Can you think of ways to use LN offline?

[danniwide1234]

The lightning network is comprised of bi-directional payment channels between two nodes. This means that either one of those nodes should be able to initialize a transaction at any time. These transactions require both parties to be actively participating in updating the smart contracts that keep the channel alive. If one party fails to respond, they are essentially in violation of the smart contract, and are forfeiting their claim to any of the funds in the channel.

Non-responsive clients are a liability to anyone opening up a channel. It means that their bitcoin may be tied up in the channel until the timeout period. That bitcoin was typically put there either to make a payment (which now is delayed), or to earn network fees for being a hub of other people's transactions. An unresponsive node means the channel is wasted. It's similar to a denial of service attack, except it's tying up bitcoin rather than bandwidth.

I feel LN clients Would they have to rely on third-parties to commit for them when they're offline. The success would depends on how much reputation the third parties have built to be trusted . I'm thinking users would at least have to trust them to commit transactions in a timely manner to invalidate past transactions, right? This to me seems an awful lot of trust put onto third-parties

[Xynerise]

I feel LN clients Would they have to rely on third-parties to commit for them when they're offline. The success would depends on how much reputation the third parties have built to be trusted . I'm thinking users would at least have to trust them to commit transactions in a timely manner to invalidate past transactions, right? This to me seems an awful lot of trust put onto third-parties

The third parties are called Watchtowers and it's actually possible for the whole scheme to be trustless

[figmentofmyass]

But if LN's ledger system is as infallible as bitcoin's, then I guess there's nothing to worry about.

There is no ledger system, it's just two people with their own LN wallet. There could be a few hubs involved, but the only way to lose your money is if you lose your wallet.

lightning is still a ledger system.

we may not be publishing every transaction on the blockchain, but the pre-images we exchange are literally ledgers of accounts between channel participants. they're basically "private" ledgers that eventually settle on the blockchain's "public" ledger. (hence the privacy benefits of LN)

[Loveboard]

People will lose money from bitcoin because LN was hacked in some way, and they won't blame LN... it'll just fall on bitcoin.

No. Just like the fact that people lose money when their computer gets hacked doesn't weaken Bitcoin. "Be your own bank" comes with responsibilities, or to state the obvious: "it's a feature, not a bug".

But if LN's ledger system is as infallible as bitcoin's, then I guess there's nothing to worry about.

There is no ledger system, it's just two people with their own LN wallet. There could be a few hubs involved, but the only way to lose your money is if you lose your wallet.

Well, if mainstream peeps view LN as a wallet, even though it's not, then what I've said is kind of true.

When that ETH wallet got "miscoded" because one dude put in an errant line of code in the multi-sig, it froze up millions of dollars worth of ETH. Even though it was just one particular wallet that was affected, the major news outlets reported it as ETH itself being hacked.

I'm not saying the same thing will happen with Bitcoin, but if LN gets "hacked" in such a way, then... they'll just make an overreaching statement and say bitcoin was hacked.

It's different if you're talking about your hard drive or your wallet on your PC getting stolen... because no one sees that as connected to bitcoin. LN is already being touted as "part of bitcoin," so if it gets hacked, then they'll just assume bitcoin was hacked. That's the way they think.