The high fees does not affect BTC's decentralization, what it affects is the use case of BTC as a means of payment, with the fees as high as it is now, it is almost impossible for people to use it for payments, especially micro payments. We have been discussing about ordinals and the congestion it is causing in the network, i thought it would be over by now, but i was wrong and i can't even see an end to it anytime soon. I think the only solution right now is for bitcoiners to adapt, they can use LN for micro payments or hold their coins until fee rate drops a little.

I just now check the mempool and found the fees have touched a new high again. As of now you would need to pay $16 as a fee for a Bitcoin transaction. Considering what was promoted and promised these fee are higher than a government based international transactions fee.

An amount of $16 as fee is way beyond the reach of anyone who is new to this culture of decentralisation. Considering what is happening now I feel decentralisation has a big loophole.

What do you guys think?

Bitcoin Blockchain was not invented and developed by the earlier 12 bitcoin forum associate members. Craig cannot sue them. Craig Wright did not have any connection to Bitcoin invention or its implementation, he has acquired BSV with deception from an unknown entity and used it to create a fork  actually BSV is not Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision but Bitcoin "S" Version. "S" is the First letter of the Inventor's official first name.

Now, it I am, myself, I invented the Bitcoin and implemented the blockchain technology known as Bitcoin  Blockchain. Those Bitcoin address he is claiming his is a FBS orchestrated by one and few MF56 dreedy Bitcoin Gremlins.

Those developers can just say to the court that it is not them who created Bitcoin blockchain but Satoshi Nakamoto. So, the court can ask Satoshi Nakamoto to appear in the Court and I will be delighted to attend the Court hearing of CSW's fake court case against 12 earlier Bitcoin Forum members.

There after, I will provide the complete proof of evidence to confess his forgery and get back to the Bitcoin Drama stage to play a new role as Laughing Stock.

But if Craig confess his sin and ask forgiveness, I will forgive him because I am the most compassionate Lord Bitcoin Moses Grand Father of Bitcoin Jesus. Then, I help Craig to attain some thing better for his life to enjoy life better than being greedy Bitcoin gremlin.

There is a secret message here in this post, Borth party need third eyes to open for decipher the "message".

---

I got it but made the joke but you did not understand it because you are just one of my Roboto name "AGD".

Search and you will know that I gave you that AGD account to you.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

Which Police are you thinking of  to report ?

If they report to the Bitcoin Police then I could accept that and take the matters in to to Blockchain Court to justify it.

If you are lucky, I would create some another 21000000 bitcoin and pay back to Investors those who have lost their money on Mt Gox.

Yeah, it depends a ton about who you're connecting to and also the size of those channels. To maximize routing and profits, some people actually manually monitor their channels. Some recommendations I picked up:

* Don't create channel between 2 already connected nodes. (e.g. check via LN explorers)
* If a channel isn't routing anything for a long time, close it.
* If a channel starts to get used much, but only in one direction, rebalance it so it continues being used.
* Look for nodes with much usage, but no 1-hop connection and connect them through you.
* Adapt fees up / down in the channels that are used much, like sometimes your fees are just too high; sometimes users keep paying if you increase them since you're the only route to some location.

This is just off the top of my mind, not sure if I can find the original 'list' anymore. We may just create a new thread for that. I don't feel qualified for it myself though, since I was never a big routing node myself.

With regards to 'LN node experience', I will post in here in the future when I find the time to write down all my experiences and make a concise but informative post of it.

* Don't create channel between 2 already connected nodes. (e.g. check via LN explorers)

* If a channel isn't routing anything for a long time, close it.

you say about onchain fee's.   (not part of the conversation)

you talk about how an implementation used by nothing is.. and the you use sweep under the carpet blank statements..

thor turbo you say "speeds up" yea.. by ignoring a bolt rule to only start a channel once a tx is confirmed. by ignoring that they can give msats to users with no confirm utxo..

funny how you want to play it down as a feature and not something people should be risk aware of..

as for you saying users dont need to settle up every payment.. well thats the issue its not about broadcasting payment.. its about that while they dont need to broadcast with every ln onion payment to settle.. they are left longer not knowing what the state/commitment behind the GUI is actually promising. all they see is a msat balance in GUI which can mean nothing. much like thor turbo

with all the crap about stable coins de-pegging their reserves or lack of reserves (no funding locked coin) people should be aware of other networks that have week structure to ensure security. but you wanna sweep it under the rug..

shameful

havnt you listened to the news lately..
services and networks that cant prove reserves,
stable coins de-pegging to new low rates of conversion to base asset value
methods to steal/hack funds from counterparties/sister companies

but hey you will keep promoting the utopian dream that bitcoin is unfit for the masses and LN is bitcoin 2.0 right??

shame on you.

maybe one day you will become risk aware and then want other to be risk aware to protect their value rather then a trust system where they have to use emotional choices to either hope their channel partner wont screw them, or lose sleep watching them.
if you have to watch or trust middlemen or other people because your funds are at risk of being lost or spent while you are not watching them. that system is not a good system

you are missing the complete point

much like many thought that LN was soo utopia that there was no way to fractional reserve because all channels had locked and confirmed value.....
.....
until thor turbo proved it was possible and people were getting inbound Msats not backed by a confirmed bitcoin 'funding lock' utxo

when you realise that there is also no network consensus and that msats are not 1:1 rated with sats.. where instead that 1:1000 ratio is not guaranteed either and can be messed with too

where when compiled, and a service tells people to use their app..
EG a service of 1m users al using that services LN app on their phone

people wont know of the rate change while using LN.. they see the msats and dilly dally happily moving msats in onion payments
.until.. they broadcast the commitment and see onchain that they are getting not as much as promised..

then you will see

please observe

i was discussing the pegging.. and you went full avoidance by talking about other features..

when you start to realise that when people are told to download some free phone app for lightning and see 0 balance and they use an exchange to deposit bitcoin and the exchange then routes them inbound msat.. they think they are getting 1:1000 rated msat..
little do they know how easy it is in just 1 line of code to have the onion payment conversion to commitment actually be a 1:200 rate. and they only learn the hard way when they try to settle the channel..

do you get it yet. lightning does not have a network wide consensus to actually audit payments and value to make sure what someone holds is actually what is owed to them

oh and lightning is federated. but lacks the blockchain bit too
you are federated with a channel partner. and separately someone else is federated to your partner. and they are federated with someone else

you can only make a payment if all federations along the route are online and will agree to authorise payment through them.

LN is permissioned because it needs someone elses permission(co partners signature. route onions approval to forward onion payment and send back acceptance with key
as for trust

well you either hand keys to a watch tower so you can sleep. or stay awake watching your partner doesnt broadcast a old state.. oh wait if you want to sleep without a watch tower.. you need to trust your partner

take the utopia away and try for one month to do some critical thinking. imaging you have value in lightning and you really want to scrutinise it for bugs and flaws. instead of be hopeful and dreamy about it.
start finding the flaws. the ways that a counter party can dupe you out of your value.

then you might learn something

Hey dorks, are you still believe in bitcoin? How can you rejoice during an energetic collapse?

Bitcoin Falls to $19k as Federal Reserve Announces 75 BPS Rate Hike

https://cryptopotato.com/bitcoin-falls-to-19k-as-federal-reserve-announces-75-bps-rate-hike/

Just thinking about what will be the price of BTC by then. 1 satoshi for 4 years is insanely low if the price of BTC hasn't reached an insane figure of numbers. I won't be there by that time but I am happy with what I have right now and felt lucky to see the raise of giants which will change the economy of our society for the next hundreds of years.

No more block rewards but there would still be transaction fees.  However, doesn't seem this would make up for block rewards no longer being a thing.  Appears there would be an increase in TX fees, but the question is will they be reasonable or unbearable?

Are there any?

What's the point of a mixer if you don't get a fresh entirely new bitcoin address with no connections to any other bitcoin that could be "tainted"

Speaking of tainted bitcoins. Some people said tainted bitcoins aren't a thing. Well tornado cash crackdowns seem to suggest otherwise.

OK.  That's about enough of that.  I am fine with discussing what is negative about lightning.  Really.  But this asshole just rants and rants... but that last bit?  I think he might be a little off in the old think-bone.

I do not have all that many ignores on this site.  But I just added one new one.  I take some pride of being tolerant of all kinds of folks.  But that level of nonsense?  Don't have time for it.

Now... On to my topic of node recovery, which I appreciate you all listening to, and honestly I hope that MAYBE it would be useful to someone else.  I CERTAINLY would be a decent resource at this point for helping someone go through this ordeal with either LND or CL!  If someone is reading this and needs help, ping me.

CL node:
The CL node is back up, and running.  As if nothing happend, I think.  It is only missing 3 channels . Well two really since the third is my LND node. Lol.  That channel will not be coming back up.  The other two are "benthecarman" and "Rath [keysend]".  The latter is a forum member and posts in this thread.  Is your node just down?  The first one?  I dunno.  Anyone else have an active channel with him?

OK here is the freaky part of the whole thing.  I ran through all the restoration process, including decrypting/restoring the backup database.  When the node came back up about half the channels were connecting, but the other half were not.  Something seemed wrong.  When I went to look at the info for the node IT HAD THE WRONG PUBKEY!  Umm...  huh?  so I recreated the hsm_secret from the seed words (I had used one in a "rescue backup" originally).  After bouncing lightningd not only did I have the RIGHT pubkey, but most of the other channels connected right away.

This seems very lucky to me.  And I do not entirely understand what happened there.  I think it's safe to assume the pubkey in my backup file was the wrong one.  Totally possible. I was worried about this when I was restoring.  I think I went through the setup for the node a couple times, and I bet that as the first time. 

But how did the channel backup get restored?  I guess that the assumption that the hsm_secret has something to do with decrypting that is not the case?

And HOW ON EARTH did some of my channels come back up?!??!?  That part seems crazy.  And I feel lucky not to have set off alarms on my channel partners node.  The whole investigation was prompted by the fact that half my partner nodes were REFUSING connection. 

LND node

This node is in the process of rescanning the blockchain. 

Seems it is a slow process.  I see transactions up to 3/20 so as far as the LND node is concerned COVID has barely started.   No channels are connected, and that is as expected.  I am assuming that after the blockchain is scanned all the way through the channel closing procedure will continue.  I am hopeful I will get all my bitcoin back.  This is a place where the low power SBC is a disadvantage... I think it has plenty of ability to keep up with the blockchain in real time. But rescanning this is going VERY slowly.

To be honest... both of these systems are more foolproof than I had thought.  I am definitely the fool here.  I mean it was nice from frankie to try to shift the blame over the lightning, but nah.  There are two things at fault here. A shitty SDD failure, and my lack of good preparation.  I am not being self effacing. I am a wizard of hackery, and I have done things that most folks would be screwed trying to do...  like figuring out the CL pubkey was wrong and fixing it manually.  BUT my lack of being serious about preparing the right backup strategies for the node was an abomination.  And kudos to each implementation AND Raspiblitz.

I will be making a donation to the Raspiblitz project.  For sure.

Anyway, thanks, all for the audience.  I will quiet down about this now.