Reasons why Lightning Network will fail

[sjefdeklerk]

* The maximum amount you can pay in a certain route is determined by the guy with the LEAST amount of money in his channel
* Users can defraud each other in a channel, so they have to continually check if somebody is defrauding them.
* Unless you have a direct channel to your target, there is NO guarantee AT ALL that you can pay the person you want to pay.
* Users need to be online 24/7 if they want to be part of a payment route. If a user is offline, this particular route is not possible which of course has huge impact on the possible routes.
* Insane amounts of data are being sent because the network needs to be aware of EVERYBODY's payment channel's state (otherwise it can't discover a route)
* You still have huge fees if you want to wire money into/outside the channel.
* It's not feasible at all for bigger payments. Let's say you have to pay $1500 rent/month, are you going to open a payment channel and deposit 3 years rent in it ? Most people have difficulties enough coughing up the next month. But if you have to wire every payment into the channel, then you could just as well pay on-chain because you're paying that exact same on-chain fee.
* It's also not feasible for very small payments/channels. If you open a $30 channel with your coffeeshop to buy a few cups of coffee per week, then the price of your coffee doubles because of the huge fees to open/close the channel. Your only option is to route and HOPE there IS a route.
* Who is going to lock up his money in several channels anyway ? Liquidity, needed for routing money, is going to be a problem
* Very difficult to use and explain to users. No way your mother let alone grandmother is going to understand all this.

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[Lopumbo]

This is good for bitcoin!

[poor-yorik]

* The maximum amount you can pay in a certain route is determined by the guy with the LEAST amount of money in his channel
* Users can defraud each other in a channel, so they have to continually check if somebody is defrauding them.
* Unless you have a direct channel to your target, there is NO guarantee AT ALL that you can pay the person you want to pay.
* Users need to be online 24/7 if they want to be part of a payment route. If a user is offline, this particular route is not possible which of course has huge impact on the possible routes.
* Insane amounts of data are being sent because the network needs to be aware of EVERYBODY's payment channel's state (otherwise it can't discover a route)
* You still have huge fees if you want to wire money into/outside the channel.
* It's not feasible at all for bigger payments. Let's say you have to pay $1500 rent/month, are you going to open a payment channel and deposit 3 years rent in it ? Most people have difficulties enough coughing up the next month. But if you have to wire every payment into the channel, then you could just as well pay on-chain because you're paying that exact same on-chain fee.
* It's also not feasible for very small payments/channels. If you open a $30 channel with your coffeeshop to buy a few cups of coffee per week, then the price of your coffee doubles because of the huge fees to open/close the channel.
* Who is going to lock up his money in several channels anyway ? Liquidity, needed for routing money, is going to be a problem

Frankly, I'm not very knowledgeable in the matter and maybe some of your points are in fact quite valid but others certainly not. As I suspect, most transactions are made between just a few big operations like top exchanges and major online wallets, and LN will definitely help them lower the number of transactions to be written on the blockchain. So even a few payment channels will suffice to substantially decrease the load on the network.

[vanish9]

* The maximum amount you can pay in a certain route is determined by the guy with the LEAST amount of money in his channel

It would not fall.. all those who are saying that it will be a total failure are probably being paid by Roger Ver in order to spam this forum with all that crap. Just relax, it will work fine if that is your real problem at all. And it will fix a lot of things in here.

[kwukduck]

Apart from half of the points you state are just untrue, do you know of any feasible solution?
Bigger blocks don't solve the problem. DAG structures don't solve the problem.

IMHO a proper decentralized secure base protocol with second layer scaling beats any other proposals we have now, they all decrease decentralization and/or security at the base level.

[Deeyoh]

Yeah, just look at Bcash's 100s tx's vs 80+thousand for Bitcoin. It's so funny to watch the deserted highway.  https://txhighway.com/    Bcash did nothing but make money for the creators.  No one actually uses it.

I believe Litecoin is used much more than bcash and there should be a reversal on bcash/ltc price.  

[matteo96]

Well, you are just doing copy and paste of that without kwnowing anything about the tech  (:


what you don't consider is that it will be incredible easy to partecipate to the network, as it will be profitable to partecipate also with small amounts (it's indeed more secure, because you are less a target of attacks).



so we will see it growing exponentially reaching easily hundreds of thousand of nodes, so what does it matter if a channel has not enough funds? you just
use more than one

it is in fact happening : as you can see here , https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ , the numbers of channels grown 40% a day in the last few days

[surfinonmyownwavebaby]

I will be honest I only know the surface of Lightning Network but I will say this. All the problems you listed are technical and if there is anything I know it is that technical problems with Bitcoin can be solved. We have seen that last year and we will continue to see that with the development of Bitcoin. The main problem I see it now is the price of getting money to the channels (if this is true), if we can reduce that the system will function well. Again, I am not well versed in the tech I just knew that LN would lower fees overall and wait time, I don't know the nitty gritty.

[matteo96]

I will be honest I only know the surface of Lightning Network but I will say this. All the problems you listed are technical and if there is anything I know it is that technical problems with Bitcoin can be solved. We have seen that last year and we will continue to see that with the development of Bitcoin. The main problem I see it now is the price of getting money to the channels (if this is true), if we can reduce that the system will function well. Again, I am not well versed in the tech I just knew that LN would lower fees overall and wait time, I don't know the nitty gritty.

i agree, i was thinking the same , the only problem is sending to and back from the channels
if transactions continues to be so slow , everytime it would be a pain

but, you don't have to do everytime this transaction, and also if you want to maybe litecoin with the atomic swap would have its use case

[sjefdeklerk]

Apart from half of the points you state are just untrue

Which points are untrue?

[sjefdeklerk]

so we will see it growing exponentially reaching easily hundreds of thousand of nodes, so what does it matter if a channel has not enough funds? you just
use more than one

Every channel you open is an on-chain transaction so you pay high fees. Besides that, who wants to have money locked up in several channels? That's just a horrible situation.

[alyssa85]

* The maximum amount you can pay in a certain route is determined by the guy with the LEAST amount of money in his channel

It would not fall.. all those who are saying that it will be a total failure are probably being paid by Roger Ver in order to spam this forum with all that crap. Just relax, it will work fine if that is your real problem at all. And it will fix a lot of things in here.

It depends very much on users, does it not?

Segwit got activated 6 months ago and only 10% of users use it. It's likely that if the lightning network proves too complicated for users, they'll go down an easier route, which is to use another alt.

[sjefdeklerk]

It's likely that if the lightning network proves too complicated for users

Great point, I added it to my opening post. Most people here don't even understand how LN works. How are you going to explain all this to your mother or grandmother? For something like this to become mainstream it has to be simple to explain and to use and that's really not the case here.

[Slark]

It's likely that if the lightning network proves too complicated for users

Great point, I added it to my opening post. Most people here don't even understand how LN works. How are you going to explain all this to your mother or grandmother? For something like this to become mainstream it has to be simple to explain and to use and that's really not the case here.

It's the same with cryptocurrency as a whole. How do you explain it to your grandmother?
LN is nothing special and person who already has vague knowledge about cryptocurrency should get the idea without a problem.
Despite its flaws, LN is the best option for bitcoin upgrade we have so far, there is no need to depreciate it.

[sjefdeklerk]

LN is nothing special and person who already has vague knowledge about cryptocurrency should get the idea without a problem.

It's far more complicated. Crypto currency is easy cause it's pretty much like traditional banking. LN is far more complicated. Even when all the tech terms are hidden behind a simple GUI: How to check if a user in a channel defrauds you ? What to do when you're defrauded? How long do you have to respond to fraud? With whom to open channels? How to manage your money over all your open channels? How much does a transaction cost? When does the channel expire? How to indicate that I don't want to open up my channel for routing? How to sign for a transaction? Etc etc etc

[debuni]

You are right in most points, but I think LN will be successful for daily usage in cafeterias and similar places.

I think LN have /limited/ future.

[poor-yorik]

LN is nothing special and person who already has vague knowledge about cryptocurrency should get the idea without a problem.

It's far more complicated. Crypto currency is easy cause it's pretty much like traditional banking. LN is far more complicated. Even when all the tech terms are hidden behind a simple GUI: How to check if a user in a channel defrauds you ? What to do when you're defrauded? How long do you have to respond to fraud? With whom to open channels? How to manage your money over all your open channels? How much does a transaction cost? When does the channel expire? How to indicate that I don't want to open up my channel for routing? How to sign for a transaction? Etc etc etc

I somewhat agree with you here. LN is a second layer solution to Bitcoin blockchain, so it can't be easier than the blockchain itself. Nevertheless, to explain something in layman's terms, you don't need to have a detailed and profound knowledge about something and how it works in every detail. You just need to understand it conceptually to be able to explain its concept to your grandma.

[Samarkand]

...

I believe Litecoin is used much more than bcash and there should be a reversal on bcash/ltc price.  

Do you feel confident investing in a coin where the creator has recently sold
all of his holdings? He justified it with a "conflict of interest", which is odd
in my opinion, because he saw no conflicts of interest when he was working
at Coinbase or in the time before Litecoin made all-time highs.

Would Litecoin have ever been added to Coinbase if Charlie Lee would
have never started working there?

[LeGaulois]

To be honest, Lightning Network is too long and difficult to understand to become mainstream, it adds difficulty to understand cryptocurrencies. The LN is so complex (Lightning Network - A Puzzle With Missing Pieces) so I would say I agree with some posts here (and no, I am not paid by Roger Ver)
It may be easy to understand for you but not for everyone (including me)

[realr0ach]

I posted weeks ago why Lightning Network is also a trojan horse to recreate the same usury banking system that already exists:

LN is an unworkable train wreck without putting all channel closings in the same common permissioned queue (meaning completely centralized).  The fact these systems are built around a finite block size means humans can easily attack that bottleneck by flooding it with channel closings.  Since it can be flooded, you're required to buffer them and either discard low payers or put them at the back of the line just like regular bitcoin mempool.

From that point, you either have to design as a hub and spoke model just like what Mike Hearn claimed, where the Lightning node is a bitcoin bank and everyone who uses it is their peon slaves to extract usury upon, or every lightning node broadcasts a shared queue with each other.  But due to the fact that people can try to flood the queue as mentioned earlier, each lightning node will have their own criteria for what is or isn't spam, or who is and isn't a terrorist that they will broadcast to other nodes (meaningly INSANELY PERMISSIONED, cartel coordinated, and usury based).  The nodes might also be incentivized NOT to broadcast and force a hub and spoke model for their own gain.

If a Lightning node constantly broadcasts flood bullshit to everyone, they will likely be blacklisted by other Lightning nodes (lightning banks, whatever you want to call them), so the entire system is based around things like trusted and untrusted members, subjective anti-spam filters, etc.  In other words, for Lightning to work at all, it would probably be the most permissioned centralized piece of garbage ever to exist.  No real difference from having an account at Bank of America, and ironcially, the govt will likely legislate who is and isn't allowed to run these Lightning nodes, meaning Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will run them.

At least this is my understanding of the problems one has to overcome to create such system.  The fact bitcoin is not decentralized and it's impossible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place, also means anyone claiming Lightning is going to be "decentralized" is a complete idiot when it's built on top of bitcoin.

Do you actually know what LN is?  I'll tell you what it is.  LN is nothing more than establishing bitcoin banks on top of the blockchain.  All of the exact same regulation traditional banks have will be applied to them and bitcoin will be virtually identical to your current banking system.  The only reason it hasn't happened yet is because it's too difficult for them to play whack-a-mole with regulating miners, but the LN "nodes" aka banks are less ambiguous in nature and will be regulated to infinity just like any normal financial services provider or bank.  

The costs, compliance, and amount of lawyers needed will be so high only entities like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs will run them.  This is how crony capitalism works.  You introduce regulation with compliance requirements and fees so high that only your existing monopoly can participate while all small competitors are eliminated.

Nevermind the fact LN doesn't function in a decentralized manner in the first place.  There is also ZERO incentive for LN nodes aka banks to broadcast transactions to external peers.  There is actually incentive for these bitcoin banks to FORCE a hub and spoke model or cartel collective in order to hold their users hostage for usury fees (just like regular banks do). There's also nothing that stops them from changing usage of bitcoin as settlement to ripple, US dollars, or anything else.