Lightning Network Observer

[fillippone]

Interesting news from MicroStrategy:

In 2023, the company plans to introduce solutions based on the Lightning Network. Development is already underway, the first developments will be available in the 1st quarter of 2023.

An exciting announcement from Micheal Saylor.
Microstrategy is still a software company, after all.

A breif recap of the news is on various sources.

MICROSTRATEGY TO LAUNCH BITCOIN LIGHTNING SOLUTIONS IN 2023: SAYLOR

Brief excerpt:

"We want to make it possible for any enterprise to spin up Lighting infrastructure in an afternoon" and onboard thousands of employees or customers, Saylor explained. "We want to plug it into enterprise technology and make it a marketing strategy for any forward thinking CMO."

Areas that MicroStrategy is exploring for Lightning services include online content monetization, enterprise marketing, web paywalls, and internal corporate controls. Every chief marketing officer should be able give away satoshis –– Bitcoin’s smaller denomination unit –– as incentive for customers to post reviews or give feedback, Saylor said.

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[n0nce]

"We want to make it possible for any enterprise to spin up Lighting infrastructure in an afternoon" and onboard thousands of employees or customers, Saylor explained. "We want to plug it into enterprise technology and make it a marketing strategy for any forward thinking CMO."

Areas that MicroStrategy is exploring for Lightning services include online content monetization, enterprise marketing, web paywalls, and internal corporate controls. Every chief marketing officer should be able give away satoshis –– Bitcoin’s smaller denomination unit –– as incentive for customers to post reviews or give feedback, Saylor said.

To be honest, I don't understand why nobody has ever simply applied Lightning for rate limiting / anti-botting. That's something they could do.
Replace (mostly pretty stupid) AI, captchas and human workers with a simple payment page for each post, registration and other action prone to spam.

[fillippone]

Jack Mallers wrote a Medium Update as a wrap-up update of all the announcements made back in Miami last year:

Strike Commerce Update

Yo. Today, I’m excited to share an update around the partnerships I announced at Bitcoin 2022.

It's an interesting post, but some bit of information literally blew my mind, even if they were already in Strike's philosophy:

Same goes for our Lightning Network integrations. Our integrations are NOT only for Strike wallets. The QR codes, NFC readers, and whatever other mediums we use to process payments are all open, interoperable, Lightning Network payments.
Anybody using any wallet can pay our partners with whatever wallet they choose.

Really looking forward one of the most ubiquitous implementation of the LN so far

[d5000]

This may be an absolute non-issue, but was mentioned recently in a "Lightning-critical" video in German:

Does anybody know what happened in mid-December that the Lightning node/channel count dropped by more than half according to BitcoinVisuals and LookIntoBitcoin? I don't think it's due to cAPSLOCK's outage, or is it?

I have unfortunately not found any news about this event. It's strange also that 1ml has completely different numbers (16K nodes, while LookIntoBitcoin and LightningVisuals show less than 8K. Unfortunately 1ml doesn't show a chart of the evolution of these numbers in time, or I am missing it, lol).

So it may be the case that it's only a problem of these two websites (perhaps a bug in their Lightning implementation?), but even in this case it may be worthy to notify them to avoid FUD being spread (I don't accuse the video guy above to be a FUDster, he operates Lightning nodes himself and only criticizes some aspects, but big blockers surely will love that "node drop").

Edit: I've seen now this has been already discussed in the Lightning Network FAQ. However, there seemed not to have been a definitive answer for the problem. Maybe still some can bring some insights, but I think it would be better discussing it there and not here. The issue at LookIntoBitcoin / BitcoinVisuals still persists as of January 9.

[Carlton Banks]

Interesting news from MicroStrategy:

...except that's quite similar to saying nothing?

An exciting announcement from Micheal Saylor.

so can we take it you two are being paid to splash big screenshots of this nobody announcing nothing on the front page of the forum?

seriously this Saylor guy is turning into the biggest spam master, and he's got nothing, every single time


...but I think I just hit on an apt nickname: Michael Spamlord

[franky1]

...but I think I just hit on an apt nickname: Michael Spamlord

those that say nothing, but say it to the most people... usually shout the loudest
micheal sayloud
micheal sayless
micheal saylack

dont get me wrong. bitcoin(mainnet, not subnetworks phishing the brand) is strong unique and has utility. and yes there is a good lock and peg mechanism to create subnetworks with future niches..(as long as the peg on the subnetwork is just as secure) but 5 years in the waiting.. LN aint it.
LN tried and stumbled many times.. it does not have a secure monetary policy so always will fail that test, nor has a secure peg(but shh they want to blame user fault)
now its time to forget patience and hope. and instead innovate something new that can actually do a job. innovate both onchain.. and also create a new subnetwork without the LN flaws/bottlenecks

[JayJuanGee]

Interesting news from MicroStrategy:

...except that's quite similar to saying nothing?

An exciting announcement from Micheal Saylor.

so can we take it you two are being paid to splash big screenshots of this nobody announcing nothing on the front page of the forum?

seriously this Saylor guy is turning into the biggest spam master, and he's got nothing, every single time

...but I think I just hit on an apt nickname: Michael Spamlord

Sure Saylor speaks a lot, but it seems that he generally has put his money where his mouth is, and he has been pretty consistent in a lot of ways in terms of seeming to follow a pretty radical investment thesis involving accumulating a pretty damned high quantity of bitcoins, engaging in a lot of bitcoin education (in person) and a lot of materials that he provides publicly and for free.  Relative to his treasury size, he seems to be punching above his weight and surely he seems a lot more bullish and even willing to take a variety of risks that seem quite innovative in a variety of ways... both his personal bitcoins and also his company's ongoing accumulation of bitcoin and also his company seems to have quite a few technical competences too that may well make it quite plausible and possible that he is following up towards developing more and more in the lightning network space. Hiring actual developers seems promising, similar to what Jack Dorsey did in 2016/2017 when Jack was first getting into bitcoin, he was expanding his areas of bitcoin competence by starting to fund developers.

Why such a Saylor naysayer?  What did Saylor (or Microstrategies) ever do to uie pooie?  Can you point on the doll where he made you go "owie, owie," exactly?

  ..

Also, you have been gone from the forum for half a year.. have you been pondering these kinds of profound ideas in recent times?  Do you even remember what is the bitcoins?

[TrustedBitcoiner]

so now that franky1 has single-handedly exposed LN for the vaporware we all knew it was, can we scale the blocksize now?

[franky1]

so now that franky1 has single-handedly exposed LN for the vaporware we all knew it was, can we scale the blocksize now?

not until LN-ers have world domination and turned bitcoin into just a reserve for LN-hub settlement layer, where bitcoin fee's become above $10+ as standard,,  where the only bloat is LN settlements, to then make LN-ers need to scale bitcoin apparently

the master LN plan..
offboard everyone on bitcoin, to LN..... to reduce tx utility on bitcoin.. then after more time(yawn) of then getting LN settlements to fill the blocks then and only then do they want bitcoin scaling

[JayJuanGee]

so now that franky1 has single-handedly exposed LN for the vaporware we all knew it was, can we scale the blocksize now?

not until LN-ers have world domination and turned bitcoin into just a reserve for LN-hub settlement layer, where bitcoin fee's become above $10+ as standard,,  where the only bloat is LN settlements, to then make LN-ers need to scale bitcoin apparently

the master LN plan..
offboard everyone on bitcoin, to LN..... to reduce tx utility on bitcoin.. then after more time(yawn) of then getting LN settlements to fill the blocks then and only then do they want bitcoin scaling

I am glad that we have guys like you franky, who can project 50 to 100 years into the future in order that perhaps we may well be able to avoid those pitfalls when they start playing out, just like you said that they would happen.

[franky1]

I am glad that we have guys like you franky, who can project 50 to 100 years into the future in order that perhaps we may well be able to avoid those pitfalls when they start playing out, just like you said that they would happen.

funny thing is LN fans think that bitcoin shouldnt scale this decade..
..so,  thanks for the confirmation of this ("projecting 50 to 100 years into the future")
.. i guess you missed my subtle yawn of waiting for their plan to actually flourish..
.. waiting for promises to be met
.. waiting for the supposed secure solution without flaws..

here is the funny
LN has been around 5 years.. liquidity=5k btc
taproot has been around 1 year.. liquidity 22k btc
taproot reached its forst 5k coins in 4 months..
taproot most recent escalation by 5k coins in 2 months!! .. says alot about LN's growth factor of 5 years in comparison


havnt ln-ers not realised yet, .. they havnt launched.. their moon plans have not flourished in 5 years
they are just holding up bitcoins evolution with endless promises.. not wanting bitcoin to scale because bitcoiners are suppose to wait for LN to launch.. (in a now projected time of 50 to 100 years)

[JayJuanGee]

funny thing is LN fans think that bitcoin shouldnt scale this decade..
..so,  thanks for the confirmation of this ("projecting 50 to 100 years into the future")
.. i guess you missed my subtle yawn of waiting for their plan to actually flourish..
.. waiting for promises to be met
.. waiting for the supposed secure solution without flaws..

here is the funny
LN has been around 5 years.. liquidity=5k btc
taproot has been around 1 year.. liquidity 20k btc

havnt ln-ers not realised yet, .. they havnt launched.. their moon plans have not flourished in 5 years
they are just holding up bitcoins evolution with endless promises.. not wanting bitcoin to scale because bitcoiners are suppose to wait for LN to launch

I have ONLY started to play around with a couple of lightning wallets within the past year, so I just wanted to be able to use it if I were to be presented with some real life opportunity to transact using the lightning network.

Regarding your last point about bitcoin not scaling very well, are you suggesting that bitcoin should have gone some other route than it did since 2017-2018.. I don't really see anything major to be broken in bitcoin, so surely we have had some challenging episodes this year in terms of some of the people who had been using bitcoin in various leveraging kind of ways - so perhaps some of those kinds of events take away from adoption.. because surely more and more adoption can allow the tools to be put to the test in more ways, and surely there can be differences in various geographical locations too.. so I have had times when I was in other geographical locations that contributed towards me having more opportunties to have bitcoin interactions, but not so much recently for me..

I do believe some of the arguments that some of the increased availability and usage of lighting network has provided a decent amount of relief of the on chain fees, so I had noticed that sometimes the onchain fees are pretty damned low.. and maybe even discouraging use of lightning network too.

[TrustedBitcoiner]

not until LN-ers have world domination and turned bitcoin into just a reserve for LN-hub settlement layer, where bitcoin fee's become above $10+ as standard,,  where the only bloat is LN settlements, to then make LN-ers need to scale bitcoin apparently

scale for thee but not for me

how typical.

[franky1]

you lot dont want bitcoin fees to be sub-penny amounts as thats competition

anyways
when just one exchange can cause a week long congestion of transactions on bitcoin.. bitcoin needs to scale
even if that exchange was to go LN.. when it then wants to settle all those channels.. guess what.. congestion again
LN solves nothing.. just delays things

but you stay in utopian best case scenario.. singing and praising when things play good and ignore/run/get amnesia the many examples of bad
(guess you forgot how LN failed el salvadors chivo wallet (oops your suppose to blame bitcoin, right))
(guess you forgot how LN failed to not fractional reserve (thor turbo) (oops your suppose to call that a feature, right))
(guess you forgot how LN can break its peg (oops your suppose to call that user error, right))
(guess you forgot how after 5 years. the bitcoin tx count is still under 2500 and the fee's are over an hours labour for unbanked country)


do you also need reminding that bitcoin does not leave the bitcoin network and what value is being played with ON ANOTHER NETWORK/SYSTEM is not bitcoin
.. nothing about a LN onion payment resembles bitcoin

need i remind you that LN is not a bitcoin feature solely to function on bitcoin and cant survive without bitcoin
.. yep i said it LN can function without bitcoin (yep without reprogramming/recompiling your LN wallet you can flip a button and play with other currencies)

LN is not a "bitcoin"
its much more emulating other crap subnetworks emulating that they are bitcoin (renBTC, wBTC) many many ways.. differing unit of payment, peg not secure to bitcoin. phishes to be bitcoin but is a different network entirely. yet LN doesnt even have its own blockchain or its own consensus..nor is a onion payment(ln's native tx mothod) something bitcoin recognises


as for saying that LN has taken on the strain to create some slack..
read this topic. where the most prominent LN-ers are showing their relay "events" of only 20-150 A MONTH

bitcoin nodes relay ~150-230 tx every minute

LN gets congested and bottlenecks just trying to route $600
(Average Channel Capacity 0.068 BTC$1,175.57) (2 participants =  average $587.78) per direction


oh lets not forget the whole liquidity thing

if just 7,000,000 people wanted to move 0.02btc($340) EACH.. just 5 hops using a node with one channel route direction
thats needing 840,000btc locked to process those 140k payments..

yep it needs for a 5 x hops needs 6x capacity to enable such hops

so now imagine binances 25m users of 575,000btc
needing to move 5 hops to destinations
requires locking up 3.34m just to process 575k.. whereby those (router/middlemen) of 2.8m of locked value is then stuck as 'outbound' and not spendable by the person that locked funds up.  able to facilitate further routes..  nor able to facilitate further routes..   as it was used to process the first 575k
(in this scenario of 1 channel hopping)

but wait.. let me guess "bottlenecks and payment failures are a feature or user error"
where you suggest they then create another channel set to find another route
thus now 6x becomes 12x locked just to process 1x of payments (rinse/repeat)

now do the multiples
Average Channels per Node 9.45

[n0nce]

Edit: I've seen now this has been already discussed in the Lightning Network FAQ. However, there seemed not to have been a definitive answer for the problem. Maybe still some can bring some insights, but I think it would be better discussing it there and not here. The issue at LookIntoBitcoin / BitcoinVisuals still persists as of January 9.

Looking back at it now, in January 2023, it seems pretty definitive. As I suspected, their node is most probably dodgy / unmaintained. You can actually see that in the last year there were more 'anomalies' (marked in yellow) in bitcoinvisuals' chart. Those anomalies include data gaps, a plateau end of year and the 'crash'. These can be explained by downtimes, closing of some of their own channels (making them reach fewer nodes) and maybe even channel partners closing channels to them, which obviously lets them reach fewer channels on the network.

Especially due to the completely horizontal line from around October, it seems to me like they stopped maintaining their node and it stopped recording data; then probably people closed channels and the capacity crashed.



I am still confident that this has nothing to do with LN itself, because nothing proves me otherwise.
Again, in a decentralized network (even Bitcoin L1) there is no single, clear view of the network and mapping them is a difficult task. For instance, determining the total number of full nodes on the network has always been known to be basically unsolvable and that all the numbers we have are educated estimates.

As we can see now, a month later, https://1ml.com/ recorded no plateau or crash of Lightning balance, as did no other 'LN stats service'; further enforcing my point.

Since only bitcoinvisuals and lookintobitcoin show both plateau from October and crash in December, I am confident that they just use the same / each other's data.

LN aint it.
LN tried and stumbled many times.. it does not have a secure monetary policy so always will fail that test, nor has a secure peg(but shh they want to blame user fault)

If you want to call 2-of-2 multisig transactions an 'insecure peg', go ahead..

Have you had a look at this paper that covers the used scripts, yet?
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

There are also some illustrations and explanations of the scripts in 'Mastering the Lightning Network':
https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook/blob/develop/07_payment_channels.asciidoc

[Carlton Banks]

Why such a Saylor naysayer?

because he spams his face and meaningless "interviews" in every piece of free internet column inches available, seemingly because he wants to become a bitcoin celebrity of some kind (Andreas Antonopoulos was the same kind of character, but even he wasn't as shamelessly obvious as Spamlord here)


so you'll all stop spamming Michael Spamlord's spam, because you aren't spammers, right?

[n0nce]

so you'll all stop spamming Michael Spamlord's spam, because you aren't spammers, right?

I have no 'beef' with Saylor, but he is just not too interesting for me, since he doesn't develop anything in or on Bitcoin / Lightning.
So he's just a big investor. That's not too interesting: 'buy low, sell high', 'look how much BTC we bought', 'investing in Bitcoin is working', etc.

If his company starts building Bitcoin products and contributing to open source (like Blockstream), I'd look into them more. For now though, Microstrategy is just an investor like Tesla and everyone else.

Regarding your last point about bitcoin not scaling very well, are you suggesting that bitcoin should have gone some other route than it did since 2017-2018..

Yes, it's well-known that Franky just wants bigger blocks, but at the same time dislikes BCH. There's a whole thread for discussing with him about that, so let's not derail the LN Observer for this purpose.

[franky1]

n0nce
you got no clue at all
try to do more research and less social drama sucking up to certain people

EG read how the LN payments really flow
https://github.com/lightning/bolts/blob/master/04-onion-routing.md
not your comic book manual of deceptive wording

for people pretending to be observers. your choosy about what you want to see and what you want to close your eyes to,

open your eyes once and a while to the less than perfect case scenarios, you might learn more and while at same time promoting broke things less
you might even start to become risk aware for your own value security. rather than aimlessly think your value is secure

people want a good monetary system that works without the endless worry of funds moving without their consent and without being lost just by things like wanting to settle up or even just sleeping

if you want to observe things about lightning.. actually open your eyes to the flaws too. not be blind and only see the dreams
i know you only want to sales-pitch the "best case".. but try to now ant again open your eyes and observe "normal " case usage.. and maybe one day you might challenge yourself and open your eyes and observe "worse case".. and maybe just maybe you might become risk adverse to want to be making observations that are risk awareness

you have fooled yourself into dream of only best case dreams
the peg is the onion payments.. these are NOT COMMITMENTS!!
also, lets quickly explain commitments..
NEVER is a raw bitcoin transaction format of data of a full bitcoin transaction sent between LN users
they send small datapoints(mainly measured in msat) where each side builds its local commitment and its partners desired commitment via converting datapoints to sign locally and than swap signatures to check partners
(research htlc conversions)

now back to onion payments.
LN funds route around the network via onion payments where there is a different value UNIT that floats around which trigger separate things. the conversion of the value unit. is what your missing the understanding of

bitcoin format transactions do not loop around routed paths from payer to destination across a multi-hop
commitments are just the receipt.. which are not settled thus not secure either

if you think its soo fixed, secure, rigid and perfect. why do you think watchtowers, revokes and many other things are add-ons that become needed
have you even tried to read the malicious stuff of your idolised devs.. saying bitcoiners do not even own their value. that bitcoin is not a system of property ownership even in the link your provided

open your eyes

[JayJuanGee]

Why such a Saylor naysayer?

because he spams his face and meaningless "interviews" in every piece of free internet column inches available, seemingly because he wants to become a bitcoin celebrity of some kind (Andreas Antonopoulos was the same kind of character, but even he wasn't as shamelessly obvious as Spamlord here)

so you'll all stop spamming Michael Spamlord's spam, because you aren't spammers, right?

I look forward to see if Saylor's announcement regarding further involvement in lightning network ends up in any kinds of open source contributions and/or innovations.  It seems that he had not been involved in lightning network for very long, and he had seemed to have had been less interested in the payment network aspects of bitcoin, so his thinking seems to be evolving in terms of being more open to the ideas of developing and building upon payment networks, so yes hopefully there are benefits to the whole lightning network that come from his (or his company's) involvement in such. 

If I come across some information that Saylor and/or his team put out that relates to the lightning network that I find to be interesting (and it has not already been posted or shared) I will forward it (which you call spamming, but you seem to have a way more strict (or would it be perverted?) idea regarding what is spamming, as compared with me - at least when it comes to Saylor).

[d5000]

As we can see now, a month later, https://1ml.com/ recorded no plateau or crash of Lightning balance, as did no other 'LN stats service'; further enforcing my point.

Since only bitcoinvisuals and lookintobitcoin show both plateau from October and crash in December, I am confident that they just use the same / each other's data.

Thank you! That confirms basically my suspicion that these both services have currently a wrong "view" of the network at this moment. It's strange however that it persists for so long this time. I'll try to reach out to them I've reached out to lookintobitcoin.com to see if they can try to reconfigure their nodes to fix the issue. And also perhaps to the youtuber who criticized LN based on this very likely flawed data.