Bitcoin Forum

I think it’s important that everyone who supports bitcoin be on the same page about how the Lightning Network works and why bitcoin’s future is still as bright as ever. This short read was written up by a buddy in a slack channel and I thought it was important to pass along. It’s easy reading for anyone! 10 minutes of your time and if you’re not fully educated on the Lighting Network basics..you will be!

https://medium.com/@melik_87377/lightning-network-enables-unicast-transactions-in-bitcoin-lightning-is-bitcoins-tcp-ip-stack-8ec1d42c14f5

Thank you for that link!  Though many (including myself) have discussing the “network layers” analogy for a long time, this is very well worked up; and it’s the first I’ve seen the quite apt comparison to unicast vs. broadcast.

Admittedly overextending the analogy a bit, I think this will also excite the mental wheels of anybody with IP routing knowledge.  I haven’t been following LN development closely enough to know; but I’d be surprised if Lightning engineers hadn’t already been combing the vast repertoire of routing algorithms knowledge for useful things.

That was excellent. As an ex-data communications engineer of a certain vintage (like I was doing it at the time Tim Berner-Lee was writing his proposal for the www) it certainly struck a new understanding for me. It's difficult for me to know whether everyone will get the same meaning from that as I did.
The main takeaway should really be that Bitcoin is still only just beginning. In the analogy with the internet, this is 1992 or 3.

Thanks for the share, lightning will boost the Bitcoin Network a lot. I think we can´t forecast the impacts, they will be big.
Unconfirmed transactions in future ? zero , hopefully.

Merchant payments will be only transfered over lightning channels and after transaction finished resent to the Chain, after lightning channel closes.

Very nice Ty! Good reading for the rest of us non technical mortals on this forum who try and understand all the magic that is happening around us :D

This rings true.  I've been getting the sense more and more lately that Lightning means we aren't at all where I thought we were on the adoption curve:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*hlz90_oyNWulZc_hf-dDJw.png

In the earlier parts of last year, I generally felt that we were roughly nearing the end of 'early adopters' and rapidly approaching 'early majority'.  But Lightning is almost like someone pressed the reset button and we're just about back to 'innovators' again, because it's a huge change with such far-reaching implications.  It's like there's so much more to come now and we haven't even imagined all the possibilities yet.  Particularly if other cryptocurrencies get on board as well and we can start hopping from one chain to another via atomic-cross-chain-transfers.  That's when crypto becomes completely and truly... I'm pretty sure "unregulatable" isn't generally considered a real word yet.  Perhaps in time we'll make it one.  But yeah, that - unable to be regulated.  No centralised exchanges (unless fiat is involved) losing peoples' funds and no KYC losing peoples' financially sensitive data.  All in all, a better economy for everyone.

I don't know if you people have seen this video, but maybe its good idea to check it now. The concerns of putting a middleman (hubs) in the p2p transactions can ruin the whole idea of anonymity and freedom and can be more beneficial for the banking system and give them control over the bitcoin in general.
I not sure how credible the source is and if what he says is truth, hope someone with more experience and knowledge can confirm/dismiss it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYHFrf5ci_g

Please check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks for sharing that diagram, the numbers are fascinating.
I've seen some interesting articles recently which I can't find now that estimated that between 5 and 10 million people currently have a crypto wallet of some sort. If that true out of a world population of 7.6 Billion then we're still right at the beginning.

I did remember to bookmark this one.

https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-investing-10000-year-view/

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I think it's FUD. Using the analogy in the article linked to in the OP it's like arguing that the introduction of the internet reduced anonymity, was beneficial to the banking system, and gave them control over life in general.
It's probably a good subject for a thread of its own and many people more knowledgeable about LN will be happy to explain everything it gets wrong.

I don't read articles often but I am sooo glad I read that one oh boy! I already knew a bunch about Lightning but I wasn't aware that we are in the stage of the internet pre-global revolution that is phenomenal to know and I can't wait for Lightning to come out so I can watch this puppy unfold ::)

This is exactly why I am a bit perturbed every time I hear "bitcoin bubble".  I do believe that BTC and Alts were oversold and a correction was due but as you point out there is just a small fraction of the world whom know what Bitcoin is all about and buy it.  Hell half the people on here are clueless about bitcoin, most saying they "invest in Bitcoin"

Yes.  And no.  There is a huge difference between a payment system and a network system, and it is very important to understand this.  The comparison with the TCP/IP stack is tempting, and from a pure engineering viewpoint, it looks like it.  But this is a big misunderstanding of some very fundamental issues.

First of all, even though this sounds like blasphemy, one has to understand that bitcoin and bitcoin-like coins, are not a network, but a data set.  This was already clear in Satoshi's writings in November 2008.  All value in bitcoin, all meaning in bitcoin, resides in a data set.  The network is simply a tool to access and build the data set, but the network as such, has no value. You can do what you want on the network, if it doesn't influence the data set, it has no meaning in bitcoin.   That data set is the block chain.  In bitcoin, a transaction doesn't have meaning if it is not included in the block chain.

So this is already a fundamental difference with the TCP/IP stack.  There's no "underlying data set" in TCP/IP.

The next point to understand, is that bitcoin has a very specific rule to make sure there's only one agreed-upon data set: proof of work.  This system has evolved in such a way, that there are a very limited number of entities that actually (can) MAKE this data set.  There are many, many less entities that actually write in this data set, than there are users of the system.   There are at most something like 20 entities that write the data set (of which 3 or 4 write more than half of it, 10 write about 99% of it).  These few data set writing entities are in a competitive game that makes it necessary to have high-quality data links amongst them.

Users of the system (bitcoin users) need to consult very small pieces of the data set in order to know about their balance, and may need to ask one of these few "data set writing entities" to write something on their behalf into that data set: the first act is verifying one got paid, the second act is paying (sending a transaction).  Essentially, a user wants two things: know for sure he got paid and pay and see that he paid.  That's all there is to know for a user.

As such, the three NETWORK functions that are necessary in bitcoin, are:

1) users need to be able to send transactions to the "data set writing entities".  That's a communication from 1 to something like 20 entities.  The users can pay.

2) the 20 entities writing the data set should make that data set at disposal of the users.  That's classical one-to-many serving: the users can verify they got paid, or they paid.

3) the 20 entities writing the data set should of course also communicate between them in their competitive game which results in the data set expansion.

The first function is a very limited multicast.  This is something akin to sending an e-mail to 20 destinations.

The second function is like a very classical web server: put data at disposal for users

The third function is like a backbone high performance link.

Right now, there is a P2P grid of nodes that performs the first and the second function, which is far from optimal.  There's a P2P network that takes care of the communication between the user and the data set producers, transmitting transactions from the users to the data set producers, and caching/proxying the data set to serve it to users.   So network-wise, it is as if there were no ISP, but we all connected our PC to our neighbours, and we are accessing servers through our PCs.

It is the misunderstanding of this, not seeing that it is essentially client/multi-server structure, which is at the origin of the claims of unscalability.  This system scales perfectly, and it was already described by Satoshi in November 2008.

Proof of work splits the system in a small set of competing servers/data builders, and a large set of users.  The difference between this system, and a classical client-server system is essentially simply that the "server" is a "multi-server" of a relatively small number of entities.  Instead of 1, there's something like 20, but with 10 you cover already 99% and with 3, you cover 50%.

In such a system, you could, even though it is somewhat clumsy, forget about the bitcoin network.  You could have these 20 entities, still connected by a high-performance back bone, and having set up some FTP server of the data set (preferentially, something somewhat more sophisticated, that allows searching and only downloading parts: an SPV kind of server).  You could send your transactions by e-mail to some, or all of these entities.  That would work too.  People who want, could download the full block chain from some of these FTP servers.  Some would only download the header chain.  Some only one block.  Some only one transaction, a Merkle tree, and the full header.
Bitcoin would work just as well, and there's no need for a P2P network.

This is why the 'base layer' in bitcoin is not a network layer.

Comes now the LN network.  The LN network is also not comparable to a TCP/IP kind of routing protocol, for two reasons, both due to the "locking in of funds in a channel".   In a communications network, you can set up and break links at essentially no cost, and once a channel is set up, you can send as much data in one direction as you want.  You can open many links simultaneously.   With the LN network, however, "opening a socket" is a costly operation, and opening a socket limits your ability to open another one: funds locked into one socket, are not available any more for another one.  In as much as "setting up a TCP link" was essentially risk-free, "setting up an LN channel" stops you from setting up another one with the same funds.  If you see that your link is "dead", you will have to wait for a day or a week to be able to set up another one and it will cost you a fee.  Next, TCP connections can be used to send data in one direction, or in both.  With LN channels, you can exhaust all intermediate links.  There's only so much that can go in one direction.  In other words, the LN network is not comparable to the flexibility of TCP AT ALL.

For a payment system, this is actually quite problematic, because the essence of a payment system is that "money goes round in circles".  If there's one thing the LN cannot do, that is to make money go in circles.  The LN network can only make money "oscillate" back and forth.  But going around in circles exhausts all links along the circle.  However, where this is interesting, is in trading.  Trading is indeed "going back and forth".  So in as much as the LN network is quite a bad "money transporter", it can be a good "high frequency trading system".  An electrical engineer would say that the LN network is "AC coupled".  You cannot push a DC stream through it, but you can push oscillations through it.  In fact, the only way in which the LN network can "make money go round in circles" is if all users in the circle are connected to the same central hub.

So this analogy breaks down entirely.  Bitcoin is not a network but a data set, and bitcoin's functioning is not "broadcast", but client/multi-server in reality.  There is not really a scalability problem in a client/multiserver architecture, as we know. Moreover, this doesn't form a basis of a network.  And the LN network is way, way, way less flexible than the TCP layer.

The scaling problems in bitcoin find their origin in not understanding (or not wanting to understand) the real data flows in bitcoin and the real nature of the system.

All analogies break down if you try and push them further than they were intended. The point of an analogy is to use a similarity in something people are already familiar with to explain something new. Pointing out differences doesn't make an analogy invalid.

In this case the analogy is of blockchain being early Ethernet segments, a bus architecture with CSMA/CD being suitable for small LANs and then Lightning Network being the addition of routers and the TCP/IP stack at the next level of the OSI 7 layer model. In both cases they remove a restriction on bandwidth and allow you build an infinite network.

The analogy works in getting across the point it is intended to. LN is an additional layer on top of Blockchain.

Of course Bitcoin isn't directly comparable to a network, and of course, LN isn't directly comparable to a routing protocol. It's an analogy, not a comparison.

One can also think that this kind of image is simply rhetoric.  Association of "the product to sell" with other things that have a positive image is the basis of publicity.

This analogy to real money can be discussed as an interpretation, of what money is. Friedman, Nash, Schumpeter, Mises, or the gold standard...? The usual bills and coins (Pound, Dollar, Euros?), or the virtual money (FIAT), which only exists as figures, where you don't know if you can get it, if you really need it... you name it!

I don't see how money goes in circles, my view is it is a one-to-one connection. I open a 1:1 channel, when I pay with cash, I put a 10 Euro bill, and I get maybe some return. There is no circle at all involved. Same I can do with a Lightning Channel...
Circle might come into the game, when my 10 Euro bill, which is in the hands of some else now, continues his travel, cause this someone else pays again for something. So the re-usability of this bill is maybe the circle analogy. The exactly same thing can be done with Lightning. But this money has a major, major disadvantage: you open/close the transaction channel within several seconds/minutes, you cannot keep it open. Every time you pay something, you need to re-open a process like pulling out your wallet, find the right bills, and hand over the money. Lightning gives me the extreme flexibility of "lending money" to a trusted channel, from which a specific amount can be used over and over again. The assumption is, this makes it very cheap for especially smaller amount transactions.

The best thing with lightning is on top: in real live I cannot tell my grocery shop to keep some of my money, because I have to buy some bread around the corner, and they shall send it to the bakery. With Lightning I can do this. I'd call this hopping over service providers. Impossible in this money world (limiting the circle analogy).

With Lightning everyone can do this, and as such a network gets created. If the perfect game for lightning is, that 10.000 traders open channels with the exchanges, then I don't see how this can be called centralized. And another 10.000 with their cable service. And another 10.000 with Amazon (or what so ever). I don't have to use these existing channels, I can still open a channel with my spouse independently.

People here are discussing a lot centralization, predicting the future based on very limited assumptions. I am not seeing the centralization idea, as it is especially unclear, what centralization means. If there are 20 main hubs around the world, can this be called centralized? Or is centralized, when 1000 major hubs collect 10.000 users around them? Or is something centralized, when one company owns all these 20 worldwide hubs? Or is centralized, when you have to use a specific hub? There is a broad spectrum of personal understanding behind centralization, that people use to predict the future...  I always come to think, that a lot of personal fear is involved, and overall I am missing real tests from those people. It is easy nowadays to create several thousand or ten thousand nodes in lightning, and let them work. And then have real statistical values as an underlying basis for such statements. But I also see, that not everyone can create such a setup.

Summary: centralization of lightning cannot be predicted, nor proofed, due to:
 - incapability of large scale measurements
 - limited assumptions
 - limited personal understanding of the network
 - different scope of meaning (of centralization)
 - and a bit of personal apprehension

All this make predictions look like hobby research, throwing shells, maybe conspiracy theory, but not at all (bullet proof) research.

Well, usually there's a money flow and an opposite goods/services flow, and these flows tend to be conservative, that is, flow in circles ("div B = 0" if you are mathematically inclined).  

Usually, money flows from my employer to me, from me to the bakery, from the bakery to his supplier, from the supplier to the farmer, from the farmer to the store, from the store to my employer, to make it simple.  I rarely pay my employer, my bakery rarely pays me, the supplier rarely pays the bakery, the farmer rarely pays the supplier and the store rarely pays the store.  Look at your bank account: you usually receive money from certain entities, and you usually spend money to other entities.  There's rarely a back-and-forth motion.  With all these entities, there's no point of opening channels.  They will quickly get exhausted.  It is more interesting for all of these entities to connect to a "single settlement node".

If we want to do this with a LN network, the only solution is to have a central node (a bank).  Otherwise, channels will always get exhausted, because they always need to flow in the same direction.  Yes, you can replace that central node by a "web of central nodes".  But my employer, me, the bakery, the supplier, the farmer and the store have no reason to have links between them, only to that "central web".  And inside that central web, if similar flows have to flow in systematic circuits, they all have also a reason not to connect along the periphery but only to a more central part.  And so on.

The ideal LN structure is hence a single central hub, with all others connected to it.  It is the only structure that can support indefinitely all possible "circles of money flow".  That's not even a criticism.

You could do, but then you would be completely missing the point.

You provide no reasoning at all for why you, the bakery, the supplier and the farmer cannot simply pay each other with direct links. Well, except when you say that they need "flow in the same direction", which is precisely what having direct channels between one another achieves. This is a reason, but it disproves your point completely. There are actually people reading your posts sometimes, y'know!

Routing can be achieved by hubs, as you point out, but it can also be achieved other ways (which you suggest isn't desirable or possible). The protocol design doesn't care whether a node uses nodes with high numbers of channels (i.e. hubs), or uses a lot of multi-node hops, or opens a new channel. It only cares about minimising fees (which is in the user's interest).

Your description implies channels can never be closed, they can. Just one on-chain transaction can be used to close 1 channel and open a new channel at exactly the same time, and the new channel can be sent in the direction where no route existed before (i.e to where the money is needed). It's quite simple. And if it's cheaper, or more desirable for privacy reasons, than using a pre-existing route ("hub" or otherwise), that's exactly what users will do.

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You're also repeating the use of the word "banks" to describe nodes with the highest number of channels (you've been doing this in other threads too). This is inaccurate. How many channels do I need to open to become a Lightning "bank"? There is no way of distinguishing between Lightning "banks" and regular nodes based on how many channels they have, everyone will be opening and closing channels as they please (including their "bank accounts" with nodes that have alot of channels, unlike when dealing with actual banks where one must ask permission to close one's account).

There is no entity in the Lightning network's model analogous to a bank, in any way, shape or form.

I realize that you are right, and I was wrong here.  There is indeed a solution I didn't realize.  If A, B, C, D and E are linked in a ring, of course, by the direct links, A can pay B only until the AB channel is exhausted.  But I forgot that A can also pay B by sending through the AE, the ED, the DC, and finally the CB channel.  I stand corrected. 
So, half of the time, A pays B though the direct channel AB, and when that reaches its limits, A pays B "the other way around". And then again in the direct sense.
Thank you.

It's a client-server structure only for SPV clients, while full nodes are peers of the network - even if they can't produce new blocks, they can verify all blocks and reject those that are invalid. This is a vital part of Bitcoin protocol - users can keep miners in check, making it impossible for them to cheat, except for 2 very expensive attacks (double spend and DOS). The big block model doesn't have this feature - for now fraud proofs don't even exist, so miners would be able to cheat as they please, but even if there were fraud proofs, miners and datacenter-nodes would still have so much power, that their relationship with users would be the same as that of banks - they would be able to get away with a lot of violations, because there's no mechanisms to stop them. We've already seen how easily big nodes (exchanges, services) and 90% of mining can act as one entity when they have tried to attack the network with their fork in the last year - this is a great example that we can't trust anyone, and instead we should verify everything.

There's a common assumption that miners and big Bitcoin businesses want the same thing as the users, because it's supposedly irrational to want to cause any damage to Bitcoin.

This is very short sighted.

Miners and big Bitcoin businesses can:

• Represent other industries that don't like Bitcoin competing against them. They would be strongly incentivised to use miners or businesses as a proxy to damage Bitcoin
• Falsely believe that wresting more control over Bitcoin for themselves is beneficial
• Falsely believe that any damaging actions are not damaging

Users can only control the Bitcoin they want to use by enforcing it's rules on the Bitcoin network. That means some users must be running fully validating nodes, even if some users (i.e. SPV users) are depending on those running full-nodes to look after their interests.

Satoshi's original model turned out to be wrong; fraud proofs for SPV nodes still do not exist, and so real world incentives have adjusted such that a middle-tier of users running full nodes is needed to keep the interests of the system's users in balance.

Here we go again.  And, if they do so reject them, they stop.  And nobody cares.  Because the 10 miner pools are connected by their own backbone network, and don't need your or anybody else's node to receive a block from one of their 9 competitors.  A full node is just a proxy, nothing more.   If your full node is switched off, nothing special happens to bitcoin.  The only nodes that need to remain up and running, are the light wallet servers (which can be run by mining pools who have their own distributed, although centralized) net of nodes of course, and the nodes of exchanges.   Whether there are still 10 000 other Joe's that run nodes or not, doesn't make the slightest difference.  If they switch off their nodes, nothing dramatic will happen, and the miner pools, nor the exchanges, will notice.

If miners decide, from block N onward, to have a change in the protocol your node doesn't like, then your node will reject block N+1.  It will wait for a "good" block N+1.  But no miner will make it.  Miners are OK with their block N+1.  So they make a block N+2 (which you also reject of course: it is not OK, and it is not on top of the last good one, N).  And they'll make N+3.  And N+4.  And N+7000.  And your node is still waiting for a good block "N+1" that is never broadcast.  One year later, while miners are working on N+52000, you're still waiting for the good N+1.  As do all your peers that ran the same software.  Nobody made an N+1-bis block for them.  So they wait.  And wait.  And wait.  Newcomers will not connect to you: your node is not up to date.   They will connect to a node that has N+52000.  And they will find it on the network of the miners.

It is a different story if miners disagree of course.  Miners can split.  Some miners may want to make N+1-bis.  And then there's a fork. This is how miners keep other miners in check.  But if miners keep agreeing amongst themselves, your node will never see a good block again.  So it doesn't keep anyone in check.  It simply stops, and waits and waits...

However, the mining pools are REALLY kept in check by the market: they have made huge investments in hardware that can only serve one purpose, they are rewarded in coins, and they don't want these coins to be worth nothing.  This is why they keep following the rules.  To please the market. Not because poor Joe has a node running, that will switch off from the moment that it doesn't like the sole block chain out there.

Exchanges have a lot of power too, because these are the gateways for miners to cash in on their coins.  Exchanges are the keepers of the market.  If exchanges decide to de-list a coin, their miners are in deep trouble.  So yes, miners will respect the nodes of exchanges.  

However, if ever exchanges and mining pools agree upon a protocol change, nobody will give a shit that 10 000 Joes find their nodes switching off because they don't find the "right" block chain any more, and come to a grinding halt.

This thing is not decentralized, but it works, because of profit motives.   The only reason why they talk Joes into running nodes in their basement, is because bitcoin needs a story, and decentralization sounds like a good selling argument.  Moreover, bitcoin being a kind of religion, running a node in your basement must be like turning those Tibetan pray mills.  But bitcoin is not decentralized at all.   The PoW oligarchy could technically impose any protocol change with a collusion of 3 or 4.  The only reason they don't, is the market (with exchanges being a big other oligarchy to take into account).


As I said, that's technically absolutely not true.  And if you're a small fish, not an exchange, nobody cares about your "checking miners".  Your node simply stops, and gets removed from the network.

TL;DR: Satoshi expressly designed bitcoin NOT to be sensitive to "vote by IP number" and hence NOT to take into account even a massive Sybil attack from non-mining nodes ; it is why he introduced PoW in the first place.  So non-mining nodes have no influence on the functioning of bitcoin.  Not as attackers, and not as "guardians".  

Even if we are leaving the track of the OP here - I do not understand why you use such black and white words ("miners don't give a shit"), as if you are unsatisfied with the system. I also read your posts about the banking assumptions. Can't make up my mind yet, but looks like you are highly desperate of the system, still you contribute a lot of text to the discussions - puzzled  ???

I want to mention quickly the UASF discussion from last year, and why dramatic things happened. Segwit got introduced, and Bitcoin went up like a rocket... If you read the segwit2x story from a miners point of view, then one could think, they met in NY, found an agreement, and implemented it. If you take a look at the reality, you find, that suddenly many, many nodes where on the net, not relaying transactions, if the miner doesn't signal segwit support. So I think it is correct, if you say, a single user can switch on or off a node, and the miners don't care. But when many users do the same, miners HAVE TO CARE. A bit like in democratic systems, and basically the design of Satoshi design/genious/network. A single malicious code can't do harm, and in general it is better to play the incentivized game, than trying to fight it. But when many users work together, miners "give a shit" :-) I think it is very well balanced...

pebwindkraft, at some point, you may be wasting your time.

dinofelis is wrong, has repeatedly been wrong, is persistently and incorrigibly wrong.  In every thread he fills with long, tortuous argumentation, everything he says is shot full of holes by people who actually know what they’re talking about.  He still fills threads with long, tortuous argumentation.

Downplaying the importance of nodes is a hallmark of people pushing a certain agenda, for which dinofelis gives talking points.  (“The only reason why they talk Joes into running nodes in their basement, is because bitcoin needs a story, and decentralization sounds like a good selling argument.”)  Whereas nodes represent the economic majority on the network, and collectively have more power than miners or exchanges.  We have seen that repeatedly demonstrated within the past 6–8 months.  Indeed, if “nobody will give a shit” about nodes, then NYA/2X would have taken over the network; instead, NYA/2X was cancelled in a face-saving maneuver.  Originally, closed-doors power-player NYA had been backed and indeed, promulgated by some of the most powerful exchanges and miners!

This is in addition to, and an extension of, what you said about UASF and whence came NYA in the first instance.

dinofelis speaks of a “PoW oligarchy”, which demonstrates how little he understands about how Bitcoin works.  (Hint:  Miners have one, only one, exactly one very important job—Byzantine agreement for transaction ordering—whereas all else is done by nodes.)

Moreover, on the face of things, anybody who uses the phrase “nobody will give a shit” as a technical argument is neither competent nor serious.  Sloppy and vulgar speech on a technical topic belies sloppy and vulgar technical thinking.

Perhaps your time could be better spent.

You really want to know ?

This is my way to get my own ideas cleared up, confirmed, or contradicted.  I'm highly fascinated by crypto currencies, I want to understand it.  It is a mixture of deception, lies, beliefs, good intentions, underlying brilliant ideas, propaganda and some elements of truth - as such, it is a great experiment that explores the typical social structure of human (and all complex, living) societies.  Me being something like a mixture of an anarcho-Darwinist (if that word exists), a libertarian and also a scientist, I consider that all forms of official communication are tools of oppression and deceit, and that this leads to quite functional societies for a while, until they hit their wall of inconsistency.  I think that "good" and "evil" are inverted notions and the funny thing is that this is very very well experimented in the crypto world.  I consider hence that just "official" information, the thing you get answers about, concerning crypto is of course most probably totally deceptive as it should be.  That's why you cannot really learn from asking.  

Like in cryptography, and in science, you learn from finding out yourself.  But you cannot trust yourself either.  So the best way to see whether your ideas are right, is to explain them to others, while having no "official" position at all yourself (otherwise, your "priests" will "protect your holy word" and will destroy your ability to see you were wrong).  From the reactions, you can see by yourself how well your own ideas work out: are some criticisms justified, or is one essentially repeating some dogmatic mantra ?

This is exactly how science works.  You would think that scientists publish so that others learn about your work.  No.  You would think that scientists go to conferences to tell others about their work and learn about what others do.  No.  If you're at a conference as a speaker, usually you're NOT interested so much in what others say.  You're interested in how well you can answer their nasty questions after your talk.  You can see that: at a big conference, half of the audience is working on their laptop - usually on their own presentation.  They couldn't care much about what's being said.  But they play the game: "can I find something that makes the guy in front ridiculous ?".   And your stress when you give a talk, is: "is there a guy going to find a hole in my presentation, and make me look like a fool ?".  Scientific conferences are a horrible arena where scientists try to slaughter one another.   The same game is played in writing: it is called "peer review".   This is how you learn: from nasty questions at conferences, and from rejections and nasty comments when you submit your work to peer review.  Scientists are battle-hardened by exposing their ideas and see how people try to find LOGICAL holes in it.  That's how you find out elements of truth in a "trustless" way.  Science invented trustless consensus long before Satoshi did.  That "block chain" is running for some 400 years already.

So I explain my understanding here, and I see if people can find logical holes in it.


It is not because some well-worked out propaganda scheme worked, or corresponded to what it claimed to achieve, that there is a single ounce of truth in it of course.  UASF is akin to the joke of the guy in Alaska that claims that he has invented and used a spray against elephants that works when it freezes.  When people tell him that his thing is a joke, he claims that the fact that there are no elephants in Alaska proves how well his spray worked.

As a propaganda mechanism, of course, it can work, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If the crowd is gullible enough to believe that if something totally harmless could do something, that something totally harmless can be used to obtain things from the crowd.  That's like Dumbo needing its magical wand in order to be able to fly.  

I'm fascinated by the entire lack of logic in the mantra about non-mining full nodes.  Nobody has ever replied something LOGICAL against the quite obvious claim that it is a totally erroneous understanding of the system, which is why I'm now absolutely convinced that this view is correct.  Of course, I can perfectly understand the official need to maintain that mantra, but I'm still amazed at the gullible nature of people, not being able to see the obvious joke.  That said, given that 3/4 or so of world population subscribes to one or other religion, one shouldn't be too surprised at the lack of critical thinking ; but then, religions are instilled in most people when they were vulnerable, that is, when they were children.  Most people here were not instilled with this mantra when they were vulnerable, so it remains an amazing phenomenon.  Of course, at first I considered I could be wrong myself.  

But there has never been given a logical argument why Satoshi, me, Gavin and others never understood the decision mechanism in bitcoin.

The remarkable thing is that one doesn't want to reason: one wants to know "in what camp you are".  One doesn't want to reason about how Jezus could have walked on water: one simply wants to know of what church you are.


This kind of argument is like the guy in Alaska with his spray, and there are several aspects to this:

- miners are in a game-theoretical battle amongst themselves too.  They didn't trust one another.  They were forced in a Keynesian beauty contest themselves.
- miners are highly sensitive to the market.  After all, the market is what pays them.  If they took erroneously for granted that the number of nodes represented a "market poll" they may have, like Dumbo, thought that they were going against the market.
- miners may be gullible idiots themselves, falling for a game of fear.
- miners may be intelligent people that don't want to demonstrate their power (and hence the true centralization of bitcoin), because they may kill the illusion of the story of a decentralized system, which is the "value proposition" of bitcoin in a way.

So the observation that miners wanted to do something, and then backed off, is not a proof that this is because user nodes have power (unless, of course, by a self-fulfilling prophecy like Dumbo's wand, if miners are gullible, or miners are afraid to show their real power and kill the religion entirely).

And the PROOF of this is so very simple, that Satoshi explained it already in his paper. If it were true that node count could influence anything, the system is entirely open to sybil attacks.  That's so obviously evident, that anyone claiming anything on the basis of "node count" must have missed Satoshi's third page and must ignore why there is proof of work in the first place.  This is so ELEMENTARY that it is mind-boggling that knowledgeable people even dare to repeat this.  

The only external effect of "Joe running a node in his basement" is the behaviour of open sockets on an IP number.  If I can control a million IP numbers, I can, for all practical purposes, be 1 million full nodes.  I don't even have to copy the block chain and RUN for real, a full node behind all these IP.  I can do this with a single centrally controlled master, and sockets opened on these IP numbers.  I am not going to check a million times the very same block of course.  My 1 million IP numbers with open sockets will SWAMP all the honest Joes with their home node.  And this for the cost that is a tiny weeny bit (namely obtaining IP numbers and a very small server behind it) as compared to mining.  That's why Satoshi reverted to mining !  That's the FUNDAMENTAL IDEA behind bitcoin.  You want me to have "true home IP addresses", so IP numbers that are only really associated by home numbers (as if that were established in the node count).  Great, how much does a botnet cost as compared to installed mining hardware ?  As I said, the botnet doesn't need to do a lot of work: the IP sockets are very light, and simply MIRROR node communication.  They don't really do all the running of a true full node, but that cannot be seen from the outside.

Thinking that those providing real proof of work are at the mercy of "vote by IP number" is not understanding even the very fundamental working principle of bitcoin.  And "run your full node to keep the miners in check" is exactly that.


Yes, yes, vote by IP number wins from vote by proof of work.  That's the "basic design principle of bitcoin", sure.

Nodes are "vote by IP number", which is what Satoshi wanted to nullify by vote by PoW.  Third page of his paper.  There's no link between the number of IP numbers you control and your market stake.  The last is not called "vote by full node" but proof of stake (which IS a sensible way to do things).  Read the bloody Satoshi paper !

So of course, given that this is so obviously evident that "vote by IP number" cannot be considered of any importance in a system that was from the start, designed to avoid it, there must be another reason.  People very knowledgeable of that system cannot ignore the basic design principles of that system, can they ?  So there must be a deceptive reason for telling this, given that it is objectively wrong.

What is amazing in this, however, is how elementary and fundamentally wrong it is.  It denies the very design of bitcoin !

1. So Lightning Networks are like few dedicated nodes with fast network?
2. Node still has to rely on those Lightning Network participants ?
3. Isn't the idea behind node connecting to nearby peer is similar ?
4. Or its more about the contract protocol than the network making it faster ?

Sounds to me just marketing gimmicks. If really want to make it faster and better reduce the avg block mining time, reduce difficulty so that more gets leverage of mining blocks faster rather than giving it to handful giant mining setups and importantly help reduce electricity and save nature.  :-*

Edit -
To add to this, with respect to communication better change will be Voting for best nodes by their uptime/network latency, higher voted nodes gets rewards and are discoverable by some means like torrent peers. This does not require bringing whole new terminology to entire bitcoin networking paradigm.

I hope you understand that "Byzantine agreement" is all there is to bitcoin, deep down.  Bitcoin is nothing else but the fact that there is an established, unique, unfalsifiable Byzantine agreement over what coins were rightfully created, and how they were transacted.  There's nothing else to it.

You are perfectly right that "all else" (that is to say, nothing of importance) is done by nodes.

Those deciding on that Byzantine agreement are hence bitcoin.

That said, there IS indeed an important point that will give true power to full mining nodes, and I neglected it to some extend: the need to keep up the belief in decentralization even when in reality it is gone.    The belief in decentralization (whether the system actually IS decentralized or not doesn't matter) is the driving force in people pumping money in this thing.  If you somehow could too obviously see that that belief is bogus (while it is, but as long as it makes for a story for the gullible, one can convince), you may kill the very religion that makes the stake holders rich.   So in a way, stake holders like miners need to PRETEND to be kept in check by nodes, so that the node owners continue to BELIEVE they have power and the belief in decentralization can be propagated.

This is a bit akin to wanting your kid to keep believing in Santa Claus because that's how you can make him behave the rest of the year.  You're obliged to play Santa Claus in order to maintain his belief, and you have to give him the presents he asked Santa, even though of course it seemed that you had the full power not to: if the belief in Santa by your kid is necessary, you have to act as if Santa were real.

In a way, then, it is true that nodes do keep miners in check, because miners have to act like they do so to keep the belief up, like you have to act like Santa exists to keep your kid believe in it.   This is a game-theoretical aspect I didn't realize.  

In as much as it is true, bitcoin is now entirely open to a Sybil attack by nodes.  Because miners have to pretend being kept in check by nodes, and nodes can easily be sybilled.  In as much as miners have to keep up the appearances, they will have to do what the sybil nodes tell them to do.  Like Dad has to do what Santa tells him - or blow the illusion apart and tell the kid that Santa doesn't exist.

(that's what I called earlier: social systems based upon lies and deceit - all social systems - eventually crumble when they hit the wall of inconsistency).

Who said anything about IP numbers?  I don’t even expose one; I’m onion only.

Who said anything about votes?  Bitcoin is not a democracy.  There is no “vote by PoW”; that’s nonsense, and shows a total lack of understanding of what POW is and how it is used to achieve BFT transaction ordering.  There is no vote at all.


Quoted for craziness.  You forgot to add that the CIA designed Bitcoin, and gives all these very knowledgeable people their mendacious talking points about nonexistent “decentralization”.  I admit, I work for the CIA, too.


The design of Bitcoin is a subject about which you demonstrate worse than zero understanding, insofar as misconceptions must be unlearned.  You really ought to go study up on how Bitcoin actually works before you spout off.  You don’t even grasp the basics.  You talk as if you learned all you know by reading /r/btc.

---

Posted whilst I typed up the foregoing:


Redoubling my point:  You have evidently never heard of consensus rules and validation.  Among other things.  These are not set by the Byzantine agreement which miners produce for transaction ordering, and only that.  You really know less than nothing about Bitcoin.

(Did you just go look up “Byzantine agreement” on Wikipedia between your posts?  Though I’m curious, I only ask rhetorically; don’t bother answering.)

Now, this is an offtopic thread hijack of a good and important Lightning Network thread.  I desire to avoid that.  I will not take this as an opportunity to explain Bitcoin design fundamentals, much less argue about them with somebody who shows belligerent ignorance and an unscholarly attitude.

---

Edit:  While I was writing the above addendum, dinofelis edited and completely changed the post to which the addendum replied.  The above quote is as I first saw it.  From its much longer replacement, I wish to make one point crystal clear for the benefit of other readers who come across this thread:


No, the design of Bitcoin is not amenable to a Sybil attack; and indeed, Core developers tend to have a dim view of systems which are (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=662734.msg7521013#msg7521013).  Bitcoin’s general Sybil resistance rises from the fact that there almost is no voting whatsoever in Bitcoin.  The only exceptions have been when votes of sorts have happened (or been attempted), via various “signalling” bits.  I know of instances when “XT” advocates tried to Sybil the network; it sort of wound up being a sick joke.

You could spin up a million of your own Sybil nodes on a million different IP addresses, and the integrity of the Bitcoin network would be unaffected.  (I here ignore DoS, since that is not a Sybil issue.)

What else does your "checking node" look like from the outside, else than a talking IP socket ?   How do you hope that that talking IP socket is going to influence the Byzantine agreement ?  How do you justify the claim that "a big majority of nodes imposes its will on miners/keeps miners in check" apart from counting them ?  And what exactly do you count, apart from IP numbers ?



If I present you two different block chains, which one are you going to accept ?  The one with most PoW, right ?  If that's not a vote, I don't know what it is.  If you have a given group of miners, divided in two groups, each making their own prong of the block chain, which one is going to win ?  That prong that accumulated the largest amount of hash rate (PoW), right ?  It is because most PoW voted for that prong, that it won.  That's the essential principle of Byzantine agreement with PoW: of all different proposals, the proposal where most PoW put its vote on, wins.

How, in case of consensus disagreement (two blocks propagated in parallel), consensus is reached again ?  By the PoW vote of the next block.  The following block is mined on top of one of both.  So the block that got voted for by the next miner, and puts its weight of PoW on top of it, wins.  The block that is not voted for, is orphaned, because its prong now has less PoW voting for it.  If ever some other miners vote for the second block, there's no tie break, until one of the two prongs clearly wins the PoW accumulated vote.  That chain that has most PoW voted for it, wins.  And the property of PoW is that you can only use it once, that's why it is a "voting token": an amount of waste that cannot be re-used.

I guess that if even that is not clear, there's no point to discuss this further.  

You see, ad hominem is all you can bring.  You don't enter into a well-argumented technical argument.  Nobody ever did.  As I said, no single logical counter argument.  Like usual.  This is what confirms my understanding of the system.  Nobody ever succeeded in giving a logically built counter proof to the evident thing I'm saying, because I'm just repeating a basic design aspect of bitcoin, as it was presented in the original paper.

There WERE some valid arguments that have some validity to have sufficient full nodes, and these are:
- some advantages for the user himself (but that doesn't have external influence of course)
- in case of a massive crack-down or other catastrophe, to have some guarantee that "the blockchain will survive the cataclysm" (higher probability that at least one copy will survive)
- some resilience of routing through P2P if ever there were a global attempt to isolate the mining industry (the multi-server) from the users (clients).

But the argument that "full nodes keep miners in check" is totally false, is never contradicted by any logical argument. It only attracts ad hominem, which is a proof of its solidity.

As to whether this is off topic in this thread, no it isn't.  If one doesn't even understand the fundamental data flow and structure of the "layer 1", it is somewhat ridiculous to go and talk about the network properties of layer 2.

The fundamental network structure of layer one is a client/multi-server structure.  Users vs a backbone of mining nodes.  It is because some people argued about the importance of full nodes, that the discussion came about.  It is hence essential to talk about this.  Because in as much as a true P2P system has scaling problems, a client/multi-server structure doesn't.  The client/multi-server structure of bitcoin scales perfectly. This is what Satoshi explains in his second e-mail on the nakamoto institute document server, and what happened in reality.  I'm only essentially explaining again what Satoshi said back then, and what is obviously observed in reality.

In fact, that should be good news.  The fact that this basic observation (that Satoshi saw this in 2008, and that the system indeed, evolved this way) is met with such vehement ad hominem resistance, is remarkable, and in need for an explanation of course. That explanation seems obvious to me: where Satoshi had in mind a "P2P network of mining nodes" that would count still hundreds or thousands of nodes, in reality, this reduced to something like 10 or the like.  In as much as you can still sell the religion of decentralization of a P2P network of hundreds or thousands of mining nodes, with a reduction to 10 or so, that becomes hard to sell.   So one was in need to save the religion with a narrative.  The point is however, that we also observe that this higher loss of decentralization doesn't have, after all, negative effects.  Even though the mining pools are only 10 or so, bitcoin continues to work correctly.  Satoshi's P2P network of decentralized mining nodes is much smaller than he thought, but it is still there.  So this client/multi-server system, even though it is much less decentralized than initially conceived, is working quite well and scales even more easily.  The only problem it faces, is that the belief of its value proposition was attached to "decentralization".  People are forgetting that decentralization was a TOOL to make the thing work.  It turns out to be much less decentralized than anticipated, but it turns out that visibly, this decentralization is not needed for it to function correctly.  However, now that one has sold bitcoin everywhere as being special because decentralization, and that decentralization is the fundamental belief tenet, it is quite annoying that it isn't there in reality.  Even though we see that it isn't needed to make the thing work.

So one has introduced a whole narrative about a false form of decentralization, which brings with it a lot of technical difficulties (and unnecessary solutions), just to keep up that narrative, because its belief system, and hence its "value" is thought to be linked to that belief.

And the kid that says that the Emperor has no clothes, gets an ad hominem reply.

It would be more constructive on your part to give arguments, not ad hominem, but I know you have no arguments.

This is the first thread I've stumbled across dinofelis and you have confirmed my initial observation. The only saving grace to his tl:dr posts is that at least he normally highlights in bold the wrongest parts of his argument, which saves a lot of time.

+2 of no arguments.

That's exactly what I'm saying too.  A million nodes don't do anything. Whether they are "UASF" nodes, Joe nodes, my sybils or miner sybils. They don't affect the functioning of the system.  They don't matter.  Happily so.  And bitcoin was designed with that in mind.  Thanks for understanding.  Finally.

More colloquially formulated: "one doesn't give a shit".

Others have already shredded your arguments so I have no need to add anything. If you can manage to concisely but a point across I might consider chiming in. I'm not going to waste my time continuing reading a War and Peace length post that rambles on incoherently after getting the first facts wrong.

None ever has.  The only counter "arguments" fall in two classes:

- "he must be a FUDDER of the other camp", "he must have an agenda" or something similar
- he's wrong, because he's wrong.  (include in this, too: others already said he was wrong)

No technical taking apart of any aspect has ever been presented that wasn't obviously logically wrong in itself, like "look how well the UASF menace worked".

But, in its most succinct form, my argument is what Satoshi writes on page 3 of his paper, and comes down to what I already said:

"if consensus were to be established by node count (IP number count), it would be easily sybilled.  This is why node count shouldn't matter, and why consensus should only be based upon proof of work voting, not on number of nodes voting".   So whether Joe's node in his basement "votes against a block chain",  and whether even a large majority of online nodes vote against that block chain, shouldn't have any influence on the construction of that block chain (the consensus).  Bitcoin was designed that way.  And if that's true, Joe's node, nor his majority of peers, don't keep anything "in check", and certainly not the miners voting over the next consensus.

You must be reading another thread. In this one you've been shown to be wrong about the fundamentals of how Bitcoin works and unaware of the principle of analogies.

The only argument was that someone said that I didn't understand the principles.  "you're wrong because he said you're wrong".


On the contrary: the principle of analogy is most of the time a rhetorical technique to deceive.  It not a rational argument.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

(12)

You really should go back and read the answers you've been given in this thread again. You seem to have missed all the times you have been corrected.


Analogy: A comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification. (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/analogy)

You might also want to look up the difference between principle and purpose. In this case, you are alleging the purpose of deception when the actual purpose was explanation.

Now it's the 1st Saturday of the 6 Nations so I've better things to do than argue with a 19th century philosopher's scepticism of analogies. Enjoy your weekend.

Deception often mimicks as explanation.  There's not much of "explanatory power" in this analogy.  The only real message a was not one of "understanding" but of associating the phenomenal success of TCP/IP to the LN, in the same way that one associates "buying cleaning products" to "be a successful housewife and have great husband and kids" in TV commercials.

This analogy is used correctly to explain that the only way to scale a blockchain is to add an additional layer. Much in the same way as you can increase the bandwidth of an Ethernet segment from 10Mb to 100Mb to 1Gb but it needs routing to making scale globally.

I cannot tell you how amusing it is that rather than address that you first start by trying to push the analogy past what it intended to explain in order to try and discredit it and now you're trying to discredit the use of analogies altogether. One might come to the conclusion that you're trying to distract attention from the fact it is correct and avoid the debate being on the subject originally intended in this thread.

I haven't been.  There has not been a single technical argument here, where mine is taken step by step and shown how things work differently than what I say.  In fact, the onus of proof is on the claim that, contrary to what Satoshi said, contrary to what Gavin said, contrary to what I'm saying, non-mining nodes "do keep miners in check".  

In as far as an argument has been presented, it goes even against itself: the so-called UASF threat.  

What needs to be demonstrated, in order to deny my claim "non-mining nodes don't influence the functioning of the system" ?  One needs to consider two different cases, one where non-mining nodes WANT something, and act, and one, all else equal, they DON'T act, and show that it makes a difference.

First example: "non mining nodes keep miners in check".  Note that we are NOT arguing how "exchanges keep miners in check"  or how "other miners keep miners in check".  

So we agree that all miners, and all exchanges, act together, and that it is the sole presence of a lot of non-mining nodes, that keeps them in check.  If this can be argued, you won.  Non-mining nodes keep miners in check in that case.

A: there are not many non-mining nodes.  All miners, and all exchanges, have decided upon a protocol change.  They do so.  The protocol change happens.

B: a lot of non-mining full nodes don't want this protocol change.  Tell me how they prevent it ?  Suppose that out of the 10 000 non-mining nodes, 9000 of them are opposed to this protocol change.  What happens ?  Miners apply the protocol change.  9000 nodes do not agree, and don't accept the N+1 block.  They wait for ever.  The "good" N+1 block never arrives.   They don't transmit the "bad" N+x blocks.
Users, initially connecting to these nodes, don't see their transactions.  They look for other nodes, until they stumble on one of the 1000 agreeing nodes, on an exchange node, or on a miner node.  They see that the chain is way further now, and they can see that the other nodes fell behind and stopped at N.  They disconnect from them, and connect to the updating minority of nodes (from miners, exchanges, and a few enthusiasts).

==> the large majority of non mining nodes, not agreeing with the protocol change, didn't keep the miners in check, did they ?

B-bis: suppose that 9990 nodes are opposed, but suppose that miners and exchanges, agreeing on the protocol change, "sybil" and install 200000 new nodes.  Now, the "node count" in favour of the protocol change is huge.  What is that small minority complaining ?  They are disconnected from the network, because they fall behind.

==> the large initial majority of non mining nodes can be sybiled away.  They didn't, after all, keep the miners in check, did they ?

Conclusion case 1: whatever the non-mining nodes do, if miners and exchanges have agreed upon a protocol change, that protocol change happens, all else equal.


Second example: nodes want a protocol change, miners and exchanges want to keep the old protocol

This is the UASF.

A) only a small minority of non-mining nodes wants the protocol change.  No miner makes their blocks, so they stop.  

B) 9000 out of 10 000 non mining nodes want the protocol change.  They stop their old client (so they remove themselves from the network) and they install the new client, that doesn't find new blocks according to their desires.  They fall behind while the miners continue to make the old chain.   ==> same scenario as 1 B.

But suppose that somehow, I'm wrong here.  Suppose that a large majority of non-mining nodes COULD impose a protocol change.

C) now, imagine that none of the honest non-mining nodes wants a protocol change, but evil Joe does.  He makes a UASF node, and launches 200000 of them.  He has now clear UASF majority on the node network.  In as much as UASF could work (it doesn't, see 2.B, but suppose), then just any evil Joe can impose a protocol change with a sybil attack with UASF nodes.

QED.

And that's exactly where the "analogy" doesn't apply, as I showed, just to get a reply that "of course, an analogy doesn't fit althe l the aspects".


On the contrary.  First of all, there is no scaling problem in the actual structure of bitcoin, because, exactly, it is a client/multi-server system, and not a P2P system.  So there is no scaling problem to be solved.

But next, the routing problem in TCP/IP is an entirely different problem than the common consensus problem in bitcoin.  TCP/IP is concerned with moving data between users, bitcoin is concerned with everyone agreeing upon a data set.

On top of that, the big success of TCP/IP routing lies in the ease by which connections can be set up and broken.  This is what allows routing to be so efficient in TCP/IP.  However, in the LN, setting up a link is costly, and stops you from setting up another link, because you lock in funds.  In TCP/IP you can set up as many links as you want, and if some break down. that's at almost no cost.  In the LN, if your channel is dead, it takes fees and a waiting period to unlock them and to set up another link.

So many of the elements that made the success of TCP/IP are not applicable in this analogy.   Both solve different problems to start with, and the great success of TCP/IP comes from the easiness of re-routing, while exactly that is costly and slow on the LN network.

Unless, unless, your LN partner is a very reliable, trustworthy partner, who has very reliable, trustworthy partners and so on.

Back from the shops after stocking up with beer and food.

At a quick glance, you've gone back to attacking the analogy, making whatever points it is you have against LN again and all sorts of other irrelevant stuff.

Let's try it this way.

Proposition:
The only way to scale a blockchain is to add an additional layer that allows off-chain transactions.

Explain to me in less than 500 words why that statement is false. I'm not interested in what you think is wrong with LN but why another layer isn't the solution. That is the topic of this thread.

Answer: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

I didn't count Satoshi's words, I hope it is less than 500.

Satoshi proposed a client/multi-server network ; we observe that bitcoin BECAME a client/multi-server network.  A client/multi-server network can perfectly scale, as Satoshi explained above.

BTW, I'm not AGAINST the LN network, and I can clearly say that Carliton Banks has induced me to clear up a misunderstanding I had about it, which I recognized without problems, and makes me see the LN as way more useful than I thought.  But I think that the LN is not a payment network, and that payment is not a good application (like payment is not a good application for bitcoin either).   The LN network is a good thing to make a fast high-frequency multi-asset speculative market.  I'm quite bullish on that.  I think that if it takes off (and I think it will), it can be much more destructive than classical speculative finance has ever been (even making the 1929 crisis, and its consequence, WWII, look like small beer).  I'm really keen on that idea.

Thx to dinofelis, I got a learning session  :) appreciated.
As non native I got a bit lost in the discussion. I reviewed the links, and to my surprise found Schopenhauer and Kant. For sure well known authors and text for me, but at no level can I compete in a foreign language (whereas I am more in French, not English). I now understand, what the link is to win in front of an audience with arguments. But here in the forum we have open minded discussions, and liberty to speak. I can't see the necessity for "winning"... The only winner I can see is Bitcoin (and LN), maybe this whole new crypto eco-system. Fascinating.

What I observe (too) often, is that a statement is made, and others are asked to show that this statement is wrong. It is easy to make such statements (god is existent, Elvis is still alive, aliens brought live to earth, ...). And there is no way to proof the opposite. So from my point of view, this belongs in the area of metaphysics (having read Kant  ;)), and I feel the same is true for arguments like "LN is centralized banking hubs" or "non-mining nodes (without exchanges) keep miners in check" or "nodes want a protocol change, miners and exchanges want to keep the old protocol". (btw: this was not UASF. UASF was, at last from what I can recall, a response to a very very small team behind closed doors in NY, representing vast majority of centralized miners, which wanted Segshit2x failing dramatically).

I think there simply isn't a possibility to show that this postulation is false. And as such it must not be proofed to be wrong.

Indeed, that's also why I'm here, I'm fascinated too.  My agenda here is to pump up my own understanding, that's grossly all.  It is also very entertaining.  Even dangerously entertaining, I spend too much time here.  My main problem is that I'm an extremely fast typographer.  I type as fast as I talk.  I learned that in high school, I followed typing lessons (back then still on mechanical typewriters :) ).  The exercise was to be able to type a heard-over discourse at "on-line" speed.   This explains my "walls of text".  It's not practical, but it would take me 5 times the time to go over it and write it in a better way.  I try to bring some relief by going over it and putting in bold, but unfortunately, when I do that, I get new ideas I want to say, and I edit and make the texts even longer.  

Apart from entertainment, as I said, my main goal here is understanding.  As I said, I'm fascinated too, but in a much less "enthusiastic" way.  I think it is a dark, evil and deceiving world, and I think nothing "good" (in standard human understanding) is going to come out of this.  But I firmly believe in its destructive success.  You can compare me to an astronomer that is studying the meteorite that is on collision course with earth.  That's fascinating in a dark kind of way.  To try to see exactly how the impact will be, what will be destroyed first, by what process.  Not scary, just dark and evil, and I have some fascination for dark and evil.

This is why I want to understand it - the only true pleasure in life before one dies.  My core idea is that the Singularity is unavoidable, but I never figured out how machines would do it.  I think crypto is the answer.

In fact, I changed my mind somewhat on that.  I thought it was a network necessity, because I made the error of thinking that with the LN network, it was impossible for "money to continue to go around in circles", somewhat akin, in electrical engineering, to push a DC current through a network of capacitors.  As channels can be pushed all the way, and cannot transmit in the same direction any more, I erroneously thought that this would kill every circular, steady motion of money.  I thought that the only way out was a central hub.  But in fact, Carliton Banks made me see my error.  So that argument doesn't count any more.

There may still be a centralizing dynamics in LN, nevertheless, like in every system with stakes and rewards.  But there's no theoretical necessity any more as I thought there was.   I see the main application of the LN, however, not in paying.  In my mind, crypto has nothing to do with currencies, but all with speculation.  Speculation, to me, is the art of extracting honest value produced by others in return for illusions, and leave them stripped.  Speculation is necessary to build evil empires.  LN channels seem like a great way to have "funds on an exchange".  It would be a first step to HF trading.  In that case, however, the natural way to pay through LN, would be to use your exchange as your "bank".  

370 which was enough for him to get across his thoughts. You could learn a lot by his example.


It would be interesting to know if he still holds this view now or whether his thoughts have evolved along the same lines as those he handed the project over to.


I would be surprised though if he had changed his mind as to why he created Bitcoin.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System (http://nakamotoinstitute.org/bitcoin/#selection-7.4-9.39)

I already told people: the long version is free, for the short version, you'll have to pay.  I didn't have time to be short.


It demonstrates that there's no scaling problem in the original vision.  That original vision is much less decentralized than what the "religion" would like, but it was/is a perfectly functional vision.   As I outlined several times, the whole story that has been sold afterwards, with the need for a lot of poor Joe's running non-mining nodes in their basement, hitting the problem Satoshi already solved with SPV in 2008, rendering the system non-scalable, and on top of that, not adding any form of real decentralization to it, is an amazing feat of deception and/or stupidity.  I don't know if Satoshi would have fallen for it, even though he was at the origin of the technicality on which this story latched: his famous introduction of a 1MB limit.  There's another thread where I give my opinions on that.




Yes, and it was pointed out to him that his economic system wouldn't work as a currency, and he wavered that away with some economic mumbo jumbo that turned out to be wrong.

This post was simply brilliant:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57.msg390#msg390

I wasn't aware of this until recently, but I also thought of it as obvious.

As to what Satoshi really thought, as where Satoshi really made mistakes, and in what way Satoshi was having different goals than what he indicated (in other words, in how much he was lying through his teeth), is hard to say.  Some inconsistencies would actually make more sense if "Satoshi" were different people at different instances, having slightly different visions.

Your inability to concisely convey anything severely reduces the number of people reading it. I usually get halfway through the first paragraph of your posts before coming to the conclusion that my time would be better spent elsewhere. Forums are a place for discussions not monologues. Have you considered blogging? It seems more suited to your style.

It is not my "inability".  It is my lack of desire to waste time on being succinct.  I can be, but it takes time and effort I don't want to spend on a forum.  I already spend too much time on it, I cannot spend 2 or 3 times more.  I don't want to be "read".  I don't want to tell the world.  I want to find out if my thinking is correct, if there are intelligent counter arguments to my thinking.  For that, I want to give all elements that led to my argument.  That takes room.  It would take less room if I reworked it, but that's too much of an effort.  If someone doesn't have the attention span to read me, he probably won't be able to give me a counter argument either that is valuable to me.  I may of course push off the true expert that could point out an error by the walls of text I produce.  But a true expert may not be put off to read a page of text.  But the casual reader that is put off by long arguments, won't be useful to me, so I don't care he doesn't read.  

I certainly don't want to blog, because I have nothing to "tell the world", and certainly not for free.  I want to learn from the world.  My walls of text, spread all over the place in a disorganized fashion will also make it essentially impossible to steal anything useful from it, if ever I decided to sell something of it.

You couldn't come across as someone trying to do that more if you were trying.

On the contrary to the rest of your statement, I think many of the most knowledgeable people here have got far more important things to do with there time than trying to decipher your "text walls" to see if there is anything vaguely resembling coherent thinking hidden in there somewhere.

Have you ever read, say, an exposition of general relativity ?  How many pages do you have to acquire, follow explanations, fill in gaps the author left, think through what the author is saying, not being quite sure that you're with him, before you actually start understanding the argument ?  Compared to that level of difficulty, "working through my walls of text" is leisure in a blink of an eye.  People not capable of doing this, can probably not reason on a sophisticated enough level to even start being useful.  Usually, in texts like that, the problem is rather that the text is too concise, and that one has to fill in too many gaps.  I err probably on the other side, I'm too verbose, too explicit, too much in simple details that could be filled in, in what I say.

I'll ask you: how many lines of explanation would you need to understand, from scratch, say, Pollard's rho attack on a Diffie-Hellman key exchange ?  Suppose that this was an unknown thing, and that someone posted this here for the first time, somewhat hesitant maybe in the fluidity of his wordings.  Would you also complain that there are "walls of text" if someone would try to give an argument explaining how it could be done in a page or two ?  Do you think that your comments would be of any use ?

If you tell me that the few people capable of seeing that, are elsewhere, then one must conclude that the amount of brain power here is too low to be of any sensible use in the development of any form of advanced argument.  That's also a possibility of course.

You seem to have misunderstood the function of a forum. It is a place to meet and discuss issues not to publish a thesis.


You also don't seem to understand the shortcomings of your writings. It's not that the brain power here is too low to understand them it is that they ramble on and on and rarely actually get to a point. I'm trying to help you get more out of the forum by being clear and concise. That way you will actually interact far more.


If this is your aim I am sure that would be a far better way to proceed.


I understand it can be difficult for some people, writing clearly, concisely and debating are skills that have to be learned. With practice, it will come much more easily to you. In the long run, you will benefit greatly from making the effort to acquire this skill and you'll find it eventually will save you much more time as once you get the hang of it writing concisely is far less time consuming than rambling on the way you do now.

Ynqvrf naq tragyrzra, jr unir n trahvar xbbx.

dinofelis, I admit that my brain is no match for your “advanced argument”.  Indeed, I am certain that none of the regulars on this forum has a brain capable of operating on the level of yours.  I grant you all thanks you are owed for your having been so magnanimous as to grace us with your presence.  Please, do not waste further time here.  Go forth to seek the company of like-brained people.  Just remember to give us a wave (a particular wave) when you are accepting the award to you of the Fields Medal, or whatever; and please tell the Singularity to go easy on poor, be(k)nighted old nullius, nobody’s man.

Now, this started as a most excellent thread on the topic of the Lightning Network.  I know, I admit, it is a characteristic of our brains that we need thoughts concisely organized and focused.  Be that as it may.  Does anybody have anything further to say about the Lightning Network and the metaphor of unicast networking?

I will make explicit a specific question I earlier implied:  Are the Lightning engineers availing themselves of the fine research literature on network routing protocols and routing algorithms?  If that could be answered off-hand by anybody who’s been following Lightning development much more closely than I have, I’d be much obliged.

Thanks.

Even to someone with limited knowledge of network engineering and specs, it seems very simple to understand and informative. Based on what was explained it definitely is in a long way to advance o better system of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. The way it is designed now is falling the real purpose of the crypto ideal that was having a decentralized, secure way of fast and cheap transactions on the peer to peer basis. Definitely, there is ample space for evolution and so we should head for a better world community based on the blockchain.

When following older threads, there is lot of discussion on onion routing. But here in the forum I haven‘t seen engineers discussing the research literature.

There has been a short discussion, but it did not get the desired attention it deserves... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2573055.msg26369895;topicseen#msg26369895

The routing itself is described here:
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/04-onion-routing.md

And I read, Acinq/Eclair is using the flare routing engine. Haven‘t found the spec yet. If someone has?

I have a lot of reading to catch up on.  Thanks for the discussions and ideas you are all sharing. I won't be able to understand half of it, but still great.

The good news - LN is in place and starting to do it's thing!! I paid .33 cents for a roughly $250 transaction.  Much better!

The bad new- we're all getting spanked right now.

However I see a great buying opp and the LN makes me that much more confident about it.  

Thanks, pebwindkraft.  Of course, onion routing for privacy is a subject near and near and dear to my heart.  (The name of the Tor network started as an acronym for “The Onion Router”; it was later declard simply “Tor”.)  As a general concept, it is a source-routing method which conceals prior hops from each next-hop, including the destination; and I am glad to see the active development of an onion-routing implementation for Lightning Network (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-onion).  But that’s not the type of routing problem I had in mind, when I thought about the IP network analogy.

Network routing is one of those arcane specialties filled with scary-smart people who know all the minutiae of complex systems which most developers are barely aware exist.  (How does the Internet really work?  How do all those little packets know where to go?  Magic!)  I am not in that specialty, and I’m not familiar with its research literature—but I know it has such a thing, and a quick search found some handy starting points:

https://www.caida.org/research/routing/
(CAIDA is an important site, by the way...)

https://www.academia.edu/Documents/in/Routing_protocols

When OP’s link launched a train of thought about Lightning and networking, what first occured to me was that Spanning Tree Protocol might somehow be applicable.  Of course, that’s not an Internet routing protocol; but it is the standard staple for organizing the network topology on LANs.  Then, I thought of Internet routing.  Also, self-organizing mesh networks.

The general question is:  Given a global set of nodes which form and remove links between each other unpredictably, how does each node organize its own view of potential routes and choose optimal paths?

I think there are a few network characteristics of Lightning which are sui generis:  The problem of optimal (or even possible) routes involves monetary calculations, both as to fees charged, and as to availability of funds on each channel which provides a potential hop.  Indeed, network “cost” is monetary, rather than usual measures of network bandwidth and latency.  Otherwise, however, it mostly sounds like just the sort of problem for which a network routing specialist would have applicable existing expertise.  Whence my question.  Lightning development must already encompass some answers to these questions; and I expect that routing optimization may be a significant area of evolution and improvement as Lightning grows and matures.


A quick search found only some (https://www.pdqenterprises.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/CODA_FLAREProductSheet.pdf) PDFs (https://www.pdqenterprises.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/CODA_FLAREProductSheet-2.pdf) pertaining to a financial order routing system, on a site which won’t load for me (probably blocks Tor).  I have no idea if those be relevant.  But come to think of it, there’s another pre-existing field which is likely to have applicable existing knowledge.

---

Hey, thanks for posting the link in OP!  That started an interesting discussion—one in which I myself have mostly questions, not answers.

So my question is it possible to make your own coin that can be traded that could be used on the lightning network and if so how would one go about doing this?

I'm also not a specialist, but understand enough on the basics. So no, not magic, and I bet you know as well :-)
IP protocol is well defined, with routing information (or destination) in the header of each packet. In the very early days a router would ask his neighbor, do you have a route for network x? (neighbor discovery protocol). Someone to whom I was connected would answer accordingly (or not, then "PATH NOT FOUND"). And the question of routing optimization started quite early. There was this ATM network model at the same time (goal to unify networks with telephony and IP in 53 byte packets!)... Remember good old CISCO 27xx or 29xx models with configs for RIPv1 and v2, and then open shortest path first (OSPF)? These were the internal routing protocols. Then there was the bigger networks in the late 80s and they needed a professional base layer (border gateway protocol, BGP and IGRP/EGRP, or EGP). And of course a DNS. btw: why is DNSsec not used today?

Spanning tree was the protection layer in bridges, to prevent loops in larger networks, with the "routing" of MAC addresses (bridge = layer 2 device). Yup, no routing at layer 4 here ...

Lookup tables?
I took a look into the routing in Lightning - you come to deal with SPINX, HMACs, and of course onion routings. I think the difficulty layer of lightning routing stems from the fact, that the node only knows the predecessor and the successor of a route. Nothing else. Not the origin, not the final destination, not the amount (but then, how to know, that the channel supports the requested value transfer?), and for sure in a way bullet proof, that the node cannot benefit from forwarding the package to a different target. There I find this table in the data structure of 20 entries @65 bytes (hops_data), which makes me think on what it is used for? Is there a max of 20 hops?
Also the flare white paper (http://bitfury.com/content/5-white-papers-research/whitepaper_flare_an_approach_to_routing_in_lightning_network_7_7_2016.pdf) says:
and
Interesting, that would mean no dynamic routing?

I don't understand (yet) how routing achieves a dynamic management, when it is pre-defined from the beginning. And this would mean, it does not require IP routing specialists? There's work to be done!

Surely you mean the 2500 Series? (Ooops showing my age again.) This is a good demonstration of how easy it is solve scaling issues at layer 3. When the limitations of RIP became apparent it was easy to simply add additional routing protocols to solve the problems. For example, EIGRP is a Cisco proprietary protocol that can be used in areas of the network using exclusively Cisco equipment and then BGP handles connecting to other areas that may not be.

I see so many debates about the possible limitations of Lightning Network that miss this. It's not an end product set in stone, it will constantly evolve to address any issues that arise. That's not so easy to do in blockchain where much was set in stone in the genesis block.



Pedantic Note: STP allowed layer 2 topologies to be designed with redundancy built in by temporarily blocking loops and then opening them when a failure elsewhere eliminated the loop.

While you guys dissect the technical aspect of this document, I would just like to thank the author for a very enlightened piece of art. The main point of this article in my humble opinion, was to highlight the fact that we are still in the earliest phase of this experiment. We are building the "Internet of Money", piece by piece and if second layer applications are necessary to do that, then so be it.

The point is, Block size increases can only take us to a specific level, before it becomes destructive to the network. We have to rely on second layer applications to take us to the next level.

Thanks for the networking discussion, folks.  I want to underscore this twice:


So—how would you take all this networking knowledge, and apply it to routing and network topology in Lightning?  More to the point (and my original question), are the Lightning devs doing so—and if so, how?

(Aside, or perhaps not:  Shifting analogies around and down to the link layer, per OP’s article, we no longer have only a broadcast network as with old Ethernet hubs.  There is a reason I thought of Spanning Tree first.)

I see plenty of speculation about what LN will look like, topology-wise.  Yet much of that depends not only on what potential links are available, but also on how nodes use them.  I don’t see how a simple look-up table would suffice.  If you are connected to A, B, and C, and you want to reach Z, that’s not an easy problem.  It’s not easy in the first instance; and however it’s answered now, I expect that could be fertile ground for optimization in the future.

I'm afraid I can't answer this bit as I don't know.


The lesson I would take from IP routing protocols would the introduction of 'areas' that allowed changes that occur in certain places need only be propagated within that area and have no effect on the network topology as a whole. The IP routing table in Internet routers is a simple lookup table, but these protocols keep the updating of that table to a minimum.

If I understood the docs correctly, the big difference between routing in IP networks and in Lightning is the used model: in Lightning I see source routing used, so the sender first creates the route, packs it in layers (hence onion), and then sends the package. In IP networks there is ROUTERS all over the network, that do this job. So in the IP world you can send a package with a destination address (encapsulated in the header field) to the next router, and he has these lookup tables, and forwards accordingly.
In a lightning node would have to ask "the network" first, then create the route (based on fees), and then send the package over this pre-defined route. So the node has it's own "lookup table". It might be called differently though. I still have an issue to understand the "ask the network", so leave it open for discussion.

There was some text from the devs on the mailing list:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2015-December/000384.html

yes, and yes  ;D, me too!

Man, I want to say thanks for such info, because I couldn't find something usefull about that. It's really interesting and I think it has the future.

Very good read, and the analogies helped, as most of us aren't deep inclined. Maybe if a short comic-like/graphic video was created, we can get a larger pool of people to understand this upcoming feature of bitcoin, and re-affirm their belief that the future is good for bitcoin. I'm really looking forward to the Launch of Bitcoin's Lightening Network, and the Raiden Network of Ethereum.

NP guys!  But the smart mo fo who typed this bad boy up deserves all credit. I've been looking for articles like this that teach the non-coder/programmer (as badly as I'd die to be) and they aren't easy to find.

I was researching about lightning network and found this topic. Very nice article.

I made a summary and translated it, and posted in my local board. Thanks for sharing.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3179641.msg32927586 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3179641.msg32927586)

The only problem lies in the fact that the channels are only defined between two persons. In order to reach a person with whom you do not share a channel, you will need to use intermediate nodes or “hubs” (Bob in our example). However, these nodes could be considered by the regulatory agencies as “money transmitters” and as such be subject to requirements such as the minimum capitalization, KYC checks (…) which cannot be filled by anyone.
More here...https://www.blockchains-expert.com/en/lightning-network/