", which will step in to monitor for you if you're offline for whatever reason.  If watchtowers are successful and become the norm, you won't have to worry about monitoring your channels.  As I said before, all the stuff that will make it easy and user-friendly will come later.  Give it time.



It's an argument you don't have an answer for, you mean.  Lightning is not designed to replace on-chain transactions altogether.  If you're suggesting that it is, no wonder your arguments seem so skewed.

But each time you open a channel you pay the on-chain fee, which would be very steep if bitcoin would ever become popular. So I just don't see people opening tons of channels and put a lot of money in each and every channel. That just makes no sense.

The thing is, you compare it to the on-chain form of bitcoin. But that makes no sense, that's a failure already. You need to compare it to VISA for example.

But aren't master nodes open to sybil attacks? How do we know that Dash's master nodes are not controlled by Evan Duffield and his friends from the secret instamine? Because it is possible that they do control more than 50%.

I remember this issue was already raised before but with no convincing reply from the Dash development team.

You've effectively countered your own point.  The sense in people paying the fee to open a channel rather than just making an on-chain transaction, is that it provides that Visa level of scaling.  Once a channel is open, there is no limit to the number of transactions you can make as long as you still have adequate funds.  You don't have to wait for however long the next block might take to be found.  You also don't have to worry about working out what mining fee would get your transaction confirmed the fastest, because none of that applies.  You don't need to wait for X number of confirmations.  Channels are also bi-directional, so the funds don't just have to go one way.  Those are all reasons to have channels open and funded, ready to go.

I don't need to pay, say, $50 to 'open a channel' when I want to buy something with VISA from whatever shop. THAT is the whole point, I'm not sure why you fail to understand such a simple point.

1. Credit cards do charge fees, and not only that: their merchant fees increase the final price of the products you buy with them. With LN, you would have to pay a fee once, and probably never again, if everything works as expected. You can open the channel when you want, probably in a "low-fee timeframe", like weekends.
2. There will be, very likely, providers that open the channel for you for no cost just to ensure you use their LN node as a gateway. I expect this behaviour from exchanges and online wallet providers. Obviously, they want you to pay their (trading) fees, but let's be honest, most Bitcoin users do that anyway, and trading fees are usually low.

The lightning system is nonsense. I don't believe she can succeed. I'm waiting for a return to the system segwit2x. Without that, bitcoin has no future. We need to admit this honestly and seek a compromise with the miners right now. If the price of bitcoin starts to grow miners will not agree with the loss of profits.

Sure. The fees are just WAY lower than with bitcoin/LN.

Nonsense. Any time you need to 'recharge' your channel you'll pay the on-chain fee. And again, this will be very steep if bitcoin would ever become popular. With only 450k transactions/day in December it already was more than $50. Sure it can handle now twice that due to segwit but that's still only 900k/day, for the whole frikkin' world. For some perspective, VISA currently does more than 150 MILLION transactions PER DAY. Remember that the max bitcoin can handle on chain anyway is only 1.2million per day!

Nonsense, nobody is going to pay for such steep costs.

Getting a distinct sense of deja vu here, like all the people who proclaimed Bitcoin itself had died (https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/) but turned out to be dead wrong when it kept churning out another block every ~10 minutes.  Lightning will be the same.  Some people will completely fail to comprehend it and declare it dead in the water because they're ignorant, but it'll just keep going. 

Anyone want to start off LightningObituaries.com with this thread?

I'm honestly not sure at this stage if the OP genuinely believes it will fail, or if it's more along the lines of them wanting it to fail for reasons they've yet to disclose.  Hate to disappoint you, but talking it down won't kill it.  Enough people are on board with the idea that they're willing to commit time and effort to improving it.  It's only going to get bigger.

But you go right ahead and keep using Visa.  All you have to surrender is your privacy, independence, freedom, etc.  Small price to pay, right?   ::)

Well I'd love to have a decentralized coin with which I could pay everywhere in an instant, that would be awesome. But at this point in time that's just not possible due to the current state of technology. Maybe some day in a future someone will invent a better blockchain algo. But what I know for sure is that LN is not the solution, it's a dumb idea and I really don't understand why people think this will work. If you'd design a system from the ground up, you'd NEVER come up with LN. The only reason it exists is that this was the only thing possible within the bitcoin network without having to change anything in the network itself: someone thought "oh let's use the fact that people can have a shared wallet and change the ratio of ownership without having to do an on chain transaction" and that's how it was born. And then people started figuring out "hey that way we can also route from wallet to wallet". So it's a 'solution' given certain constraints. But again, if you'd were to build a system from the ground up, you'd NEVER come up with LN.

You accuse me of talking nonsense, but it seems you haven't understand even the basics of LN. It's obvious that if you "recharge" your channel with lower amounts, you'll do it within LN itself. You would be connected via LN to your exchange, or if you're a merchant, to most of your clients.

Why should Bitcoin handle millions of on-chain transactions per day if there is LN?

I'm a supporter of a three-layer (or even four-layer) model as the "final" configuration of LN: On-chain transactions as the first layer (sidechain settlements), sidechains as the second one (large transactions and opening/closing of LN channels), LN as the third one, and (for non-technical users) centralized providers like Coinbase as the fourth. That should be more than enough to handle billions of transactions per day.

I also don't think Bitcoin will ever be the one and only cryptocurrency, and much less the one and only payment system. Bitcoin will coexist with altcoins, fiat currencies, and other centralized payment systems.

So I don't think the average fee to open a channel would be higher than $50. I guess it will be much lower. It's likely that we'll never see again the extreme congestion in December as the reasons were spam attacks, a strong bubble, and Christmas.

Eh? If you have a channel with A and a channel with B and can simply fund B from A, then why have 2 channels in the first place? This makes no sense!

You're a dreamer. Just like all the other LN adapts.

The standard configuration for most non-technically-savvy users would be only one channel: most likely with an exchange that acts as my hub and connects to other sub-hubs, acting also as my "recharging station".

But even the example you mention would make sense. If I have good hardware + a good Internet connection then I can try to profit becoming a mini-hub, charging some (extremely small) fees to the other connected users, for example my friends with less good connections that don't want to connect directly to an exchange to incentive decentralization.

Yea, I know. But one has to be a dreamer sometimes, just like Satoshi was ;) . (No, I'm not comparing myself with him.)

Anyway, I'm not so optimistic about LN as some other users here, as I consider it as a pure micro/mini-payment solution (for amounts up to $200-500), not so much as a complete replacement for on-chain TX. And I would like a steady, but slow block size increase (based on a model like DooMAD's one (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1911288.0)) to handle possible bottlenecks. And, of course, sidechains and alt-chains like I already wrote.

We'll see soon if optimists or pessimists are right ;)

This centralized idea of LN makes at least much more sense than the decentralized version, to that much I agree. But people wanted bitcoin because of decentralization. If we go back to the model where big centralized banks are key in the whole system, will people still like bitcoin? Doesn't this go against the very core of what people look for in bitcoin? But even in that version, everytime you 'recharge' your 'bank' you still would need to pay the huge on-chain fee.

Here is a video of the bitcoin lightning network failing to route a transaction https://youtu.be/PgjUXi6XXFc (https://youtu.be/PgjUXi6XXFc)
Sadly, this is quite a common occurence, and as a developer myself, id advise everyone using lightning to only put in bitcoin that you are willing to completely lose

That is a Roger Ver video. Hahaha.

But as a developer yourself, what would your proposal be to make routing better? Can you check the code and tell us where the problems are and explain how to fix them?

Sorry, I overlooked that answer ...

I would not call it "centralized" but "multi-central". I think both models will co-exist: Technologically savvy people will try to use LN in the most decentralized way possible, while "non-techies" will follow the "easiest" way (using an exchange or online wallet service as "LN bank"). You're right that this isn't what the most optimist LN advocates want but I consider it more realistic than a totally-decentralized LN where the average user can't be sure to pay a high fee.
For advanced users the situation is different; they can try to open several channels in low-fee-periods, so they can route through the network using much smaller hubs and thus use it in a much more decentralized fashion.

Even with this "hybrid"/"multi-central" topology LN is much better and more decentralized than the methods most users follow today  - using Coinbase or even an exchange to deposit your coins. There will be many types of hubs, not only commercial providers but also "altruist" hubs of libertarian Bitcoin early adopters, mini-hubs for groups of friends, etc.
Well, the "LN dreamers'" vision is that the fees would stay relatively low because most people would use LN instead of on-chain transactions. I think with LN enabled and an user base of less than ~50 million people fees won't go as high as in late 2017. But if the user base grows beyond that mark and the Bitcoin community want fees to stay low, then it should also consider sidechains as alternative scaling method because LN + on-chain alone wouldn't be enough imho.

I believe what sjefdeklerk means by "decentralized" is "distributed". But the Lightning Network in its present structure today is indeed decentralized.

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*nnpzTe1hx74WKICL3Gj34A.jpeg

It is a natural and simple mistake newbies make.