Bitcoin Forum

Obviously other currencies have been aiming to tackle the scalability issues that Bitcoin is being presented with.

Obviously if the Lightning Network is not successfully implemented, the likes of coins like XRP will fill in the gap that banks need for fast cheap liquidity.

Will the lightning network be game over for the rest of the ALT coins that are borderline built on scalability?

Let me know what you guys think.

It will not be a game over other projects but another "stepping stone" that different coins will face during the improvement time. If the lightning network is applied everywhere, I don't think there would be another hater of BTC that would say it's only suitable for a store of value type of asset but an actual currency as to what we want. If that happens, I think replacing or dominating the cryptocurrency scene by BTC is even more apparent.

lightning is one of the solution

Bitcoin in its current state is not capable of supporting world-wide adoption of Lightning. Other solutions will need to be developed.

It s just introducing many new issues, problems & flaws

Many altcoins are kinda useless anyway. However, I don't expect LN have a crucial effect on them.

And LN is not a perfect solution. It's a step forward, but it will have its opponents and its problems too. Even the fact that it stays that long labelled as "beta" is a bit worrying.
Many won't understand that it is normal that it needs coins locked and on-chain transaction for finalize everything (I don't know how to say it better), many won't understand why it doesn't work just like that from <insert-wallet-name-here>, many (will) cry that it creates centralization and basically works only with custodian wallets.

All in all, many will prefer altcoins, even centralized altcoins, that do the same job. And if some of those altcoins will work seamlessly for payments at merchants, maybe also allowing some sort of atomic swap with Bitcoin, they could easily become a strong competitor for LN.

Just to put some numbers on this: Let's assume all the following (which is completely unrealistic):

• Everyone uses Taproot
• Every channel opening transaction is one-input-one-output
• Every transaction being made is a Lightning channel being opened, and no one makes any other type of transaction
• Every block is optimally full
• Everyone only opens a single channel which they keep open forever

Even assuming all that, then at most you can open 9,000 channels per block, meaning it would take 17 years just to let everyone in the world open a single channel. As soon as you consider that obviously some people need to have multiple channels open for Lightning to work, and obviously people will want to close channels, open new ones, top up their channels, and so on, then that number increases exponentially.

Lightning is great, but it cannot support global adoption without further changes to the base layer.

The Lightning Network is said to be able to take the transactions per second figure of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to unprecedented heights of at least 1 million transactions per second.

Compare that with Visa that does around 1,700 transactions per second.

'El Salvador' and Jack Dorsey will be pushing this technology and also we will soon have the book Mastering the Lightning Network by Andreas Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun, and René Pickhardt available on the bookstores' shelves. 

All that is working synergetically to make LN solve all the bitcoin scalability issues.

Note that “1 million” isn't something fixed. It's a decentralized network and you can't know for sure how many transactions it can hold. The fact that it doesn't have a limit makes it even more interesting. I guess that the more LN nodes, the more transactions it can hold per second.

Can't I receive money from you through LN without having to open a channel? For example, a family of four wouldn't have to open four different payment channels, the father could open one and then send off-chain funds to the other members.

Usage of Lightning Network is rising every day with number of nodes (over 21,400) and channels (over 49,800) being at all time high, but I doubt this will solve all scalability issues with Bitcoin.
It is not so popular with regular people, more development is needed, and more merchants and websites need to accept LN payment to see the real potential and fix all bugs.
It's always possible to have some new mainnet scaling solutions in future, or some better alternative to Lightning Network.

Lightning could process this number of transactions, yes, but the limiting factor is on-boarding everyone on to Lightning as I explained above.

You don't have to open a channel directly with me, no, but you still have to open a channel to someone. If the other three members of the family open a channel to the father, and he opens a channel to me, then I can send money to any of them, but the 4 of them have still had to open 4 channels.

Excuse me from being a LN newbie. Can't you open 1 channel funding 4 multi-sig addresses?

For scalability- yes the LN would apparently solve the issue. But you need to understand that LN is a sidechain. It collects the payments in bulk and broadcast into the bitcoin network at one go. So LN is a temporary solution for now. Even though LN is live since last few months, it has not yet received enough attention that it deserves.

Secondly people are already using altcoins for their daily transactions because they are fast and cheap. Why do you think BNB coin is constantly rising up? Bitcoin is mostly considered as an investment unfortunately so even LN would not be able to bring down the alts in any way!

I'm not entirely sure what you are asking here - I think you might have your terminology wrong.

It is possible to open multiple channels with one transaction, if that is what you mean, although not yet commonly done. It is also possible for more than 2 users to open a single channel by using something called Channel Factories, which allows more channels to be opened and closed between all these users without requiring any further transactions to be broadcast to the base layer, but I don't know if this has actually been successfully done by anyone yet.

if we're working with assumptions, then let's assume that Eltoo lightning gets a soft fork:

• slightly fewer than 9000 channels per block, but far more than 2 participants per channel
• the overhead for adding extra channel participants is negilgible
• Eltoo therefore radically improves the number of people opening channels in a block beyond the 18,000 possible with taproot channels

If "radical" even halves your 17 years figure, and I think it will do far more, then Eltoo will do the job. Considering how fast taproot was activated, we can expect something similar for eltoo (which is now a pretty mature spec with years of technical discussion behind it)

Sure, you can! I have recently opened two channels in a single transaction. As far as I know, LND, which seems to be the most popular implementation, requires the operator to construct such a transaction manually using PSBTs. That's probably why it's not so popular. C-lightning has a dedicated multifundchannel (https://lightning.readthedocs.io/lightning-multifundchannel.7.html) command which is fairly easy to use. I don't recall seeing a mobile wallet which would support this feature.

Increasingly I am finding it harder and harder to connect to Lightning Network nodes with a sizable number now hidden behind onion addresses (that's fine, that's their choice).  Both my Eclair and Zap wallets are reporting sites (not hidden behind Onion addresses) are showing as "incompatibility" errors.

If Lighting Networks want to be considered a powerhouse for Bitcoin use (as opposed to being a novelty as it is now) then there needs to be a formulisation of protocols and procedures.

I might, but what I want to say is that even if we make all those assumptions you wrote, it's still impractical to open a channel for every future Bitcoin user. We'll probably have to move into another smarter way like using 1 multi-sig address for a family; each member could have their own balance in their phone, but they'd all spend from the same channel.

There's a lot of development in LN these days as I can see. I'll dive into the details this summer, because I've stayed behind. I have never setup a lightning node like LND and C-lightning; I'll start with these.

that's what Eltoo is, except everyone still gets their own channel too

simply put: one channel that contains multiple channels

I think one of the drawbacks of a add-on type of technology like this.. is the complexity. People are already struggling to understand the basic concept of Bitcoin and now they have to over complicate it, by adding more things to it.  ::)

Technology should never be too complicated on the "user" side... or adoption will be hampered. People want a wallet and they want to deposit and withdraw... that's it...  ::)   (Running Lightning Network hubs and all that nonsense is for techies... not for your average public out there)  >:(

to an extent

if a child that can barely talk has the same level of tech skills as you, then it's not that the tech is too complicated, it's that you're lazy


the alternative is to permanently have Jeff Bezo's military-intelligence dick in your ear

Yes, this will be possible using a channel factory as I mentioned before. Eltoo will allow the creation of such multi-user channels built upon a single channel, and Schnorr signatures will remove the limit of seven users on such a channel.

Eltoo actually makes things simpler by replacing LN-Penalty. The end user doesn't need to understand the tech (how many actually understand how mining works or how transactions are created?), as long as their wallet can present it in an easy to use manner.

It's actually feasible right now! You can install LND and LNDhub on a server and ask every family member to install BlueWallet. I have recently talked about it in this post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178336.msg57222484#msg57222484). The whole family would be able to use all channels of the same node without having to worry about individual backups or liquidity. Of course, someone would have to manage that node.

It's getting complex if you go through the technical stuff. In theory, I believe that I can explain to a five year old kid how Bitcoin works. Same thing happens when you'll have to explain the Lightning Network to an adult. On their usage, they're both very simple, but one may ask “Why should I use this?” or “How does this differ from a traditional payment processor?”. And people should ask themselves what is this thing's purpose. Anyway, IMO it's still early.

It seems that you don't...

The way I tend to look at it is this:
It's relatively easy to make something for a single purpose.  It's far more difficult to make something that performs multiple functions and do them all equally well.

Any altcoin can claim it has solved scalability because, chances are, they'll never have to demonstrate that in practice.  The vest majority will never handle anything close to their maximum capacity.  And the reason for this is acceptance.  You can't (affordably) transfer value via a token that other people don't accept as payment.  So along with scalability, we have to add other elements, like network effects, speed and security.  This is the point where compromises start to come into play.  Again, it's easy to do one of those things well, but very problematic to do them all at once.

LN can't do everything, but it can do a fair number of those things to a reasonable extent.  

Let's assume the improvements Carlton Banks mentioned, let's assume that not everybody in the world will use LN, more like, 100 million at maximum and probably half of that to be realistic and when we're considering this we arrived at the point when we might have to ask ourselves if LN won't be solving a problem that's no longer there and will come to hunt us more likely in a distant future!

4 years since the last spike in price and the activation of segwit and despite periods of high fees look where we are now, it's the middle of the week, blocks are coming in at 90% of the pace  (https://diff.cryptothis.com/), 44 blocks behind in 3 days, and the mempool is empty, less than an hour ago a 700kb block was mined, even if we have been experienced 1-3 sat/vbyte days for almost a month now, with the difficulty finally not taking those damn swings usage is at the lowest. Of course, the usage might grow again if we're entering in a bull run but those that rush coins then won't be using LN, until the thought of making 10x with our coins in a year won't fade away I don't see the demand for transactions growing that much, especially with a lot of users opting for centralized solutions, debit cards, internal wallets off-chain transfers, and many more.

So, I guess we have quite a lot of time to seek improvements, and if those problems arise when a 12TB ssd costs 200$ and nobody produces drives with capacity counted in GB, I can see how this will be solved.  ;)

You either.  :)

I suggest you explore https://www.algorand.com/  since you have nothing better to do.  :D

So you can see for yourself how lame bitcoin and LN are to a true 3rd generation blockchain design.

Not all scalability issue but it will solve some that are the most bothersome like the speed and network congestion that's plaguing bitcoin for a long time now, hopefully it will catch because LN has been here for awhile now and it seems to me that people is making it underrated.

LN is designed for small trades/transactions that's why this is not widespread , but i know that there comes a time that this will be the answer for all that we need in terms of scalability and bitcoin usage.

the devs have removed the maximum limits on channels and sends for most Lightning node software, so it's possible to send large amounts. All lightning software will remove send/channel size limits eventually.

Still, it's better if you're careful how much money you put on your node. It's a good opportunity to learn how to run a secure server, which can only be done slowly/carefully.

devs are in the process of making lightning 2.0 (layer 3)
its where you dont vault up funds into a channel. but instead deposit funds into a factory multisig
the factory then offchain creates channels below it in millisats.
so users cant broadcast, but can close session with the factory and so the factory aggregates the channel balances and recreates new channels to rebalance the channels.

thus even less onchain transactions as it wont require onchain broadcasts/settlement to close/reopen

All of which you are opposed to as it is not done on the block-chain where it can be verified.

Hmm,

You deposit/lock your Bitcoins with the Factory, and then the Factory creates the channels for you.

Has anyone told them the so called Factory is now a Bank.  ;)  :D

it's centralized we know that. maybe they'd find solutions to it as well.

LN is being used that's very important though there are limitations to these channels we haven't heard of some issues yet that actually happened. but there are already speculations as to what's to come. the solution is also coming.  so let's just wait for what could the devs bring.

It sounds like you don't understand what Channel Factories are. Your bitcoin are not locked anywhere - they are in a mutlisig address, which you can broadcast the settlement transaction for at any time and withdraw them from the factory, just like in a normal Lightning channel.

IMO,
It seems more , like people are afraid to call a Bank a Bank.  :)

You are welcome to your wrong opinions.  You've been trying to claim "LiGhTniNg = bAnKiNg 2.0" for years now.  It's not like you've had any great success with convincing people of that myth.  Maybe find a hobby you're actually good at?

It seems to me that you don't understand the difference between a bank and a lightning node. The bank can transfer your money whenever they want; they just attempt not to. The lightning node cannot move your bitcoins same like I cannot move your bitcoins from your address.

I guess that the “C” in your username stands for “Chatter (https://www.google.com/search?q=chatter+definition&oq=chatter+def&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l2j0i22i30l6.1664j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)”?

I think that even if the LN solved the scalability issues, altcoins would still be popular for trading and as a form of a long-term investment. Moreover, the LN is not exclusively for Bitcoin, so altcoins can also benefit from it. But honestly, I don't think it'll become the mainstream solution that we need because it had years to do so and didn't. Plus, people who open the channels do pay significantly, right? And there are centralization issues due to which some are against it, and then there are many crypto users for whom it's just too difficult to start using the LN.

Old Reference
Deposit Gold in a Bank
Banks let you transfer value using their BankNotes/IOUs

Deposit Bitcoin in LN Factory
LN Factories let you transfer value using their channels (IE: LN notes/IOUs)  :)

*Look for the following to be added to LN Factories/Banks at a Future Date*
Custodial Fees, and seizures after certain lengths of inactivity

Actually the Bank does need the pretense of a legal reason to control your funds,
and you can sue them to retrieve any funds they put on hold.

Who will you sue, if the LN factory/Bank locks up and loses your funds?  Blockstream?

 :)

FYI:
If the LN Factory/Banks decreases the onchain transaction fees to miners,
it may induce miners to start taking bribes to earn more to cover their energy costs.

If the LN hubs bribe miners, a DoS attack may be performed on a transaction (by not mining it).
This transaction must be mined within a given number of blocks or else a portion of BTC that was locked in a channel may be forfeited to a LN hub.
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/2016-March/000500.html

forfeited /seizure  ;)

It will not solve all the issues but it's definitely will be a good thing. And it will solve as many problrems as it will give.
And it's definitely not a game over for altcoins. There are plenty of good ones.

for the next couple decades miners dont need to rely on fee's. its still defined as a bonus. not the salary
the block reward is still the salary. so on that premiss of the nest 5 years, this is what happens

imagined a settled average mining cost is ~ $220k per block. today ($35k/btc)
with a yearly 1.5x of (hashpower, difficulty, cost)
meaning 2022 they will need $330k
meaning 2023 they will need $500k
meaning 2024 they will need $750k
meaning 2025 they will need $1.125m
(without having to care about any tx fee bonus)

in 2024 each block changes from 6.25 to become 3.125
so 1btc would need to be $240k to achieve block reward of $750k

this means if the minimum onchain fee was 1sat/byte
and average tx was 250bytes
thats 250sat
with LN needing 2 onchain fee's to open then close so 500sat
0.5btc=$120k
0.005=$1.2k
0.00005=$12
0.000005=$1.20

so the very minimum and i mean minimum cost onchain to use LN from start to end is $1.20 a session

here is the thing though.
fee's are hardly ever 1sat/byte
the average is min 6 max 60
meaning $7.20-$72

people will just stop using bitcoin alltogether to make settlement transactions. if its going to cost $10+

after all.. imagine it.. what if paypal started charging people a monthly subscription of $10+ just to use paypal account for a month..  then micropenny fee once in. people will start using other fiat wallet services like venmo, cashapp, dwalla which have no subscription and no fees

bitcoin WILL NEED to increase its onchain transactions AND change to things like 10byte/sat to keep the onchain fee's low

any dev or altnet fangirl that thinks that bitcoin will still have purpose if it costs say min of $20 to use.. is in some fantasy land or they hope to kill bitcoin utility to force people to play on other networks.

LN is not the saviour of bitcoin.. its the segregation of bitcoiner and eventual displacement of bitcoin. because devs refuse to allow cheap utility on bitcoin..
bankers played this game over 100 years with gold-fiat and we all know how that ended.

With the price as high as you are suggesting ^{(thank you for doing the calculations too by the way - it's appreciated)} I feel people will either turn to products that offer small transaction fees in built ^{(cue the Lightning Network theme song)} or, they will wise up to paying higher than necessary fees and, fed up with those high fees, turn to something like coin control and drop the fee down to 1 satoshi (not one satoshi per byte, but *just* one satoshi) themselves.

Were bitcoin to reach One Million Dollars US, then one satoshi would be worth one cent, so a five cent transaction would be *just* five satoshis.

Coin Control as we know it would have to be modified.

I don't know whether it will be ALL. But it can solve a lot of problems for sure. It could remove the slowness on high amount of transactions on a large scale. And the fees can be much cheaper than this I believe.

In my opinion, LN is "only" a part of the scalability puzzle, but a pretty big one. LN can rise the Bitcoin capacity safely by 1000x or more, without any fundamental disadvantages for small-to-medium transactions.

But I write safely for a reason, because if LN adoption becomes too high, a point could be reached where attacks could have a success probability of higher than 1, because the closure of all affected channels by the attacker would take longer than the timelocks expiration. This point would be reached earlier if the network becomes relatively centralized (hub-and-spoke model), and later if there are lots of well-connected hubs.

What we must aim for, thus, is to not let grow the biggest LN nodes too much - ideally there should be lots of medium hubs of a few thousand channels each. This is of course currently not an issue, as the whole LN has only about 50.000 (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning) channels, which could all be closed in 2 hours given the current blockchain capacity. But once there are nodes with more than 100K channels each, things could become more critical, as if a 100K node decides to try out an attack, the closure transactions would compete with regular transactions, and if the blockchain is quite full, then it may take several days to close them and consume lots of transaction fees.

Anyway, I think we are far away from that situation. The other parts of the puzzle may be:

1) altcoins/alternative blockchains - let's face it, they will always exist, and if there are a few strong ones of them, it's better for the resilience of the cryptocurrency ecosystem as a whole, because not everything would be concentrated on a single blockchain. But I'm also quite sure that no (decentralized) altcoin will be able to scale fundamentally better than BTC, all "big block" and "zero fees" models come with tradeoffs.
2) pegged BTC coins on alt chains, either centralized (wBTC) or fairly decentralized (BitBTC)
3) maybe pegged sidechains - I had big hopes on that in the past, but I'm not so sure it will ever get massively adopted, as for example the Drivechain project (http://drivechain.info) is taking longer than I expected, but there may be a surprise breakthrough.
4) centralized solutions, like Bitcoin debit cards, which will be ok for smaller transactions in many cases.

So I believe the scalability problem will probably be solved fully, but without LN it would be difficult. I also don't think that fiat money will disappear, so Bitcoin will not need to have a capacity for all monetary transactions which are made in the world.

I don't know in how far the lighting network itself can scale or whether it has to be improved over time as well. Is it able to infinitely scale for all kinds of micro transactions? Right now there are a couple of networks that do an amazing job at transaction throughput and very low fees. I am not sure if it is a given that the lightning network will outcompete all of those no questions asked.

Does somebody know where the technical limits of the lightning network are? I know it is a centralized mechanism, making it more dangerous to be used for larger transactions, but purely from a scalability perspective, does it scale infinitely?

1900-1970 bank notes were not actually gold. but paper pegged to gold
alternate networks like liquid and LN are not bitcoin. they are tokens pegged to bitcoin

a millisat htlc on LN is not a bitcoin transaction that can be broadcast.
bitcoin does not understand 12 decimals.
bitcoin is measuured in satoshi's which are multplied by 100m to make the basket term btc
millisats are 12 decimals of a btc. thus they are not convertable at raw transaction value level

so LN is not increasing bitcoin capacity.
its getting people to vault up their gold so they can play around with bank notes.
once you make the distinction of the different tokens (sats vs millisats)
and you understand bitcoin has know understanding of millisats. it becomes clear. that its not scaling bitcoin.
but converting bitcoiners to another token

LN is not even a feature unique to bitcoin, solely for bitcoin. and created to only wiork with bitcoin.
LN cant even use the same pegged token unit as bitcoin.

LN is a separate gateway for multiple coins to utilise.
meaning what will play out is bitcoin locked into factory.. users play with millisats. then "atomic swap" to a cheaper fee altcoin like LTC, giving the atomic swapper the bitcoin unlock ability.
or
people will vault up the btc into factories. and never exit LN unless through a exchage that converts to dollar. meaning the factory again keeps the btc

its how banks done it in the last century.. with the pretend 'bank notes are gold so no need to convert back' lie

I would say that Lightning Network is one good solution to deal with the scalability issues, but it does not seem that all scalability issues can be taken care of by the lightning network.

LN (or better: payment channels) is a mechanism to bundle several (potentially thousands of) Bitcoin transactions together. If something goes wrong while you're transacting offchain, you can always settle on-chain. And you're always using Bitcoin Script contracts, the pure Bitcoin protocol.

Liquid is very different from LN, as it requires trust in a federation. Once you use the sidechain buying the token, you can't rely on the protocol exclusively to be sure to get back your coins. In LN, in contrast, you can - as long as you observe your channels to be ready to close them (or let them observe by watchtowers).

So you're mixing apples and oranges.

The only issue I agree a little bit with you is that I am a bit concerned about the probabilistic methods that are planned to subdivide satoshis into millisats. The decision to use millisats is based on a megalomaniac conception of Bitcoin's future -- as if the satoshi could be worth 1$ eventually or so (the maximum Bitcoin price I can imagine is the equivalent of around 1 million USD, this would result in a 1 cent satoshi), or if it could make sense to do nanotransactions worth 0.001 cent (why, why would you use Bitcoin for that? And for what purpose?). This part of the design is making LN sort of "impure", because obviously millisat differences can't be represented adequately on-chain. But as long as you transact only values measured in satoshi, you're using pure Bitcoin, only bundled together.

And it should be possible without problems to build an implementation of LN that doesn't support millisat.

Perhaps you are thinking of the "Silver Certificates" as the "Gold Certificates" were no longer pegged to gold in the 1930's (and, as it happens, the Silver Certificates were not issued after the late 1950's as the modern smaller size notes were introduced circa 1963).

Both Gold and Silver certificates were issued from 1863 on-wards.

In BitCoin you can send P2P trx via simple bitcoin layer having only group of miners your counterparty, nearly not visible, no care as long fees are lowest (don't care) and miners have game theory = economic driver to process your trx. Makes BitCoin cash and a bearer instrument

LN is just totally different. Another layer (design, hardware, software, interface, cyber risk...), new counterparty structure, different economics/ game theo, and legal structure as a true payment processor that needs licensing- and its not P2P cash. Selling such as Bitcoin - the P2P electronic cash system sold by the White Paper of Satoshi is just consumer fraud imo

Debunking of such might just ve started here  https://decrypt.co/73845/el-salvadors-u-s-bitcoin-partner-lacks-key-licenses

Kim dot Con - the man of decentralized content - against all rules. Sure he knows his shit / tech -to make it run big

but wont get adopted AGAINST the bigger consensus of regulation

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1408576877216681986

And Satoshi made pure Bitcoin - that scales onchain (not crippled BTC or BCH)

and yes - there was no block / capacity limit from the very beginning. Satoshi got talked into by first Bitcoin-FUD ever

https://twitter.com/wisewizzz/status/1409243183888932866

I agree the whole millisat thing is unnecessarily complicating.

I'll tell you what would really be handy is an Electrum-type wallet for Lightning. You can't expect everybody who wants to participate to run their own node. I'd also be more inclined to use Liquid if exchanges other than Bitfinex supported it. Liquid and Lightning support - along with feeless conversions - should be standard for all major BTC exchanges.


Megaupload is quite centralized. You must have him confused with the Pirate Bay people. But then again your bar for decentralization is quite low, so maybe not.

https://i.ibb.co/PDPZMk8/bsvminers.png

Bits.  Even illiterate peasants understand 2 bits.  Been saying for 8 or 9 years it’s going to bits.  :/

---

BSV thread got deleted?  Wow.  Anyway, dude, you’re over 1000 merits now and still not legendary.  Odd. 


[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

I am not sure what you would exactly expect from an Electrum-like Lightning wallet, but actually, Electrum has introduced support for the Lightning Network in the 4.x update. I even wrote a step-by-step guide (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5259973.msg54732922#msg54732922). In short, a user can easily open a channel with any Lightning Network node. The only caveat is that the user has to either set up a watchtower or launch their wallet every few days to check if the other party did not broadcast an outdated state of the channel.

There are even more user-friendly wallets out there but most of them are custodial, for example, BlueWallet (https://bluewallet.io/lightning/) which takes care of the channel management so that users don't have to worry about incoming/outbound liquidity.

the IN LN payments are not using bitcoin scripts. your talking about the latter end session commitments. not the in channel payments known as HTLC

HTLC are measured in millisats and not formatted to be broadcast/accepted by the bitcoin network

its these very same HTLC that are not bitcoin formats that allow for custodials(elthree) to 'print' their own channel balance and manage customers. as its the manager/custodian that then when end sessions are needed aggregate the HTLC's into a commitment they sign to then allow onchain withdrawals. otherwise users could also just request the aggregated funds held within the custodian be reused to open new sessions without needing to touch the blockchain

once you separate the idea of the open/close onchain transactions. from the inside LN htlc payments. you start to see how millisats are not actually bitcoin

oh and one last tip...
lightning is not subservient, not solely functional to bitcoin. many LN apps alow utility with many other altcoins too.

in short LN is nor forced to play by bitcoin rules. because htlc's are not network wide audited

LN devs crippled bitcoins onchain capacity/utility to promote users to move over to LN before LN was a proper beta working project

EG at the moment a blocks can only hold so many open and close sessions
so imagine people having 4 channels and locks for about 1 month(standard predictable spending plan)
4 close previous sessions 4 open new session. that 8 transactions per user per month.
(1.6kb)
so for now thats call that 1000 users per block
well over 4032 blocks(a month) thats only 4million users efectively able to open and close sessions per month.
but here is the thing
it only works as upto 4 million users of LN if:
no other transactions are allowed(no legacy transactions. no exchange reserves rebatching)
everyone timed their close-reopen sessions precisely not to bottleneck with others
they intend to spend more times within LN than 8 times onchain

EG if your an ebayer that only uses paypal 2 times a month. where your offered paypal to ebay fee's of 1c
but it costs you $16 just to get to use paypal membership each month just to get the privilege of 1c fee.
but you could just buy something on ebay direct with your bank card for $2 each($4 total)
it then makes using paypal less of an incentive

LN is not a solution for everyone its a niche market separate network for spammer(multiple spenders)

the bitcoin devs made onchain transaction fee's increase. removed any rational fee formulae mechanism of fairness and just promoted everyone should use LN even if they are not a frequent user. and even when using LN there is a silly ignorance// because not all channels/route will work all the time.

its like they tried to run before they could even get out the womb

Buddy, transactions included into blocks can't handle the entire world for global adoption whether they extended the block size or not. (Even if the block generation happened every 10 seconds with size > 10GB, which has other downsides)

You have to tackle the problem from its root and it's been solved with LN; it makes Bitcoin operate more practically. Think about it. If I wanted to make purchases, buy coffee/food, electronic goods, other services etc, I'd have to make multiple transactions whereas they should be included into thousands of computers' disk. But, with LN the thing changes completely. We no longer broadcast our debts; we agree upon a final balance on our own ledger and once we're out of capacity we can send it to be confirmed in the main ledger. (And then we can increase our capacity and repeat again)

And the best part: The system works and my money aren't controlled by a third party! I have 100% ownership of my funds. It's genius.

Even knowing that op started this thread to shill a centralized random shitcoin (xrp), which definitely will NOT solve all scalability issues, I feel almost forced to clear some things up.


Lightning is NOT a solution for big payments
Bitcoin is already able to handle this. You can send Bitcoins worth millions for a very small fee already, so there is no need to find another solution. Lightning fees are measured by the amount you send and not the tx size. Most big payments will be cheaper on the btc mainchain. Discussions about how big payments can be send over lightning are a non issue.


Lightning is a solution for small payments
You can buy a coffee and a piece of cake with lightning and pay a very low fee. You can tip people a few satoshis and pay a very low fee. That's what lightning is good at.

There is NO need for everybody to open channels
You can use a lightning wallet like Breez for example, which gives you inbound liquidity up to 0.04 BTC (4 million satoshis) and you can accept lightning payments instantly without caring about opening channels. You can use @lntxbot on Telegram to send and receive satoshis to/from everybody else on telegram. No need to open channels for this. There are more solutions like that. Find out for yourself

Payments within the lightning network are not countable from the outside
There is no open ledger, which counts the payments made on lightning. Only node operators can count how many paments they are routing on their own node. They don't know what's exactly happening on other nodes. This makes lightning payments practically anonymous, which is a nice side effect. When people start to crunch numbers on how many payments the lightning network is able to handle, forget about them. They don't know because they can't!

The lightning network may not solve the scalability problem faced in the Bitcoin network entirely but it will further help to solve high liquidity. If the lightning network is fully implemented, then Bitcoin will become a full flesh currency rather than just being a store of value as many have speculated bitcoin to be.

While it's true that the on-chain transaction has lots of advantages over LN, I simply don't understand why some people hate LN so fervously, being the alternative a completely centralized payment processor (e.g. Bitcoin prepaid card issuers, custodial wallets), who can always run away with your money. There may be protections in certain countries if the centralized operator has a bank license, but this does't apply to many of the jurisdictions where most of the unbanked live, who could enormously benefit from BTC.

The new counterparties that are added in LN do have this advantage only in very specific circumstances, mostly if the blockchain is too full and the malicious actors got connected to too many channels. The other risks (cyberattacks etc.) are also present in the no-LN structure with centralized payment processors.

It is simply terribly inefficient and not necessary if you store all transactions in a ledger shared by _all_ full nodes.

For medium to large payments however I like the sidechain structure (as I wrote above), just because it shares some of the advantages of on-chain transactions. But there seem to be big challenges regarding the two-way-peg. Maybe however an one-way peg (via proof-of-burn) could do the trick too. The challenge however here seems to be to guarantee enough security and demand to maintain the peg.

@franky1: The HTLCs being formatted in millisats may be implementation details, the important thing however is that you always get the right (by the off-chain transactions sent to you by your counterparties) to settle on the blockchain with the correct value rounded to satoshi, with a pure Bitcoin transaction. If that's not the case, then please provide me further proof.

THIS is exciting. Do you have any documentation you can share?

One of the biggest issues I have found with LN is the issue with locking funds up in a channel. I always thought this would be the main issue for many users. I am glad to see the LN devs are looking to improve on this model!!

bitcoins structure is simple. you get paid when its confirmed. anything else should not be treated as a payment until confirmed and immutable. thats the security and the whole beauty of what makes bitcoin and blockchains and crypto such a unique and trusted system

however
inside LN
"get the right to settle in the blockchain" = commitment..
these commitments however have conditions(if statements) thus not the same as legacy/native bitcoin system

but so many obsess about commitments and pretend its like a guarantee. and a security that people will always get paid..
with the fluff that these yet unconfirmed commitments are as secure as a confirmed bitcoin transaction

reality is people are not guaranteed. and there is no security of always getting paid.
definitely not while unconfirmed and in many cases not even after confirmation(IF conditions attached)

there are many many bugs and flaws that break the ability to claim whats owed.

note: commitments are separate from the HTLC/invoice messages in ln
its like a commitment is a signed cheque of ajoint bank account. and an HTLC/invoice is a post-it note IOU between users in LN.. handed around the routes of users

i know people are going to obsess and want to distract people with the commitments and avoid with their very harsh insults that people should only think and discuss commitments.. but,. take a breath and start thinking about the real inside LN stuff.. beyond the commitments

commitments are sent onchain to settle
HTLC'offers'/'invoices' (the inside LN messages looping around the network) are not sent onchain

there is alot of stuff happening between commitment updates. there are also alot of issues around the bugs and flaws of not getting the "secret" of a hash160(secret) commitment outputs 'if condition'.

so even if someone was to form a commitment and broadcast it. they are not able to claim all thats owed unless they have the "secret" and they only get the secret AFTER all the inside LN flimsy htlc/invoice stuff is complete

many users AND DEVS have lost funds this way. many malicious users playing around outside the flimsy non audited rules, abuse the system to ensure they get an advantage

..
if alice-bob-charlie-dave-eric were on a route

and alice wanted to pay eric. where alice has NO COMMITMENT with eric.
its not a system where alice only talks to bob. via commitments
alice sends messages to eric and eric provides messages back to alice with a millisats  value and hash(hash160(secret) accepting the offer
alice then and only then talks to bob. and starts the gossip/path finding through the channels to get through charlie dave  to get to eric where then and only then the commitments are created with the hash160 added output 'IF condition'

but in all this part described above. has bob charlie or dave got the secret?? NO.
 and alot can go wrong
however bob-charle-dave have locked value toward their own outbound counterparty unable to be spend on other things..  and also dont have the secret to spend the promised inbound funds
thus unable to spend it themselves and the other party unable to claim it

again lots can go wrong here
even broadcasting the current commitment wont help as they dont have the secret to claim

its a known fact that lots can go wrong here. its not just the low success rate of "payment success" issues

these locks are not measured in milliseconds. but have lengthy timeouts.
these lengthy timeouts are to allow users to accept and help out or reject

during these lengthy timeouts of initial offer...  alice can reject/abstain/not respond to the bob-charlie-dave route to eric

and instead use zoe-yenson-xena to get to eric and leave bob-charlie-dave waiting with locked value they cant spend of their own commitment forward(outbound) nor claim funds owed/promised to them(inbound)

because they are left waiting for the other LN messages that are not commitments.

so please understand there is alot more happening in LN then just the commitments. and alot that can break/delay/make unclaimable those commitments.
so please understand the other "layers" of LN outside the over promised and utopian dreams of commitment guarantee

theres actually alot.
but it comes under many many buzzwords.
elthree
factories
hubs
gateways
custodian services

in most cases you got to imagine it as you depositing funds into a manager and the manager just sets up a non-broadcastable channel set under them
(current buzzwords 'micropayment channel' as oppose to 'payment channel' (micro denominated in msat))

which requires the manager to control if/when//why users should be allowed to completely exit LN and retrieve some real bitcoin utxo via a separate commitment in control of the manager

Guess ppl  dont like be be 'forced' out of Bitcoin as the best thing ever happend to electronic payments and cash. Further proven is that Bitcoin cannot be altered in legal and tech terms or it is sth different ( see copyright and just legal prospecting of financial products ...)

LN in terms of netting systems are already here, no need to change Bitcoin's basic protocol for. Ryan X Charls and Clemens Ley mad LN work on BTC - way before Segwit or any other rubbish was sold to the herd. Capacity is no issue in e world, and the fake talk with decentraliziation already debunked

Answer given 3 posts before yours:

inbound

accept

..
the other persons question was in general.. 'if i have bitcoin and i want to spend..'
 you mention a "solution" where
i have to pay a company. and they hand me channels so that i can 'receive' upto 0.04btc
i dont think you really understood the situation and requirement
i give you a hint. when people want to spend . they want an outbound solution

oh and a quick search and it shows that breez offers that as point of sale merchant tool
basically its like saying dont worry about bitcoin addresses, sign up to bitpay as your merchant shopping cart

many dont want custodial solutions. and others dont want to spend funds to be given an option to receive
after all wasnt that the point of bitcoin

oh and yea breez is still not a solution for everyone

It is not about displacing other projects or ALTS is about an alternative, the LN is always seen as the solution, bitcoin works well as it was created, LN is an alternative to the concerns of the current present and the demands that are presented with bitcoin for its use. I like LN in its alternative.

no issue calling LN an 'option' for utility. or an alternative. .. but dont praise LN as THE SOLUTION.. as that is trying to push the mantra that everyone needs/should use LN. even when LN is a niche and not a all out solution

many scenarios where LN does not solve things. heck LN does not have a 100%payment success rate for its minimal usecase/bestcase

its niche is very small. and so people need to be informed on its limitations to then make wiser choices. rather then be bombarded with myth and PR that its better than bitcoin

That shows how much you don't know about lightning. To spend money you just have to send some into your Breez wallet (or get them for free by tipping etc). That's how the world works: Spend some if you have some. If you have no Bitcoin at all, you can't spend them. Still no need to open a channel. And yes, Breez (and other wallets like that) is the solution for everyone.

Edit: is completely wrong. You don't pay for the channel.

the part of that world is just getting smaller and smaller that must!! finally use sth (sold!) here, sold as Bitcoin - but ... wft?

Hoping for lot of things, finally some space to settle ( what fee it ll be ?)

Freedom is not here

i have bitcoin. probably more then most
there is no magic that a channel just appears
i have to get an app and ask for a channel to be opened.
if i want to spend i have to fund that channel

(there is a big difference of language between 'dont need to open' and the reality of 'dont need to be the funding initiator')

you can play mind games about how the channel opened but if i have to use another app  which i have to download and i have to request a channel using such app. its still triggered by me even if a 'custodian' then 'initiates' it

i do love it how people try to make things sound magical and utopian,
but end result is the same

if i want to spend coins. using LN.. it still requires a channel. and that channel is not magically existing already. its created by my request. and i still need to fund it

but anyway have a nice day with you "LN solves everything"
its weird that people are sooooooooo determined to say bitcoin is broke and another separate network is the sole solution everyone needs.
even when bitcoin transactions are more guaranteed, and its the other network that cannot guarantee stuff

when the solution is more broke than the presented problem.. its not a solution

LN's biggest flaw. its liquidity.
payment success for micropennies is ok
payment success for 1 coffee is almost ok
payment success for a months worth of coffee is varied and not always ok
                                                          pizza has more issues
                                                          weekly groceries is poor
                                                          house rent is even worse
you get the idea the more you want to spend the less chance you get to spend it

so the LN fan philosophy is to pamper and promote LN beyond logic and outside of moral risk just to get OTHERS into LN for the hope OTHERS will facilitate the fans payments. whilst others then suffer the issues the fans avoid telling them about
the flaw in that philosophy. is more people=more competitions for the route liquidity
EG someone might have 1500,000sat ($450)(split into a a few channels of $150) they want to spend themselves. but they only allow 10,000sat($3) to be spent via autopilot routing of others
so people end up in bottlenecks because everyones using up the $3 route to try getting their $150 spent
..
and no . no one is silly enough to open up their whole $150 to be used by others. as the sub penny fee's of such act makes that channel void of spending in just 50 attempts. but at a cost that wont cover the fees onchain to re-org channels

To make this quick, “Will the lightning network be game over for the rest of the ALT coins that are borderline built on scalability?” My answer is YES

LN is not fixed as a bitcoin feature
LN is a separate network that multiple altcoins can use too

so any niche benefit bitcoin gets. altcoins will too

many have run scenarios.
and here is the main conclusion
people deposit bitcoin into custodians so they can play around with outbound millisat balance on LN phone app.. coz yea who wants to carry around a desktop full node when in starbucks buying coffee

so they play around with millisats in lite custodial apps

and instead of exiting LN back to bitcoin. to avoid onchain fee's that custodians have determined as the channel initiator. users atomic swap to an altcoin and exit LN via cheap fee altcoins
end result custodians keep the bitcoin. and users play with altcoins

its how the banks did it over the last 200 years. grab the gold hand out paper. at the end swap for nickel and copper

In the meanwhile the network is clearly growing both in value and activity terms. More and more people are jumping on LN: most of them via simple wallets that avoid the whole LN complexity. The following chart shows that it took three years to reach 1000btc and six months to go from 1058 to 1641. It reminds me how bitcoin started, little by little.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5HjwJfUUAIrG8B?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

This is indeed the advantage of on-chain transactions. But I view the model a bit different.

Let's compare it to traditional solutions in the financial system. The base layer are bank transfers. It's the most secure layer and the one preferred for big transactions (yes, you have also cash, but in the current system it is more or less an "additional tool").

Above bank transfers you have additional layers: credit card systems, online wallets like Paypal, et cetera. Payments with these means are inherently less secure than "normal" bank transfers, but offer the advantage to be instant.

So in my opinion the comparison - on chain=bank transfer, credit card=LN - is perfectly valid.

OP_IF is an old statement of Bitcoin script which is present at least since 2011.

As I wrote above: it's a >99% guarantee, like a credit card or PayPal payment, which is enough in most cases, and in practically all cases of payments of less than an equivalent of $100 or even $500.

You can't bring up bugs as an argument against a technology. No software would be "legit" then, not even Bitcoin. The only valid argument would be that LN is more complex than on-chain Bitcoin and thus more vulnerable to bugs. But LN is currently in a state as Bitcoin was in 2011/2012, and yes, there is a chance that a fatal bug could happen, like it occurred in the Bitcoin network in 2013 in the transition to 0.8.

If LN is "un-audited", like you claim, this is also not an argument against it, because it can be audited at any time. The rest of your post is about "possible things which can go wrong". But in which software system this isn't the case in such an early state? Above all: is it really riskier to pay via LN than to pay via any centralized processor which can run away with your money?

The post was about altcoins "built on scalability". While my answer would not be as categorical als Maymoney's, altcoins would not directly benefit from LN enhancements in Bitcoin. The communities have to adapt the LN software to use it. And most important: they cannot use Bitcoin LN nodes and much less the Bitcoin-LN-supporting merchants etc., so they have to bring in a whole lot of extra community-building effort.

OK. Now you are presenting your typical ignorance about simple facts. I don't know if you are just silly or trolling. You know what? I put you and your dumb posts on ignore. Enough is enough.

many altcoins are bitcoin rip-offs
all thats required is not to change masses of code of the altcoin
but to change the first couple characters of an invoice in the LN software.
many LN node software already have litecoin and other coins already coded in.
........
as for you believing that LN is 99% successful for $100-$500
care to show me the latest 'payment success rate' graph

like this one from 2018
https://cdn0.tnwcdn.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2018/06/Screen-Shot-2018-06-26-at-3.45.32-PM.png

as for 2021
seems the lightning network stats sites (removing the elite hub/gateways) shows the median node capacity is only $60 for the general network. channel being less

I believe that franky1 somehow feels benefited from trying to make others avoid the lightning network. I'm still not convinced from his counter-arguments against the lightning fans in here. I have to state, though, that he sometimes brings in reasonable issues to the discussion.

What I do observe is that he can't formulate them properly, as a result to make no sense and create thousands of meaningless posts repeatedly. That's why he may be hated; because of unjustified “quarrel”.

I think this year will be important for the Lightning network, Jack Mallers is building an incredible App with Strike. He recently published this tweet with the news that the App will have zero fees when its users buy bitcoin.

Also all the eyes of the world are waiting when the bitcoin law begins to rule in El Salvador because the government app called Chivo is built by Jack Mallers using the Lightning network.

More Latin American countries want to follow El Salvador's step and celebrate its success, surely there will be more work for Jack Mallers building apps that adapt to the needs of each of these nations.

i understand lightning fully, more than most of these expert-fans

but over the years. it becomes a social drama PR rampage by the fans..
whereby i use one buzzword, they jump straight to knit pick that i did not use the other buzzword of the month. all done to distract/ignore/avoid the point of the context.
 
claiming they can ignore the whole context because i must not know because i didnt use their buzzword of the month(facepalm)

they get so wrapped up and ramped up on trying to find the most minimal grammatical issue to scream about and dismiss the whole context. that i just end up avoiding the buzzword drama and instead ELI-5 using common real world analogies.(laymans)

then they think my layman versions are to be ignored because of lack of buzzwords.
round circle arguments to avoid the context (social drama and very boring)

its funny because
they avoid discussions about funds arnt claimable until they have "secret" of hash160(secret)
they avoid discussions of the inner HTLC messages and invoice.
they avoid discussions about the many ways to break the route midflow. (even LN devs have lost funds)
they avoid discussions of capping out max limit of routes to save entire channel balance depletion
they avoid discussions of the payment success rate

yea a $3 coffee might be 99% success
but what about buying 3 coffees because most people dont drink alone

coupe years ago LN had a dismal 10% payment succesrate with 'folds lightningpizza'
(1500 attempts only 10% success)
and that just for pizza.. not a lambo

but hey i get used to the fan base of drama queens with your overpromises and utopian dreams

oh and if you look at the stats properly.
if you take out the elitist hubs. and just look at the average joe channels. the capacity is not there to have 99% $100-$500
but yea if we then redefine LN as a custodial only manager of ElThree micropayment channels they dont broadcast. then yea custodians can guarantee it.. but without users independance and freedom

just imagine wanting to buy pizza. and out of 10 people only one getting their payment to complete..
... id call that a failed payment system
if bitcoin had that issue in 2009 or 2011. it would never have moved forward
imagine lazlos 2010 pizza demo. imagine if he said he tried 10 times and got nothing.

We were talking about safety, to not lose money, not "sucess for a route from any place of the Lightning Network to any other". This may be lower today, but we're in the infancy of the network. $60 is a pretty good value for now, though.

I believe the events in El Salvador, if the adoption there is sucessful, will show us in a couple of months (from September on) which way Lightning may look like in the future. There will be probably way more non-Bitcoin-enthusiasts than now at least in El Salvador's user base, due to the Chivo wallet airdrop of $30 which provides a big incentive to just try out the technology. This may create the incentives for node operators to increase capacity and may make routing sucessful for bigger payments.

As I wrote in another thread it's too early to draw any conclusions from the current state of the Lightning Network, as we're having still a network of devs and Bitcoin enthusiasts.

I agree here, this is why I discuss some issues with him. For sure Lightning has still problems and vulnerabilities (see here (https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-lightning-network-vulnerabilities-not-exploited-yet) and here (https://www.forexcrunch.com/bitcoins-lightning-network-plagued-with-vulnerabilities-again/)) but most are simply fixable bugs, and others can be minimized by caring for a decentralized infrastructure with many small hubs instead of a couple of big ones, and watching out always for sybil attack opportunities.

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.



Still people talk about the problem to send tx worth > 500USD through lightning, which in reality is no problem at all, but it could cost more than sending it on the mainchain.

I know that you do. You just can't formulate your arguments properly and it looks like you're spiting non-sense sentences. It doesn't matter that you're against the lightning network, this is what I'm saying; you're misleading people with arguments that don't hold water and you insist that others are wrong while they respond you ideally.

That's why you're receiving negative feedback and some mods don't even want you to post. Not because they're against free speech; we just barely make any sense from your messages.

As for the lightning network, it'd be unnecessary to try to convince you. A peer-to-peer money system that works only within a limit of transactions per second can't work globally that way. We have to face the issue from each root. Each user must keep track of their own ledger based on the main's one capacity. No one will ever force you to use it, you can always broadcast your transactions instead of using lightning. I can't deny, though, that it isn't a matter of time until merchants adopt it.

As we progress with this newly invented matter about the transactions in Bitcoin, it's already a couple of years now but the development hasn't announced yet the dully developed and stabilized version of the Lightning network as there are some technical problems that need to be solved. However, the reason we still talk about this thing is, we still have their updates, and their working on it until today. Anyway, this will be the last technology we need and everything will be set and bitcoins will finally get over that big problem of transactions and finally will be recognized as one of the top online payment methods in the world.

I’m honestly confused with big blockers. They criticize the Lightning Network, because it might have the tendency to centralize, and their proposed solution is to hard fork to bigger blocks, which for them it would be more preferrable to centralize the base layer, reducing security.

Only if a protocol is locked down and free of governance for years like tcp/ip - you can consider that 'decentralized'. Open for all + free to launch server, miners, services, apps whatsover with that - max freedom is there (no pain in terms of capacity + long term planning - where new middle men can & want your toll & fee formost basic use)

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone? :)

Nah, never happens.


oops

it did

https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/coinbase-admits-its-former-data-provider-sold-client-data/

What I'm saying is, that node operators only know about the routings of their own node. They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve. Most of the node operators are completely unknown btw. So if somebody shares the info about the tx he was routing and how much fee he earned, you still don't know anything about the other nodes and you might never find out. Everybody is free to tell you how much Bitcoin he has, still many people won't tell you.

Just to show you the problem: Try to contact this node with a liquidity of more than 7 BTC 02fb22354383c240f9a04b194d610186cdec1045d961cb7989f254cb7c96498ab5@opwodusf33oapzmpg7nmtpjtdpauaa2m6ym2y6yvm7t2ju34x4jmctqd.onion:9735 and find out how much routings he has and how much fee he earns. If you achieved this (which I doubt you will), you still don't know much, because he can lie to you and also he doesnt know about origins and destinations of the txs he routed.

In addition to this, there are other shortcomings as opposed to traditional transferring of Bitcoin that I find will someday cause problems.  Lightning is not a bad addition to Bitcoin, but it isn't the holy grail it is portrayed to be.  I personally would prefer multiple different methods of scaling but I am not in charge.  I would say that the explosion of alternative crypto blockchains is good evidence I am not alone in this thinking, but they aren't Bitcoin.  Hopefully someday the community can come up with a better scaling solution that is supported by a higher % of crypto participants. 

Every single one of us would like to see all the scalability problems to be solved of course. But there is not a perfect system built yet. So after Lightning Network, I guess there will still be some problems. But they won't be on a large scale like now.

Bitcoin is plenty decentralized, you simply can’t accept the fact that the community came into consensus that it likes the Core developers to be the rightful stewards of the network, not those developers who proposed for those forked-shitcoins.

What has Coinbase, a centralized exchange renowned for being anti-privacy and working with governments and surveillance agencies, selling customer data, got to do with Lightning nodes leaking information about the transactions they are routing? You might as well say that you cannot use Tor nodes because Facebook collect your data. Complete non sequitur.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I would worry about splitting the user base across too many solutions. "I want to pay via scaling solution 1", "Oh sorry, I only accept scaling solution 2, and the other merchant down the street uses scaling solution 3". I agree Lightning is not a holy grail - at least not yet. One of nice things about Lightning though is that different pieces of it can be upgraded or changed individually - see Eltoo for example. I think I'd like to see more people adopting and driving the development of Lightning to make it better before we start introducing additional solutions.

Your initial statement was :"Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public.".
 And this is a true statement. From this statement another true statement follows:
 If node operators make their data public, then everything will be bad with privacy in LN.

No one can guarantee that node operators will not do this. You can only believe in it. But, as the English proverb says, "When three know it, all know it".

you really have no clue about history or facts
seriously go check actual blockchain data.. not your friends opinon and dream

it was not those opposing segwit that changed code in their software to create an altcoin
it was the segwit side that arranged the NYA flag to ignore legacy blocks to cause a split.

also compared to 2009 hardware/bandwidth limitations to which satoshi decided 1mb was ok limit
things have moved on since then. on average hardware/internet has increased 33x
yet the blockchain is struggling to get passed only 2.5k tx a block since 2017
https://api.blockchain.info/charts/preview/n-transactions-per-block.png?timespan=all&h=405&w=720

what you are finding is average joe just wanting to buy coffee will not want to carry around a desktop computer to make LN payments 'coz decentralised full node required'
they end up not giving a crap about bitcoin and just deposit fiat into a central exchange and have the exchange manage their micropayment millisat token channel. thus avoiding any need of caring worrying,securing bitcoin

its like accepting bank notes. no one cares about securing the bank vault of gold. thats for the vault owner to do and people are not vault owners. they are paper holders.

LN will cause more people to move away from using bitcoin as a full node because they are not doing daily things onchain to want/need to keep a full node open all day everyday

removing bitcoins daily utility makes average joe not be full nodes. leaving only large central services to be the full nodes. (like the NYA guys)

You didn't understand this part:


Means, if a node operator makes his data public, he will only lose his own privacy. Just like everyone who makes his finances available to public, because he doesn't know where the money is coming from and where it went to. The english proverb you provided doesn't apply to lightning, because when three know it, only these three now it and the rest of the 12000 nodes doesn't know shit.

The split? There was never a “split”. It was Bcash that hard forked into an incompatible-with-Bitcoin-shitcoin. Bitcoin continued on without the minority led by Roger Ver, and Jihan Wu. Plus the community has spoken, look at how much little Bcash’s value is compared to Bitcoin today.

Everything is clear with this statement. It works if only one node operator discloses the data. ( and then not always). If we return to your statement again ( and to mine), then "node operators"were used there.

Why did you decide that only ONE node operator will give its data. Where there is one, there are 2, and 3, ... And here everything depends on the number.

Let's take the end users who will not keep the routed nodes. If one end user makes a transaction to another end user, then most likely 2 nodes (the sender node and the recipient node) are enough for the whole world to know about this transaction. And if we take into account that in the future, with a significant development of LN, there will be 98-99% of such end users,then the privacy of LN looks less convincing.

Why are you discussing a non issue? What you say applies to everything: If one person gives something to another person and one or both disclose what they traded in public, then everybody that has this information will know what it was (unless they are lying)
Did you contact the node operator that I have posted to you and did you find out about his routings and fees? No? Instead you are talking about things that you don't know anything about. Try to keep it real! Can you follow my lightning transactions or no? Do you know somebody who can? No? If you want to know about Lightning, than learn about it and we can discuss real things. You obviously can't add something with substance to this topic.

Going back to OP, he said,


No, I believe you don’t understand that the difference is Bitcoin is an open, permissionless system that any individual and organization can use. It’s a different “flavor”, and should NEVER be compared to closed, permissioned systems that has shitcoins with doubful regulatory status in them. Gaps can’t be filled where Bitcoin can fill them.

No, LN has its own issues and it’s more of a private network, the opposite of what Bitcoin is advertised as.  I think with a few tweaks it will be used but not us regular people.  You think apple or the CIA WANTS its opposition how money they have or are transferring and where?  The lightening network provides that privacy plus unbreakable security.   Not to mention instants coin txs not just tokens. 


V

Isn't Bitcoin advertised for its privacy? Also, the LN isn't a private network. I'd say that your payment channels are just hidden from the public.

These are the ones intended to use it. If it won't be used from regular people, there's no reason to develop it. We all contribute for it, to become adopted by the crowd; to be considered the usual payment method.

I don't understand the relation between Apple and the CIA, neither this question that is suppose to... be an argument?

but LN isnt hidden. part of routing is to allow the "gossip" part of the network to gather all info on the network about balances of channels... and also when payments are done the gossip updates new balance.. heck there is even graphic maps of channels, listing the channel partners and much more info than bitcoin reveals.

yes you can pretend that it offers no 'history' but if your watching live, over time you can just record your own records of the changes channels make. and then make your own 'history'

LN isn’t designed to solve scalability.  It’s made by FUBU and designed to be invisible from the public for numerous reasons.  The main objective is to allow for fractional reserve banking. 

We showed them.  Lol