Bitcoin Forum

Recently received news about the Bitcoin Lightning Network which experienced quite rapid growth in 2023 with a growth of 1212% in the last 2 years.

Bitcoin financial service River Financial reported on the growth of the Lightning Network,
from 503.115 transactions routed now soaring to 6.599.553 transactions in August 2023.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/10/13/RERDf.png

Sam Wouters, River's research analyst said the figure was "surprising" due to the drop in Bitcoin (BTC) price and loss of interest in online searches.
The report revealed that Bitcoin's price has fallen by 44%, while online searches for the top cryptocurrency have fallen by 45% since then, yet Lightning Network continues to grow.

The research analyst highlighted that Lightning Network has achieved a lot despite the market downturn and only having 5,000 BTC locked on the network.

Source:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-lightning-network-growth-surges-over-two-years
https://x.com/SDWouters/status/1711758161042866231?s=20

Some people use a decimal point '.' to represent a thousandth place, but it is not so common and you cannot use that for sums like percentage AFAIK.

Readers see 1% and what comes after the decimal place, but the real figure is 1,212% as can be seen on the image you shared.

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That said, the growth of the LN is massive and shows promise that it can take huge load off on chain transactions in the future to keep fees at a reasonable amount.

I am one of those, but when i see the graph i undertand that the OP is using dot for thousand seperator instead of comma. Anyway

Very impresive the growth of the Lightning Network, i would like to participate on it, but in my city there is no bussines that accept bitcoin, even less LN.

Yeah I also read the 1% and I assumed this would of been a negative article towards lightning network. No idea why some countries use . Instead of the , symbol to mean it’s a number in the thousands or millions.

I think the reason why the usage is up is due to the higher fees and the fact that many exchanges finally added lightning network. Years ago almost no exchanged used it because fees went down and it wasn’t really needed at the time.

This growth in transactions could have to do with there being more things to do on Lightning. I don't know if the growth in users is as impressive as the transaction count increase. Nostr is an interesting protocol that has attracted many developers to create Lightning focused apps. There are also several play to earn games and apps that let you earn some sats and withdraw through Lightning. There is still many improvements needed for users to have a better experience but it is certainly promising to see a huge growth in activity.

In general it looks like there's a huge adoption toward lightning network because the total transaction increase really high.

But if we look at the total channels, it's not really increase as high as the total transactions. So it seems only small a group are use lightning network, which I think it's a centralized exchange and centralized wallet that integrated with lightning network, where the user only need to use it without need to open a new channel.

Pretty much like people who use and hold Bitcoin in CEX.

https://imgvb.com/images/2023/10/13/c34aff2f11b04aa70a36fffebbec0f99.png

Is there supposed to be a correlation between LN's growth and the Bitcoin price growth? I don't know why Sam Wouters is searching for such correlation. LN is supposed to be growing in times of high transaction fees, when the BTC blockchain is congested. There was such time frame(due to the Bitcoin Ordinals, I guess). The Bitcoin price and the online searches about BTC has little to do with this.
5000 BTC being locked in the Lighting Network proves that there's no actual growth of LN. It's just a bunch of channels inside LN, that are transacting more often between each other.

Due to some debate about the decimal point ".", I chose to remove it.
So that it would be clearer that it is thousands according to the graphical increment in the image that I have included.

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Lightning network transaction fees are cheaper and transactions are also faster.
There are many adoptions made with Bitcoin's Lightning network for several payments for credit purchases, vouchers, and other payments.

If regulation becomes an obstacle it is already a rule that cannot be changed.
My country also does not allow Bitcoin as a payment transaction, but I can buy Bitcoin in Rupiah currency with a ATM Bitcoin Mainan made by local people in my country.
You can visit it at this link. https://btcln.app/

and I also discussed about this ATM Bitcoin Mainan
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5404778.0

https://i.postimg.cc/t4hTC8Cw/lightning-ATM.gif (https://btcln.app/)

Yes, that's one of them, many exchanges have added Lightning Network Bitcoin, especially Binance, which makes transactions increase due to cheaper and more efficient fees.
List of Exchanges that Support Lightning Network.
https://github.com/theDavidCoen/LightningExchanges

Lightning Network is developed in various sectors, one of which is like a game that allows users to get Sats in every game.
Thanks to the Lightning network it can be done with fairly minimal transactions and this will be the future of Bitcoin layer 2 adoption.
There needs to be a lot more development for the Lightning Network.

It is uneven, indeed after several large exchanges such as Binance began to support the Lightning network, there was a significant increase in transactions.
and Coinbase also plans to integrate the Lightning Network, after Brian Armstrong CEO of Coinbase said "Lightning is great and something we'll integrate"
https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1644794656570617856

I don't have an opinion on it, but Bitcoin Ordinal is indeed the cause of the surge in transactions that are getting denser, and because of that people are starting to use the Lightning Network so as not to get stuck on Bitcoin transactions with fees that are also quite expensive.
It also makes the big exchanges want to support the lightning network.

There is a good lesson in this statement that one can not speculate on bitcoin price and adoption based on the drop from the ATH and the number of searches in search engines. The real adoption takes place in terms of usage of bitcoin, number of transactions both on-chain and on second layer, number of merchants that start accepting bitcoin, etc.

This significant growth in usage of Lightning Network is a clear indication of how bitcoin adoption has been increasing non-stop.
It also indicates how bitcoin current price is below its intrinsic value which makes the market state a manipulated one.

Well, it can be one of several things...

Lightning Network transactions are very cheap, compared to normal transactions on the Blockchain.... so people see this as a viable alternative to traditional payment options and they are actually using it as a currency... OR

The transactions are cheap and someone are "cooking" the statistics by making MANY transactions to distort the real picture.

I hope this is "real" world use and not some hidden agenda that are being pushed, by the people who wants to boost the LN technology.  ::)

Number of open channels drops but sum of channel values increases a lot after a deep fall since July.

https://txstats.com/d/000000012/lightning-network?orgId=1&from=now-6y&to=now

txstats.com (https://coinmetrics.io/announcing-txstats-com/) (the announcement) is a product with cooperation between BitMEX and Coinmetrics.com. You can customize time range to see some stats for Lightning Network.

Their guide for time range control (https://grafana.com/docs/grafana/latest/dashboards/use-dashboards/).

i agree that speculation on bitcoin is not only based on bitcoin ATH, online searches, etc. direct adoption by people, number of transactions, applications on online platforms, etc., are the most important factors to look at.

the increasing growth of the bitcoin lightning network in the last 2 years could indicate that the growth of bitcoin adoption is increasing. even though there are some who say that this growth is only transactions between channels on the network, i think it's not only that, there are definitely transactions from ordinary users that are increasing and this should be welcomed positively.

But the question is why people now adopt lightning network? remember lightning network is cheaper than on chain network in terms of transaction numbers, since open a new channel need fees. So it should be a businessman are adopting lightning network.

I doubt Bitcoin holders are adopting lightning network when they still treat Bitcoin is an investment which they're not regularly spend their coins.

I was posting with the largest LN node owner.

And with 17 btc staked off which 8 was his He earns 80 bucks a month.  What this means is exchanges may be doing it to save money but it is not a real solution for fees being too small for miners in 2056.

Here is my conversation with him and frankly his earnings are disappointing to say the least.

They clearly show that we are heading for a mining collapse in or about 2056

For cheaper and faster transactions.

Lightening network is not a payment processor which is limited to businesses accepting Bitcoin. It is an off chain alternative to high fees for smaller transactions. On average Bitcoin has hundreds of thousands of transactions daily, many of which can be routed through LN.

Bitcoin holders use LN too.

I think it's incorrect to label transaction count growth as network growth. Network growth is something like a node count growth, open channels growth, user growth. Transaction count is important, but it's not network growth.

Also, 6.5 million tx per month is an incredibly low number. Visa has 660 million per day. So the 1212% growth is not impressive, when you go from a tiny number to a still tiny number in the grand scheme of things.

Thanks, very nicely compiled and presented info. And of course I'm happy LN is growing strong and it seems like it's going parabolic. It will take some pressure off the mempool, particularly taking care of those Ordinals, BRC20 tokens and what not...

usage has not grown. the liquidity has not moved much
bitcoins intrinsic value is at the low $20k range while prices are over $26k

all this shows is that river financial is shuffling more funds back and forth(payments AND rebalancing) more often
as for the 6,599,553 payments in 2 years (1,051,200 minutes) is only 6.278113584payments a minute
bitcoin still does ~300transactions a minute

LN has existed for more then 6 years but is no where near the amount of payments bitcoin done per minute in 2015(its 6th anniversary)

infact there are other subnetwork bridges that do far more then LN

its also funny how they say there are 1.1million lightning network users but only 64k channels. meaning 1.04m users are centralised exchange balance holders. not lightning balance holders. (nor bitcoin holders)

yes i know out of the 84m utxos of bitcoin there are hundreds of millions of bitcoin centralised exchange balance holders. but based on percentages it seems lightning users are more centralised than bitcoiners.. and bitcoiners use bitcoin more than lightning

now if we took away all those upto 6million population of el salvadorians "free $30" of crypto that routed(and failed) via lightning within these 2 years i wonder how much left would be for genuine LN usage in the last 2 years

showing that river represents 10% of nodes(6.4k) and 29% of liquidity(1.5k btc locked) just shows how lightning (the so called solution to bitcoin) is not meeting its promises even after 6 years.

but hey people will just want to shout and scream how LN is great and perfect, ignore all the flaws, bugs, real stats and just want to pump the fluffy media pieces which state things which do not actually compliment a network once you put them into context

And it will not bode well in 20-30 years.
It will simply cause miners to abandon BTC blockchain and move to Scrypt.

When the largest node in the world with 17 btc  capacity only generates 87 a month in income  (when pushed hard) and 30 a month in income do the math.

170 btc is 300-870 a month

1700 btc is 3000-8700 a month

17000 btc is 30000-87000 a month

170000 btc is 300000-870000 a month

1700000 btc is 3,000,000- 8,700,000 a month this would be 100,000 x bigger than now

3 million x 12 = 36 million a year

8,700,000 x 12 = 104.4 million a year



today mining does 23,587,200 a day


looks like a fucking mess is coming right at BTC  due to scaling.

The report is this: https://river.com/learn/files/river-lightning-report-2023.pdf

In short, they have got data from various lightning-accepting companies, companies that produce lightning software, and from their own lightning node. As they say, 1,212% increase is based on data from 52% of the public capacity, which gives a somewhat confident level of accuracy.

Don't you find it a little ignorant to compare the entire mining sector with just one lightning operator? Also, since when does the largest in capacity node have only 17 BTC?

I don't know, it seems like Sam Wouter is just speculating on what he sees without considering anything else and the actual adoption by Bitcoin users.
He only focuses on the raw data presented without looking at the actual usage and adoption data done or not.

The Lightning Network is layer2 of Bitcoin that provides the best solution to overcome the cost and speed issues.
But everything is still in the development stage and there are still some shortcomings that the lightning network has such as theft and fraud activities that can be carried out by means of other users closing payment channels unilaterally or offline and charging more and more additional fees.
But this is still in the development process.

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The truth is that we can't ignore these flaws and I am even aware of some of the flaws that the Lightning Network has.
Everything is still under development and it's not perfect.
Remember that the Lightning Network was originally just an experimental project on Layer2 of Bitcoin to address the cost and speed issues. 

much like how governments that maintain roads suddenly tell  people to stop using cars by increasing the fuels and toll charges trying to get everyone to ride a train
only problem is the train stations and rails inbetween have more bottlenecks and are just waiting for popularity to go in their favour to then raise ticket prices per journey..
its not an experiment. its standard bait and switch economics that is as old as religion

when devs stop developing bitcoin and become economists(without qualification) and devs for other network preference, wanting to offer another network as the only route.. it does not help bitcoin it just popularises the centralised other network they promote for profit
(those who sponsor core devs didnt do it out of altruism they done it to push a way of getting middle men into the payments game for ROI)

funny thing is the 6mill LN payments of lets say 1 sat per hop is only 0.06btc($1600 in 2 years)
i made that amount just this month by only using the bitcoin network and true bitcoin services.. LN is a failure. its been 6 years and there are still issues and companies are not making the money they were promised years ago they would earn when they sponsored devs to implement code to make LN possible.
the 6mill payments in 2 years is equivalent to 12days of bitcoin transactions

Franky1, I'm asking you this time honestly, aren't you tired of attacking LN?
Why do you even bother, it's a done thing, nobody is giving crap about what some users which are obviously a minority say, especially when their arguments are that cheap transactions are bad, so what are you doing and why?
LN is here to stay and it will die only with Bitcoin, a thing I'm pretty sure you don't want to happen, so why? Seriously, why?


Phil is a miner, and although he is overreacting sometimes his math and reasoning are spot on most of the time.
You can't have security without a mining reward, and you can't have that reward without fees, in a decentralized network it's the users who pay, if you don't find a way to make them pay voluntarily it will suffer the same fate as an NGO that runs out of funds.

I assume you remember our discussions you can't say BTC will become centralized because we need to spend 200$ on some SSD while at the same time thinking gear running on 8GW will do so out of goodwill.
LN and the main chain need equilibrium, and ....money!

LN is dying all by itself. its already in zombie mode. just held up by centralists hoping to penny pinch each other for tx fee's
and those against LN are not against cheap fee's they are against a flawed and buggy network being promotd as a solution to bitcoin

bitcoin will live on LN is already dying. im sorry you cant see passed the truth and just want the truth to go away to keep your dreams alive. but your dreams have passed the alarm clock. its time to wake up

other subnetworks have overtook bitcoin liquidity and participation and have fewer bugs/flaws
i personally am sticking to the bitcoin network. but the failures of LN need to be poked out before some people fall foul to the broken promises and fluffy promoted lies of ln's status

look how the chief LN devs(lightning labs aka blockstream) admit that LN is more complex to use so then wants to offer a centralised service.. funny part is LN was meant to be the solution to decentralisation and help allow users to be independent nodes.. yet now they are admitting to their failing by offering a centralised service as their solution..

there are many other subnetwork bridges to bitcoin and if you add up all the users. you will see that its LN that ar the obvious minority of userbase because there is a majority of bitcoin subnetwork bridge users avoiding LN and preferring other subnetworks
its time to wake up and wipe the drool off the side of your mouth

The Lightning Network is growing rapidly because it makes Bitcoin more useful for everyday payments. Businesses and people are using it to send and receive small payments quickly and cheaply. ;)
Why this grow happened ;D -
- Business adoption
- People using it for their needs
- Also bitcoin provide financially some freedom
- More countries or chain business accept it

Overall, the Lightning Network is growing rapidly because it is making Bitcoin more useful for everyday payments. As more businesses and people start to use it, we can expect to see even more growth in the years to come.

franky1 I know you don’t like LN and rail against it alot.

I happen to agree with you my post above shows why I think LN does not work.

freeze 17 btc to earn 80+ dollars a month with aggressive fees. or 30 a month with low fees.

17 btc is about 400000 usd 80 a month is about 1000 a year.

1000/400000 is not 1% interest it is 0.25%

and if you do lower fees it is

say 400 a year

that is 400/400000 or 0.1% interest a year.

you can get 4% easy from a lot of places why or how does 0.1% to 0.25% work well.

average channel balance 0.082 BTC
average node balance 0.352 BTC

so not sure why you reference 17btc, but lets instead use some known stats

yes on average for each sat payment the router charges 0.000050sat/sat  + 0.5sat base of total
so yes for each full use before rebalance would earn them 0.005% per session
but if they rebalance each month
that average 0.082 earns 0.00000411 before rebalancing per month
however onchain rebalance(close open channel) is
close tx of ~17sat per vbyte of 208vbytes = 3536sat
open tx of ~17sat per vbyte of 208vbytes = 3536sat
which means 7072sat to rebalance meaning negative balance/no profit for onchain fee rebalancing

so yes people do offchain rebalance by backward paying themselves using another channel.. but the funny part about this is when you rebalance using the routing game.. the other participants then get unbalanced in their channels, so they then rebalance through you. and so a tennis ping pong effect is that most payments end up being rebalance gaming each other fighting to find a cohesive status quo with each other  (which explains why all of a sudden services are showing more payments.. but those payments end up being rebalance sessions of playing ping pong)

Undiagnosed psychosis, most likely.  That, and he clearly doesn't care about throwing away every ounce of credibility he ever had.  All he does is lie.  



Since franky1 is the only person in existence using this phrase to describe layer 2 networks, it's difficult to quantify what this is attempting to convey (as per normal).  

The other major layer-2 networks are Rootstock, Stacks and Liquid.  Due to the current NFT fad, it's possible that Stacks could currently be seeing greater usage than LN, but even if so, I doubt this would remain the case long-term.  Plus, it's not really being used as a currency, but more for trading of assets.  Liquid's userbase is primarily aimed at businesses rather than ordinary users, so whatever usage it's generating isn't a valid comparison.  RSK's usage definitely seems smaller than LN.

But knowing fallacious1, he's probably talking about some worthless IOU like Tether or some "wrapped" token and just calling it a "subnetwork".

In terms of people making real-world purchases of actual goods and services, I'm pretty confident that there aren't other layer-2 networks outperforming LN.  We'll see what unrelenting drivel he responds with to avoid answering the question as to which network he's really referring to.

For all his talk about "being frank with people" It's like he's deliberately trying be as vague, evasive, misleading and disingenuous as humanly possible.  Total shit-smear.


//EDIT:  Yep, as anticipated, the slippery weasel has replied and totally and utterly failed to clarify which specific layer-2 network he's referring to as having greater usage and liquidity.  Like a sleazy politician who never answers the damn question.

doomad.. lot of people talk about bridges and subnetworks.. only your dozen idiot brigade recruits want to think of LN as a penthouse level network not a basement/subway level network

there are more subnetworks then that, but doomad only promotes certain ones that he hopes to ass-kiss/fame-up to hope to get a commission, pat on the back for promoting only certain things

i know doomads PR strategy of subliminal messages to push trying to make LN sound like bitcoin2.0. or bitcoin+ or 'on top of' bitcoin meaning better then bitcoin.. but doomad is ignoring the rest of the community that avoid LN for good reason. they see the flaws, bug and bottlenecks. they see the broken promises. they see they wont ever make an income from being a router.
LN is insecure, buggy and cludgy.. its a lesser network, not a better one

when 29% of liquidity is "river" when bitfinex had similar numbers, you start to see majority of LN is not independent users. but centralised services


as for the IOU.. unconfirmed transactions are not confirmed/settled. meaning if its not settled on your key its not your funds.. thats rule one of bitcoin economics, so if someone writes a promise to pay but doesnt settle up then yes its an IOU until the promise is settled so yes the onscreen balance of msats is a nonbitcoin unit measure that promised but not settled. thus yes most definitely an IOU because you dont own real bitcoin settled value you instead have a promise measured in msats
you might want to look at how the 'states' are stored in wallet data.
an uncleared/unsettled cheque is still an IOU


maybe if there was less effort into FUDing bitcoin to try to claw people into LN and instead put effort into making a subnetwork that meets its promises, people would then be more then happy to use that niche subnetwork.. but just wasting 6 years with empty promises and false promotions pretending that it solves things.. the dream doesnt last long when people use it for a while. hit the bottlenecks and leave to try something else..they wake up.
satoshi dice system a decade ago done the same bad practice.. it didnt last

el salvador used LN for 3 months and gave it up due to many issues they experienced. they were sold a false promotion and regret trying it in the first place. they were told it was bitcoin and users can easily move bitcoin. but when they actually used it they were just playing with msats that got blocked at many node relays. which made millions of users blame bitcoin even though they never used bitcoin.. LN gave bitcoin a bad name and made millions of people not want to use bitcoin due to LN failures

there is many news media pictures of el salvadorians protesting against bitcoin even though the only experience el salvadorians had was bad experiences of LN

it makes me laugh how LN main devs support things like 'renting' channels (people pay to have a account able to receive funds)
it makes me laugh how i can make a "faster payments" fiat transfer for free but LN adorers love fee's and charging people amounts to move funds
these fee loving creeps want bitcoin transactions to be expensive so they can then charge people more on LN(if it ever got popular)

I'm curious as to what is Scrypt?

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Since there's a significant rise in the number of transactions, there could be an added amount of users of it but comparing it to BTC users, there is still a lot of catching up to do.

And you can't rely on fees in a network that can only operate in an on-chain manner, because it isn't attractive for the user. Unless you believe that paying $50 for a couple of transactions is sustainable and will definitely encourage people adopt it as currency.

I very much remember myself saying that the burden to run a full node isn't the problem but rather the risk to rip the network apart as a result of consensus failure.

Listen, I understand that this forum revisits topics often, but I've reached a point where I'm honestly tired of having this conversation. Here's a sincere question: have you ever considered taking tangible actions to address this? Complaining once in a while won't effect change. If you lack the requisite skills to develop software, have you explored alternative forks that align more closely with your beliefs?

Nobody is saying to have all the transactions on the chain! (well except Franky)
What I have been always saying is that you need to give people the space to actually create an LN channel cheaply if you don't want them to use a centralized solution, as for the $50 pet tx is EXACTLY the opposite.
I'm not advocating for a guy paying $50 for a tx I'm advocating for 100 to pay 50 cents!


Oh, the classical, if you don't like it you can go!  ;D

Fair enough!
Let's see what happens when Mara and Riot reach 40% and they will say that because of economic bla bla bla, weather conditions and geopolitical changes, they won't include transactions under 100sat in their blocks, suddenly it will make sense to tell people to host a $2000 miner at home to achieve decentralization.  ;D


LTC/Doge algo, not sure about the numbers but a bit more profitable for the same age gear, an s19 would be in red while an l7 would still run at 12 cents per kwh.

Bitcoin LN would be ok, but currently also ordinary Bitcoin transactions can be fast enough for ordinary user, if receiver accept first confirmation for transfer ( ~ 10 minutes ), but transfer fees are too high of course. Bitcoin LN is not very popular, so I do not see any bright future, because of altcoins, which have very fast transfers, cheap transfer costs, even free ( TRX ).

You think the problem with lightning is to paying a couple of dollars to open up a channel? Because I think it's rather the technical experience you need to possess with running a node, maintaining your capacities and backing everything up perpetually.

I mean, if you're dissatisfied with the current situation, you should take action-- whether it's writing software, running programs, or participating in proposals. Since I remember myself engaging in conversations with you, you've consistently pointed out the negatives, which is not inherently wrong. But, do you have any constructive suggestions to improve the situation?

Am I supposed to see some relevance with my post in here? 'Cause I don't.

you are correct huge fees would suck and harm btc.

stompix is correct small fees would suck and harm miners which would harm btc.

Satoshi whole theme is turning power into wealth


scrypt for LTC/Doge in the long term is better designed to help mining stay viable.

Does that mean scrypt will win out over Sha-256 I do not know.

And back to topic

the biggest LN node had 17 btc in it and generated 30 to 80 a month income for the owner of the node

that is an obvious fail. It won't last with those numbers. see below

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Now those are the stats from the guy running that node.

assuming that is true LN is a fucking disaster 17 btc earning only 30-80usd  a month is not viable.

Maybe someone can get stats for other 2 layer networks and maybe they are better.

But Franky1 will turn out to be correct about LN if LN only make 30-80 usd a month based on 17btc

Oh wow, that's surprising news to me. To be honest, I thought that the Lightning Network was an ambitious but failed project because of not being user-friendly enough, but I was wrong. That is huge growth that shouldn't be disregarded, although Helena Yu's point on how it doesn't translate into growth of the number of users also seems valid.
I was glad to learn (thanks to BlackHatCoiner) that it's actually based on 52% out of the total, so the actual number of Lighting transaction is even higher.
I don't use the Lightning Network, but I don't hate it either. I don't think it's a bad thing for Bitcoin, even though it's an off-chain solution.

I have been talking to a lot of LN Node runners basically they are not fans of what they are doing but they want to do some method to support BTC transactions.  As BlackHatCoiner mentioned there are a few other layer2 solutions I will be trying to research how well they work for the ones running them.

An LN runner is kind of like a POS for BTC and it is not going to scale and work with interest payments well under 1% a year.

At the moment any OG that has 100's of cheaper btc can afford to support it but that is not a longterm method. So if LN really works out it will need to pay about 2-4% to node runners. So that would be 8000 to 16000 a year to a 17 coin LN node not the 400 to 1000 it was paid last year.

Linux wasn't very user-friendly 20+ years ago, but now billions of people use Android. They don't even know what Linux is.

The BTC ecosystem needs to have its own "Android moment", but no one knows what could that be. Only time will tell.

And the tricky part of user-friendliness is not compromising self-custody...

Either way, decentralization is very important, especially since we may soon enter WW3.

The more decentralized a network is, the most resilient it becomes against nuclear warfare:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/h-bomb-and-the-internet

Internet is totally decentralized, minus the DNS part (which is unfortunately centralized due to Root DNS servers).

Adopting DVD-size blocks (like BSV does) will surely hurt decentralization, despite CSW fanboys claiming to have a warehouse ready to host a PetaByte datacenter.

It's easier to bomb a few datacenters, rather than thousands of nodes.

No, and this is why probably we have a disagreement!
It's not the sum it's the quantity, even if you would have people opening a channel every 3 months and closing it 9 months after you still need the blockspace unless you opt for centralized solutions.

With the technical experience, I'm a bit less concerned, every single day that passes a new generation becomes the majority, far more technical, far more willing to explore this, if we look at the median age probably it looks to them just like setting up core was in 2010 to the generation without smartphones


Yeah pretty simple one, raise the block space in steps by doing a 4x by each havening, allowing both transactions on the chain to go by with 1-2 sat byte, reach a million in capacity, and leave enough room for another thing, from LN to consolidation unlike things are now, Bitfinex did one consolidation that with their hot wallet and they've dumped 10 blocks of transactions, one and a half hour of capacity!

I'm not advocating for only on chain, not for only LN either, not for blocks containing money or videos but also not for blocks in which one actor can spam it with $1 million. Equilibrium, that's what I'm proposing!

Yeah bigger blocks will help. Heck I just grabbed a 2tb ssd for only 85 dollars. I used a free laptop that i loaded linux mint to it. and I downloaded the entire chain in about 20 hours.

my net does 200 speed tops. I likely could down load in 10 hours with a fast net.

Now that I did this new 25 core node I can clone a copy onto a 4tb ssd and then an 8tb ssd.

so an 8tb ssd can hold a really big blockchain.

Eventually you could load to a large spinner 20tb when you reach 7tb on your 8tb ssd.

no one should advocate everyone drop the bitcoin network and all move over to a single crap insecure bottlenecked buggy subnetwork proported as being "the solution"

there must be a multi-effort approach
firstly. devs that adore subnetworks should not only admit that their favoured subnetwork has bugs they cant fix, but instead move on and start afresh, learn from mistakes and make a new subnetwork without the issues. then not just have one subnetwork but multiple networks that solve different purposes. much like dollar does not just have cash, but it has cheques, visa, mastercard, giftcards, etc

the next part is bitcoin should not become the sole utility for CEX reserve swaps. those CEX can do reserve swaps on their own subnetwork. whereby the onchain utility is expanded for those that want to withdraw/close session to hoard longterm independently using lean transactions to allow many many thousands per block to hoard long term securely. rather than leave funds locked into subnetworks/CEX's

the mainnet should be for individual sovereign control of wealth independently. not become a centralist services reserve rail, throwing users to hold pepged value units in subnetworks falsely thinking they are secure in the subnetwork

as for tx fee's since 2015 tx counts were only 2000tx average and now although 4x data load has been deemed safe/non invasive the tx count is not 8k plus. the cludgy miscounting of bytes and the segregated dataload preventing full 4mb usage per lean tx needs to be reconfigured back into proper 4mb base block this would then allow more people to transact meaning less sats per tx yet give mining pools large totals, thus helping users use bitcoin and miners get  a nice bonus ontop of the main reward, whereby the base size does periodically increase (not large leaps like idiots pretend is the only option)

im not just suggesting "bigger blocks" its about better utility of blocks, its about fixing the rules that allow untransactional bloat. its about not penalising all users in a tx fee war but having rules that penalise spammers the most

Expected a lot from LN, but it didn't really impress me and many others so far though that could change in the future as it keeps getting updated regularly. It could prove to be a useful alternative when the BTC network gets clogged like crazy.

SegWit is more than enough for almost everyone these days thanks to the quick TX times and extremely low fees.

It's totally possible to open up multiple channels in just one transaction: https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/open-multiple-lightning-channels/. Unless you believe that suddenly a billion people would want to adopt bitcoin as currency. Rather, I think this (if it happens), it will happen gradually.

Lol. You think that the new generation will be capable of running full node 24/7, being aware of back ups and sending / receiving capacities? I'm a lot more concerned about that, and I'm pretty sure that's the reason people are encouraged to use lightning centrally.

I'd agree with a dynamically increased block size, just as someone else had proposed (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366), but I'm looking forward to see how you will find consensus on that. It'll probably be easy if it's common sense / equilibrium, as you say.  ;D

Strawman.  You are the only one who claims this and you are once again lying.  No one in their right mind is saying everyone should stop using the base layer altogether.  People are simply suggesting there are more cost-effective ways to transact.  Please provide a direct quote to support your assertions.  If you are unable to do so, then withdraw your misleading remarks.

I'm tired of your flagrant misrepresentations of the situation.



There is.  You just won't acknowledge it because none of the things being worked on conform to your (decidedly narrow) definition of "development".



And your plan to achieve this without asking for others to pay for it is...?

Oh, I see, you still want other people to bear the cost of more transactions and you haven't had a single original thought in your head for how to make that sound more palatable.  So you just offer complaints and not genuine scaling solutions.  Your only "solution" is (and has always been) those securing the network must carry a heavier burden in order that those who don't secure the network can pay less.  I'm sure that all sounds very noble to your socialist tendencies.  But in practice, the other people who exist on this network, the ones you are consistently at odds with, are not finding that approach very enticing.  

There was a rather big debate about it in the community if you recall.   ::)

And you lost that debate.  You're still losing it now.  We moved forward with a different approach.

And sure, you're going to attack me for pointing it out again, but the simple fact is that you're literally a one-trick-pony.  You have nothing new to offer.  Just repeating the same, tired, failed, whiny arguments over and over.



Yes, you aren't solely advocating socialism.  You're also advocating totalitarianism, where only you are fit to judge what is or isn't an "acceptable" use of the blockchain.  If someone is making transactions that don't fit your criteria, you would take away their freedom to do it.

Again, you can attack me for pointing it out (and no doubt you will).  But it doesn't make it any less true.

My stance is that Bitcoin is permissionless.  Everyone can do what they want if they can find a way to do it within the framework of the consensus rules.  I also believe there is a choice between "cheap" and "secure".  Everyone naturally wants both, but that's difficult to maintain over the long term.  Eventually, compromises need to be made.  Everyone gets to make an informed choice each and every time they transact as to whether or not they're going to take the cheaper route, off-chain, or the more secure route, on-chain.  That way, no one needs to make demands of others to carry a greater burden.

It's the most reasonable and pragmatic approach offered so far.  So it's the one we're continuing with.  If anyone has any better ideas, please make them known.