Why some people think Lightning Network centralizes BTC?

[CIYAM]

you do need to lock your bitcoins, that way LN would trust you to then do offchain tx's.

That locking would be done using CLTV not using the mempool (so the locked funds *are* in the blockchain as a tx output).

Using the mempool would be rather silly as that isn't in any way guaranteed.

[Carlton Banks]

i dont really see it as reducing much bloat. especially at the expense of large mempool requirements for upto a month, miners wont see the advantage. of holding data for a month for just 1 tx fee

nice diagram, don't know about your conclusion.

If you use the poker room example instead of the retail outlet example, one particular output could change hands a dozen times or more in one evening, but that gets reported as just one line in the tx, not 12. That's a credible nearly 12-fold reduction under some circumstances. A retailer (or any business) could engender something similar; take customer payments over Lightning, and make payments to suppliers/contractors also using the same Lightning hub. Any efficiency's in the way those transactions get settled on-chain can be exploited.

Also, there's more work going on right now to make the fundamentals of multisig as used by Lighning even more space efficient. Seems to me like the devs know where they're going with this overall approach to scaling up.

[franky1]

you do need to lock your bitcoins, that way LN would trust you to then do offchain tx's.

That locking would be done using CLTV not using the mempool (so the locked funds *are* in the blockchain as a tx output).

Using the mempool would be rather silly as that isn't in any way guaranteed.

so if the locked tx IS in the blockchain.. then those 5 customers, 1 starbucks =6 locked tx's in the blockchain (500byte each=3,00bytes)..(ignoring employee as he just a recipient)

then when starbucks finally closes the channel.. another tx appears in the blockchain 30 days later (1,250byte as the example on the right of my diagram).
so now 5 purchases of coffee are not 1,500bytes(old way left diagram) to pay everyone in order and give change.

but now 4,500bytes to cover the 5 locked tx's and the 1 settlement tx to pay 7people (5customers change, starbucks, employee).


i think LN has its uses to finally create more secure means to handle bitstamp day trade or a poker room 'pot'. but im still trying to analyze the benefit for the one off retail market.

[CIYAM]

then when starbucks finally closes the channel.. another tx appears in the blockchain 30 days later (1,250byte as the example on the right of my diagram).
so now 5 purchases of coffee are not 1,500bytes(old way left diagram) to pay everyone in order and give change.

For certain I don't think LN makes sense to use for "one off purchases" unless those are in the form of "streaming audio/video" where you are paying per second (so payment channels are not the answer to all scalability issues at least in how I have understood that they will work).

[Mickeyb]

People just have their opinions. I doesn't necessarily means that they are right or wrong!

As Antonopoulos has said, when people realize the true potential of Bitcoin technology and when they massively start using it and adopting it, we will need every possible solution. We will need bigger blocks, higher fees, lightning network, etc, to be able to scale to the users needs!

[Carlton Banks]

i think LN has its uses to finally create more secure means to handle bitstamp day trade or a poker room 'pot'. but im still trying to analyze the benefit for the one off retail market.

A retailer (or any business) could engender something similar; take customer payments over Lightning, and make payments to suppliers/contractors also using the same Lightning hub. Any efficiency's in the way those transactions get settled on-chain can be exploited.