Will the Lightning Network Solve ALL Scalability Issues?

[franky1]

I believe that franky1 somehow feels benefited from trying to make others avoid the lightning network. I'm still not convinced from his counter-arguments against the lightning fans in here. I have to state, though, that he sometimes brings in reasonable issues to the discussion.

What I do observe is that he can't formulate them properly, as a result to make no sense and create thousands of meaningless posts repeatedly. That's why he may be hated; because of unjustified “quarrel”.

i understand lightning fully, more than most of these expert-fans

but over the years. it becomes a social drama PR rampage by the fans..
whereby i use one buzzword, they jump straight to knit pick that i did not use the other buzzword of the month. all done to distract/ignore/avoid the point of the context.
 
claiming they can ignore the whole context because i must not know because i didnt use their buzzword of the month(facepalm)

they get so wrapped up and ramped up on trying to find the most minimal grammatical issue to scream about and dismiss the whole context. that i just end up avoiding the buzzword drama and instead ELI-5 using common real world analogies.(laymans)

then they think my layman versions are to be ignored because of lack of buzzwords.
round circle arguments to avoid the context (social drama and very boring)

its funny because
they avoid discussions about funds arnt claimable until they have "secret" of hash160(secret)
they avoid discussions of the inner HTLC messages and invoice.
they avoid discussions about the many ways to break the route midflow. (even LN devs have lost funds)
they avoid discussions of capping out max limit of routes to save entire channel balance depletion
they avoid discussions of the payment success rate

yea a $3 coffee might be 99% success
but what about buying 3 coffees because most people dont drink alone

coupe years ago LN had a dismal 10% payment succesrate with 'folds lightningpizza'
(1500 attempts only 10% success)
and that just for pizza.. not a lambo

but hey i get used to the fan base of drama queens with your overpromises and utopian dreams

oh and if you look at the stats properly.
if you take out the elitist hubs. and just look at the average joe channels. the capacity is not there to have 99% $100-$500
but yea if we then redefine LN as a custodial only manager of ElThree micropayment channels they dont broadcast. then yea custodians can guarantee it.. but without users independance and freedom

just imagine wanting to buy pizza. and out of 10 people only one getting their payment to complete..
... id call that a failed payment system
if bitcoin had that issue in 2009 or 2011. it would never have moved forward
imagine lazlos 2010 pizza demo. imagine if he said he tried 10 times and got nothing.

[d5000]

as for you believing that LN is 99% successful for $100-$500
care to show me the latest 'payment success rate' graph

We were talking about safety, to not lose money, not "sucess for a route from any place of the Lightning Network to any other". This may be lower today, but we're in the infancy of the network. $60 is a pretty good value for now, though.

I believe the events in El Salvador, if the adoption there is sucessful, will show us in a couple of months (from September on) which way Lightning may look like in the future. There will be probably way more non-Bitcoin-enthusiasts than now at least in El Salvador's user base, due to the Chivo wallet airdrop of $30 which provides a big incentive to just try out the technology. This may create the incentives for node operators to increase capacity and may make routing sucessful for bigger payments.

As I wrote in another thread it's too early to draw any conclusions from the current state of the Lightning Network, as we're having still a network of devs and Bitcoin enthusiasts.

I believe that franky1 somehow feels benefited from trying to make others avoid the lightning network. I'm still not convinced from his counter-arguments against the lightning fans in here. I have to state, though, that he sometimes brings in reasonable issues to the discussion.

I agree here, this is why I discuss some issues with him. For sure Lightning has still problems and vulnerabilities (see here and here) but most are simply fixable bugs, and others can be minimized by caring for a decentralized infrastructure with many small hubs instead of a couple of big ones, and watching out always for sybil attack opportunities.

[AGD]

...
Payments within the lightning network are not countable from the outside
There is no open ledger, which counts the payments made on lightning. Only node operators can count how many paments they are routing on their own node. They don't know what's exactly happening on other nodes. This makes lightning payments practically anonymous, which is a nice side effect. When people start to crunch numbers on how many payments the lightning network is able to handle, forget about them. They don't know because they can't!

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

Lightning is NOT a solution for big payments
Bitcoin is already able to handle this. You can send Bitcoins worth millions for a very small fee already, so there is no need to find another solution. Lightning fees are measured by the amount you send and not the tx size. Most big payments will be cheaper on the btc mainchain. Discussions about how big payments can be send over lightning are a non issue.

Still people talk about the problem to send tx worth > 500USD through lightning, which in reality is no problem at all, but it could cost more than sending it on the mainchain.

[BlackHatCoiner]

i understand lightning fully, more than most of these expert-fans

I know that you do. You just can't formulate your arguments properly and it looks like you're spiting non-sense sentences. It doesn't matter that you're against the lightning network, this is what I'm saying; you're misleading people with arguments that don't hold water and you insist that others are wrong while they respond you ideally.

That's why you're receiving negative feedback and some mods don't even want you to post. Not because they're against free speech; we just barely make any sense from your messages.

As for the lightning network, it'd be unnecessary to try to convince you. A peer-to-peer money system that works only within a limit of transactions per second can't work globally that way. We have to face the issue from each root. Each user must keep track of their own ledger based on the main's one capacity. No one will ever force you to use it, you can always broadcast your transactions instead of using lightning. I can't deny, though, that it isn't a matter of time until merchants adopt it.

[yazher]

As we progress with this newly invented matter about the transactions in Bitcoin, it's already a couple of years now but the development hasn't announced yet the dully developed and stabilized version of the Lightning network as there are some technical problems that need to be solved. However, the reason we still talk about this thing is, we still have their updates, and their working on it until today. Anyway, this will be the last technology we need and everything will be set and bitcoins will finally get over that big problem of transactions and finally will be recognized as one of the top online payment methods in the world.

[Wind_FURY]

I’m honestly confused with big blockers. They criticize the Lightning Network, because it might have the tendency to centralize, and their proposed solution is to hard fork to bigger blocks, which for them it would be more preferrable to centralize the base layer, reducing security.

[hv_]

I’m honestly confused with big blockers. They criticize the Lightning Network, because it might have the tendency to centralize, and their proposed solution is to hard fork to bigger blocks, which for them it would be more preferrable to centralize the base layer, reducing security.

Only if a protocol is locked down and free of governance for years like tcp/ip - you can consider that 'decentralized'. Open for all + free to launch server, miners, services, apps whatsover with that - max freedom is there (no pain in terms of capacity + long term planning - where new middle men can & want your toll & fee formost basic use)

[GGUL]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

[hv_]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

Nah, never happens.


oops

it did

https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/coinbase-admits-its-former-data-provider-sold-client-data/

[AGD]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

What I'm saying is, that node operators only know about the routings of their own node. They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve. Most of the node operators are completely unknown btw. So if somebody shares the info about the tx he was routing and how much fee he earned, you still don't know anything about the other nodes and you might never find out. Everybody is free to tell you how much Bitcoin he has, still many people won't tell you.

Just to show you the problem: Try to contact this node with a liquidity of more than 7 BTC 02fb22354383c240f9a04b194d610186cdec1045d961cb7989f254cb7c96498ab5@opwodusf33oapzmpg7nmtpjtdpauaa2m6ym2y6yvm7t2ju34x4jmctqd.onion:9735 and find out how much routings he has and how much fee he earns. If you achieved this (which I doubt you will), you still don't know much, because he can lie to you and also he doesnt know about origins and destinations of the txs he routed.

[OgNasty]

Bitcoin in its current state is not capable of supporting world-wide adoption of Lightning. Other solutions will need to be developed.

Just to put some numbers on this: Let's assume all the following (which is completely unrealistic):

• Everyone uses Taproot
• Every channel opening transaction is one-input-one-ouput
• Every transaction being made is a Lightning channel being opened, and no one makes any other type of transaction
• Every block is optimally full
• Everyone only opens a single channel which they keep open forever

Even assuming all that, then at most you can open 9,000 channels per block, meaning it would take 17 years just to let everyone in the world open a single channel. As soon as you consider that obviously some people need to have multiple channels open for Lightning to work, and obviously people will want to close channels, open new ones, top up their channels, and so on, then that number increases exponentially.

Lightning is great, but it cannot support global adoption without further changes to the base layer.

In addition to this, there are other shortcomings as opposed to traditional transferring of Bitcoin that I find will someday cause problems.  Lightning is not a bad addition to Bitcoin, but it isn't the holy grail it is portrayed to be.  I personally would prefer multiple different methods of scaling but I am not in charge.  I would say that the explosion of alternative crypto blockchains is good evidence I am not alone in this thinking, but they aren't Bitcoin.  Hopefully someday the community can come up with a better scaling solution that is supported by a higher % of crypto participants. 

[Reosta_]

Every single one of us would like to see all the scalability problems to be solved of course. But there is not a perfect system built yet. So after Lightning Network, I guess there will still be some problems. But they won't be on a large scale like now.

[Wind_FURY]

I’m honestly confused with big blockers. They criticize the Lightning Network, because it might have the tendency to centralize, and their proposed solution is to hard fork to bigger blocks, which for them it would be more preferrable to centralize the base layer, reducing security.

Only if a protocol is locked down and free of governance for years like tcp/ip - you can consider that 'decentralized'. Open for all + free to launch server, miners, services, apps whatsover with that - max freedom is there (no pain in terms of capacity + long term planning - where new middle men can & want your toll & fee formost basic use)

Bitcoin is plenty decentralized, you simply can’t accept the fact that the community came into consensus that it likes the Core developers to be the rightful stewards of the network, not those developers who proposed for those forked-shitcoins.

[o_e_l_e_o]

oops

it did

https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/coinbase-admits-its-former-data-provider-sold-client-data/

What has Coinbase, a centralized exchange renowned for being anti-privacy and working with governments and surveillance agencies, selling customer data, got to do with Lightning nodes leaking information about the transactions they are routing? You might as well say that you cannot use Tor nodes because Facebook collect your data. Complete non sequitur.

I personally would prefer multiple different methods of scaling but I am not in charge.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I would worry about splitting the user base across too many solutions. "I want to pay via scaling solution 1", "Oh sorry, I only accept scaling solution 2, and the other merchant down the street uses scaling solution 3". I agree Lightning is not a holy grail - at least not yet. One of nice things about Lightning though is that different pieces of it can be upgraded or changed individually - see Eltoo for example. I think I'd like to see more people adopting and driving the development of Lightning to make it better before we start introducing additional solutions.

[GGUL]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

What I'm saying is, that node operators only know about the routings of their own node. They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve. Most of the node operators are completely unknown btw. So if somebody shares the info about the tx he was routing and how much fee he earned, you still don't know anything about the other nodes and you might never find out. Everybody is free to tell you how much Bitcoin he has, still many people won't tell you.

Your initial statement was :"Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public.".
 And this is a true statement. From this statement another true statement follows:
 If node operators make their data public, then everything will be bad with privacy in LN.

No one can guarantee that node operators will not do this. You can only believe in it. But, as the English proverb says, "When three know it, all know it".

[franky1]

I’m honestly confused with big blockers. They criticize the Lightning Network, because it might have the tendency to centralize, and their proposed solution is to hard fork to bigger blocks, which for them it would be more preferrable to centralize the base layer, reducing security.

Only if a protocol is locked down and free of governance for years like tcp/ip - you can consider that 'decentralized'. Open for all + free to launch server, miners, services, apps whatsover with that - max freedom is there (no pain in terms of capacity + long term planning - where new middle men can & want your toll & fee formost basic use)

Bitcoin is plenty decentralized, you simply can’t accept the fact that the community came into consensus that it likes the Core developers to be the rightful stewards of the network, not those developers who proposed for those forked-shitcoins.

you really have no clue about history or facts
seriously go check actual blockchain data.. not your friends opinon and dream

it was not those opposing segwit that changed code in their software to create an altcoin
it was the segwit side that arranged the NYA flag to ignore legacy blocks to cause a split.

also compared to 2009 hardware/bandwidth limitations to which satoshi decided 1mb was ok limit
things have moved on since then. on average hardware/internet has increased 33x
yet the blockchain is struggling to get passed only 2.5k tx a block since 2017


what you are finding is average joe just wanting to buy coffee will not want to carry around a desktop computer to make LN payments 'coz decentralised full node required'
they end up not giving a crap about bitcoin and just deposit fiat into a central exchange and have the exchange manage their micropayment millisat token channel. thus avoiding any need of caring worrying,securing bitcoin

its like accepting bank notes. no one cares about securing the bank vault of gold. thats for the vault owner to do and people are not vault owners. they are paper holders.

LN will cause more people to move away from using bitcoin as a full node because they are not doing daily things onchain to want/need to keep a full node open all day everyday

removing bitcoins daily utility makes average joe not be full nodes. leaving only large central services to be the full nodes. (like the NYA guys)

[AGD]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

What I'm saying is, that node operators only know about the routings of their own node. They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve. Most of the node operators are completely unknown btw. So if somebody shares the info about the tx he was routing and how much fee he earned, you still don't know anything about the other nodes and you might never find out. Everybody is free to tell you how much Bitcoin he has, still many people won't tell you.

Your initial statement was :"Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public.".
 And this is a true statement. From this statement another true statement follows:
 If node operators make their data public, then everything will be bad with privacy in LN.

No one can guarantee that node operators will not do this. You can only believe in it. But, as the English proverb says, "When three know it, all know it".

You didn't understand this part:

They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve.

Means, if a node operator makes his data public, he will only lose his own privacy. Just like everyone who makes his finances available to public, because he doesn't know where the money is coming from and where it went to. The english proverb you provided doesn't apply to lightning, because when three know it, only these three now it and the rest of the 12000 nodes doesn't know shit.

[Wind_FURY]

I’m honestly confused with big blockers. They criticize the Lightning Network, because it might have the tendency to centralize, and their proposed solution is to hard fork to bigger blocks, which for them it would be more preferrable to centralize the base layer, reducing security.

Only if a protocol is locked down and free of governance for years like tcp/ip - you can consider that 'decentralized'. Open for all + free to launch server, miners, services, apps whatsover with that - max freedom is there (no pain in terms of capacity + long term planning - where new middle men can & want your toll & fee formost basic use)

Bitcoin is plenty decentralized, you simply can’t accept the fact that the community came into consensus that it likes the Core developers to be the rightful stewards of the network, not those developers who proposed for those forked-shitcoins.

you really have no clue about history or facts
seriously go check actual blockchain data.. not your friends opinon and dream

it was not those opposing segwit that changed code in their software to create an altcoin
it was the segwit side that arranged the NYA flag to ignore legacy blocks to cause a split.

The split? There was never a “split”. It was Bcash that hard forked into an incompatible-with-Bitcoin-shitcoin. Bitcoin continued on without the minority led by Roger Ver, and Jihan Wu. Plus the community has spoken, look at how much little Bcash’s value is compared to Bitcoin today.

[GGUL]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

What I'm saying is, that node operators only know about the routings of their own node. They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve. Most of the node operators are completely unknown btw. So if somebody shares the info about the tx he was routing and how much fee he earned, you still don't know anything about the other nodes and you might never find out. Everybody is free to tell you how much Bitcoin he has, still many people won't tell you.

Your initial statement was :"Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public.".
 And this is a true statement. From this statement another true statement follows:
 If node operators make their data public, then everything will be bad with privacy in LN.

No one can guarantee that node operators will not do this. You can only believe in it. But, as the English proverb says, "When three know it, all know it".

You didn't understand this part:

They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve.

Means, if a node operator makes his data public, he will only lose his own privacy. Just like everyone who makes his finances available to public, because he doesn't know where the money is coming from and where it went to. The english proverb you provided doesn't apply to lightning, because when three know it, only these three now it and the rest of the 12000 nodes doesn't know shit.

Everything is clear with this statement. It works if only one node operator discloses the data. ( and then not always). If we return to your statement again ( and to mine), then "node operators"were used there.

Why did you decide that only ONE node operator will give its data. Where there is one, there are 2, and 3, ... And here everything depends on the number.

Let's take the end users who will not keep the routed nodes. If one end user makes a transaction to another end user, then most likely 2 nodes (the sender node and the recipient node) are enough for the whole world to know about this transaction. And if we take into account that in the future, with a significant development of LN, there will be 98-99% of such end users,then the privacy of LN looks less convincing.

[AGD]

Also applies to the routing amounts. Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public. Spoiler: Most node operators don't do that.

That is, your confidence that LN is confidential is based only on the assumption that node operators will not transmit transaction data to anyone.

Does anyone believe that messengers are confidential, just because they will not share their information with anyone?

What I'm saying is, that node operators only know about the routings of their own node. They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve. Most of the node operators are completely unknown btw. So if somebody shares the info about the tx he was routing and how much fee he earned, you still don't know anything about the other nodes and you might never find out. Everybody is free to tell you how much Bitcoin he has, still many people won't tell you.

Your initial statement was :"Nobody can tell you which amounts are forwarded and which aren't, unless node operators make it public.".
 And this is a true statement. From this statement another true statement follows:
 If node operators make their data public, then everything will be bad with privacy in LN.

No one can guarantee that node operators will not do this. You can only believe in it. But, as the English proverb says, "When three know it, all know it".

You didn't understand this part:

They don't know the origin and they don't know the destination of a transaction unless they started it themselve.

Means, if a node operator makes his data public, he will only lose his own privacy. Just like everyone who makes his finances available to public, because he doesn't know where the money is coming from and where it went to. The english proverb you provided doesn't apply to lightning, because when three know it, only these three now it and the rest of the 12000 nodes doesn't know shit.

Everything is clear with this statement. It works if only one node operator discloses the data. ( and then not always). If we return to your statement again ( and to mine), then "node operators"were used there.

Why did you decide that only ONE node operator will give its data. Where there is one, there are 2, and 3, ... And here everything depends on the number.

Let's take the end users who will not keep the routed nodes. If one end user makes a transaction to another end user, then most likely 2 nodes (the sender node and the recipient node) are enough for the whole world to know about this transaction. And if we take into account that in the future, with a significant development of LN, there will be 98-99% of such end users,then the privacy of LN looks less convincing.

Why are you discussing a non issue? What you say applies to everything: If one person gives something to another person and one or both disclose what they traded in public, then everybody that has this information will know what it was (unless they are lying)
Did you contact the node operator that I have posted to you and did you find out about his routings and fees? No? Instead you are talking about things that you don't know anything about. Try to keep it real! Can you follow my lightning transactions or no? Do you know somebody who can? No? If you want to know about Lightning, than learn about it and we can discuss real things. You obviously can't add something with substance to this topic.