There isn't an N+1 unless both parties agree that there is an N+1.  Otherwise N is the current state, regardless of what anyone "claims".  In this example, B can withdraw their funds from N without a penalty.  There's no cheating involved, because no one is trying to spend from an old state.  N is the current state.  

However, it's worth pointing out that B does have a financial incentive to agree to N+1, because it sounds like A wants to send them more BTC.  It's a strange example you're using.  I assume in your example you are positioning A as a malicious actor attempting to trick B to steal their coins?  If so, A won't have much luck with that.

N+1 can only become the current state if A and B both lock N+1 with a new key and have also sent each other the old keys for N to revoke payments from that state.  Once payments have been revoked from N, if either party then attempts to spend from N, that's where a penalty would come into play.

I think the problem you might be having is that you associate the word "transaction" with a one-sided push payment like it works with regular on-chain transactions.  Once you've sent it, it belongs to someone else.  In Lightning, however, a transaction involves the other party effectively approving the transaction.  If you send a payment, it only belongs to the other person once they've accepted the latest state and revoked payments from the old state.



But it's not "trust" keeping people honest, it's "consequence".  Play by the rules or risk losing funds.

I wasn't aware that being a coder was some sort of mandatory prerequisite to contribute to the conversation.  Many people arguably prefer Wind_FURY's insights over your own, so let's play nice, okay?



In your opinion.  Clearly the breadwallet devs (who, being coders, you clearly concede have the right to make that determination) disagree with you on that part.

You and whoever you are transacting with are both the referees.  You keep each other honest.  It's explained here.


In essence, they can't trick you into spending from an old channel state because you both have to agree on what the current state is.

Also, there's apparently going to be less reliance on this penalty method as Lightning matures.  People are already talking about eltoo and achieving the same result without needing penalties.

More likely, it's precisely because they do understand the benefits that they declare it illegal.  Control over the money is control over the populace.  Anywhere that has declared Bitcoin illegal clearly has no interest in freedom for its people.  More marketing won't change that, sadly.

With the obvious exceptions of theymos and satoshi, LoyceV might well be the first "regular" forum user to break 1000 earned merits.  Which, for anyone who joined the forum after merit was introduced, is now the threshold to attain Legendary rank.  That's quite the achievement.

The rest of us need to up our game, heh.

I have a suspicion that, for most people, the honest answer would be "greed".  

These days, with new tokens becoming so prevalent that it's largely just an amorphous blur backed by nothing but hype, I don't even tend to acknowledge the existence of anything new.  For me, trust only comes from being well established and proving that the coin is robust and fulfills a purpose.

Put simply, mining was a crucial ingredient in solving the double spend problem without putting a centralised entity in control of the network.  It also helps ensure there's always more financial incentive to follow the rules than to attack the network.  It's likely we wouldn't be here having this conversation without that particular element of satoshi's creation.

Also, rather than posting multiple replies in a row, it's generally considered good form to make one post with multiple quotes in it to respond to each point.

A few things:

Firstly, that particular gutter rag you're linking to is not a source of journalistic integrity.  You might as well just ask Rupert Murdoch what he thinks directly.

Secondly, any problems with Tether and Bitfinex are precisely that.  Problems with those things and not problems with Bitcoin.  Tether and Bitfinex could both disappear tomorrow and Bitcoin would continue to churn out blocks and function as normal.  

Thirdly, people manipulating the price is nothing new.  To be blunt, who honestly cares about people who are waiting for the fiat price to skyrocket?  They're not overly important in the grand scheme of things.  None of that hollow gambling detracts from Bitcoin's resilience, security, freedom and utility.  Contrary to popular belief, Bitcoin was not designed as a tool for speculation.  If you think it was, you're missing out.  Greater future purchasing power is just the "icing on the cake".

And finally, the derivatives market is currently the biggest monetary crime of all time and you're frankly gormless if you can't recognise that.  

Providing that interoperability becomes almost as simple as making a transaction, to the point where coins on different chains are practically fungible, it could well unfold this way.  It's probably a long way off, but I can't wait to see the day where atomic swaps are just a regular everyday occurrence and aren't even thought of as anything special anymore.  Not everyone likes the idea, but I still see Lightning as the "inter-layer", rather than just a "second layer".  While it may not be accurate to describe other blockchains as "layers", that's how people would effectively use them if it proves to be the path of least resistance.

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Errrm...

45.00 / 0.75 != 6000

Should that not be 60x cheaper?  

Maybe once LN becomes mainstream and fees are often sub-penny amounts, then the 6000x bit might be accurate.

Poor analysis as usual.  There was an exchange of ideas and my idea has now been established to be objectionable.  So instead of continuing to plow on regardless of how many people tell me it's a bad idea, I'm accepting that decision and not continuing to pursue it.  That's something you could learn, but I suspect you won't.  

Also, I sincerely doubt this is a "turning point" on the scale you have in mind.  There will be some proposals to introduce a little more vigilance, but it sounds like you're expecting some sort of total rebuild from the ground up.  Your track record of contributing to technical topics usually consists of telling people that everything they're working on needs to go in the trash because you supposedly know best.



Hang on, what?  You want to have a veto in what many see as a permissionless system?  No thanks.  Also, you already have a technical means to do that.  If you want to block future forks to preserve the "old ways", you're going to have to start with a fork of your own.  Keep it frozen in time forever if you like.  It stands to reason that you won't have many developers on hand when you do need to change something, though.

Putting aside the absurdity of someone who argues against any and all off chain solutions and believes every future development can be nowhere other than on layer 0 having the gall to use the word "bloat" in a sentence without a hint of irony...

How about, instead of gross generalisations and dismissing thousands of lines of code as "bloat", you name the specific parts of the code that you believe aren't needed?  This will greatly expedite the moment someone can tell you why you're wrong and we can all move on.

Fair enough if we're ruling out alternative implementations due to security concerns.  It was only a suggestion based on the conventional wisdom of "not putting all your eggs in one basket".  But, considering that you are someone who has launched multiple lengthy tirades against the current direction this project is moving in as of late, if you're using this as another opportunity to take cheap shots at LN, you can add yourself to the list of biased actors who are taking advantage of this incident.

Slightly OT, but can a consensus based system ever really be co-opted, though?  Everyone seems to have their own slightly different ideas of what makes Bitcoin what it is.  If you find yourself on a minority fork, it's because you aren't following consensus.  It's the numbers that matter, not what any one person believes Bitcoin "should" be.  Even though we might disagree with them, many BCH users will argue that Bitcoin has already been co-opted, but the simple fact remains they don't have the numbers behind them to do anything with that assertion.  So they have to settle for being an altcoin.  That's just how it is.  A day may come where you find yourself on the wrong side of consensus.  If that day comes, you would then find yourself deciding whether it's more important to stick with what you think it should be, or to accept it for what it is.  Maybe that's all getting a bit philosophical, though.

Back to the main purpose of the thread, though.  Yes, there are definitely some issues with multiple implementations if it's done in the wrong way.  It seems there's no simple answer to this one.  Aside from the things gmaxwell and achow101 mentioned, I suspect one of the primary flaws with multiple implementations is that much of the code would simply be copied from other implementations anyway.  It wouldn't necessarily ensure catching any present faults, even if people were taking the effort to run two different clients to compare results.  If they've inadvertently duplicated the bug, it won't make any difference.  Much like how any of the altcoins that may have been affected didn't spot duplicate inputs either.

That's technically a separate issue.  Imagine someone made a highly informative and/or technical post that was worthy of merit.  You read this post and award them however much you deem appropriate.  Then, that person, who is secretly a troll, then edits their post.  They remove all the useful, merit-worthy content and replace it with "Hitler was just misunderstood and was actually an okay guy".  Or something even worse.  Now your merit is attached to this post for all to see and you can't take it back, even though it's clearly not text you would have awarded merit to.  Your only recourse is to report it to the moderators and hope it's swiftly removed.

Whether or not you agree with the content of the original version of the post is immaterial because that post is now gone.  It's entirely possible to have awarded merit to a post only to have that post later change to something completely unrelated and highly objectionable.

I'm smelling a lot of "if" coming off this article.  

If someone has proven the hypothesis, then
If someone uses that understanding to exploit the general principles of encryption, then
If no one finds a way to prevent that exploit, then
If someone actually uses it to attack Bitcoin...

Then we would have a problem.  And so would every government, military, bank, business and individual in the developed world, for that matter.  Because everything relies on encryption these days.  But let's take it one step at a time.  If we should be concerned by this, then it's a pretty small concern for the moment.

I think I can guess where this is heading.     

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Perhaps not everyone would need to.  If we adapt theymos' idea that larger Bitcoin companies should effectively place a small percentage of their employees on secondment with Core, what if instead they ran a Core node but also maintained a second node with their own business-oriented implementation?  Something that might focus more on features for merchants, for example.  Then they can report any inconsistencies and issues like would be far less likely to go unnoticed for 18 months?  I'm unsure how many companies it would take for the idea to be effective, but if it worked, that would help create a decent safety net.

Since someone bumped this thread, it's worth pointing out that any "fees" earned from LN are probably going to be tiny in comparison to the kind of fees miners earn.  It's just not on the same scale.  And, as others have already pointed out, there will still be on-chain fees being collected with people opening and closing channels.

There isn't a "reserve" and that's not a SegWit address.

I know this is probably the last argument most people want to hear, but is this not a case where more independent implementations would result in less risk?  If you maintain that one particular client should form the "backbone of the network", you have to consider what happens if that backbone breaks.  If there were a wider variety of clients being run, there may have been less of a threat to the network overall?

Core have done exceptional work, but at the end of the day, they're still only human.  Assigning more people to keep an eye on one codebase might help mitigate faults, but if there's only one main codebase, there's still going to be an issue if an error slips through the net.  Hence my belief that more codebases would create a stronger safeguard.

Is the plan to implement Schnorr itself as one upgrade and leave the key aggregation part for a separate, later upgrade?  I'm still not clear on that bit.

Also, will SIGHASH_NOINPUT and whichever other opcodes are needed for eltoo be included at the same time, or is that yet another softfork?



That sounds like a bit of a stretch, IMO.  Prior to SegWit, the network hadn't really experienced any controversies on that kind of scale when upgrading.  UASF was considered revelatory (by some) as it was specifically designed to be implemented as:

My understanding is that all the forks that occurred while satoshi was still around did not have a "flag day" (and were categorically not presented as an ultimatum to the miners).  Arguably, the network has never seen a UASF-style softfork.  Although many believe the threat of one pressured miners into taking the action they did to activate SegWit.

Article link?  You forgot to include the source.  I found a different article here if anyone wants to read that one.

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If it was anyone else, I'd be skeptical, but David Chaum is a luminary in crypto.  On that basis alone, consider me intrigued.  Although I'm a little disappointed with the closed beta.  If you want to claim you've built a better cryptocurrency, you should arguably start with the fundamentals of being open-source.  As long as they make it public at some point, then I suppose we should give them the benefit of the doubt.  Perhaps they don't want a million-and-one copycat ICOs trying to cash in on their ideas.  Hopefully this doesn't become a trend for new projects, though.