Do you think the Lightning Network will succeed?

[ir.hn]

Since there are a lot of "self moderated" (censored) Lighting threads I decided to open one that is not censored.

Here are the reasons why I think lightning is a failed idea and I would like your input about whether you see it succeeding or not.

1. Lightning is only necessary because the dev team refuses to scale the base layer.  No one would open lightning channels if the fee for getting on the base layer was under 1 cent, which it could be today.  Basically Lightning is a conflict of interest with what is best for bitcoin users and unnecessary centralization of the means of transferal.

2. The lightning network could be repurposed to be much more usable by dropping bitcoin from it entirely.  I have illustrated an idea in 2017

https://web.archive.org/web/20210414170746/https://www.naturehacker.org/2017/10/the-only-100-fully-decentralized-peer.html

that would make it so your "channels" are trusted contacts and each person has their own currency (a database ledger tally of what is owed).  This way the parties can settle with whatever currency they want, be it crypto or toothpicks.  It does require trust, but only with your direct contacts, and there are no on-chain fees for opening or closing a channel.  Such a system could revolutionize the entire world where money is not needed and we can all deal with anyone on earth like we deal with family and close friends.

What are your uncensored thoughts on lightning?

[pooya87]

1. Lightning is only necessary because the dev team refuses to scale the base layer.

When you weren't looking we scaled bitcoin twice this year and nearly 5 years ago!

No one would open lightning channels if the fee for getting on the base layer was under 1 cent

Wrong.
LN provides a very fast way of making virtually unlimited number of transactions in a secure and decentralized way, with the cherry of increased privacy on top.
Whether it costs 1 cent to open a channel or not is not changing that.

Basically Lightning is a conflict of interest with what is best for bitcoin users and unnecessary centralization of the means of transferal.

This is a vague statement. What conflict of what interests? And what do YOU consider "best for bitcoin users" and what is this "centralization" you mention here?

2. The lightning network could be repurposed to be much more usable by dropping bitcoin from it entirely.  I have illustrated an idea in 2017

Sorry, I'm not going to read the link but it's a free world feel free to start a network without a blockchain (ie. LN without bitcoin) and introduce it as a solution and see if people use it or not.
I personally would love to see an innovation...

[buwaytress]

I have not seen evidence where it looks more likely to fail than it will succeed. Same as any crypto being discussed (on-chain or Layer, whichever), every time people talk about success or failure, to me it always comes down to utility and actual scenarios. You want to theorise, great, but let's also see some evidence. And for me the main issue with most crypto's (except Bitcoin) tx volume is I can't tell if it's utility or mere trading.

With Bitcoin, however, you'll find quite a lot of companies either handling Bitcoin payments or using Bitcoin payment solutions over the years. And those still around have slowly adopted scaling upgrades on the base layer (you really haven't been paying attention!) and many are hopping onto LN in some form or other

Among my favourite sources is the stubborn group of merchants in Arnhem who've been going at it for years with Bitcoin, and since Feb 2019, also adding LN. See this.

So when you're bored with theorising on failed ideas and want to see actual evidence of an idea being used for exactly what it was built for, I'd say there's a good place to start. You can ask them for data directly, and ask them if they think LN will succeed, if the numbers aren't enough to tell you.

[BlackHatCoiner]

1. Lightning is only necessary because the dev team refuses to scale the base layer.

It's not just the dev team, FYI. If it was just the dev team, but the rest of us wanted to increase the on-chain capacity, be sure we would.

No one would open lightning channels if the fee for getting on the base layer was under 1 cent, which it could be today.

@pooya87 gave you an answer. However, I'll just say that increasing the block size so much that every transaction fee becomes under 1 cent harms the network in another way you avoid mentioning.

What are your uncensored thoughts on lightning?

To use Bitcoin Cash if you're against LN. Seriously, why do you want to convince us change our whole currency and not use its supposedly uncensored version? Or maybe BSV that is the “original Bitcoin”...

[ir.hn]

To those saying I haven't been paying attention to "on-chain scaling" are you talking about segwit?  That isn't scaling that is trying to remove information from the blocks.  Last I checked transaction fees were still $2.50 and currently bitcoin volume is very low.  Dozens of blockchains have proven you can 10x + bitcoin's blocksize and have no issues whatsoever.  

To me the only question is, how much pain is the community willing to tolerate before they finally scale?  Right now we have already lost 63% of the marketshare of crypto and counting.  Maybe when bitcoin falls to #2 people will reconsider things.

[BlackHatCoiner]

That isn't scaling that is trying to remove information from the blocks.

Making the transactions weight less does mean scale.

Last I checked transaction fees were still $2.50 and currently bitcoin volume is very low.

Wanna re-check? At the moment it's $0.07 for high priority.

Dozens of blockchains have proven you can 10x + bitcoin's blocksize and have no issues whatsoever.

Give us examples. Which ones? And I'm sure I can find bunch of weaknesses.

To me the only question is, how much pain is the community willing to tolerate before they finally scale?

Personally I'm fine with off-chain transactions as they happen instantly and almost for free. No tolerance from BlackHatCoiner.

Maybe when bitcoin falls to #2 people will reconsider things.

Why, again?

[mindrust]

Lightning has already succeeded. Thousands of people in El Salvador use it every day. I heard some other small countries are about to adopt bitcoin so LN will even have a bigger adoption once they do. It is not perfect of course. It has some bugs that needs to be fixed like any other software but LN is the best we got for now.

[pooya87]

[segwit]  That isn't scaling that is trying to remove information from the blocks.

Maybe you should first educate yourself about these changes and learn that there is nothing being "removed" from the blocks before you can criticize them.

Dozens of blockchains have proven you can 10x + bitcoin's blocksize and have no issues whatsoever. 

And last I checked they were saying ethereum is x times better than bitcoin and the main dev Butering was promising fees would never ever in a million years surpass 5 cents. Now people are paying $80 for fees.

To me the only question is, how much pain is the community willing to tolerate before they finally scale?

We are, as we've always been, open to proposals but all we see, like always, is uninformed people using buzzwords.

Right now we have already lost 63% of the marketshare of crypto and counting.  Maybe when bitcoin falls to #2 people will reconsider things.

When the ranking is arbitrary, it doesn't matter where bitcoin stands. In fact dropping to #2 or more is a good thing for the whole market since it would kill the fake ranking and eliminate the shitcoins that gained such big pumps.
We saw signs of such revolution when bitcoin did drop to #2 briefly a couple of years ago when a shitcoin produced a huge supply and slightly pumped to gain a massive market capitalization. Some people realized how fake MC is and how it has nothing to do with marketshare or market dominance...
but apparently not everyone...

[Pmalek]

Like so many other people before you, you are probably suggesting a block size increase right? But you wont get much support for that. Anything that negatively affects the laws and pillars of the Bitcoin blockchain won't be accepted lightly, or at all. Bigger blocks means bigger storage requirements, which equals to less decentralization. Less decentralization = NO.

[Rath_]

LN is preferable only when you regularly make transaction. For example, default LN channel duration is 2 weeks so LN is preferable if you make more than 2 transactions/2 weeks.

Lightning channels do not expire. You are probably referring to a relative timelock of the commitment transaction. If the other peer is honest, you can come back online after a few months and you still will be able to use your channel. If you suspect that the other party might cheat, you just need to open your wallet slightly more frequently than every 2 weeks. A penalty transaction will be broadcast if your wallet detects a fraud attempt.

Also, the default CSV timelock is 144 blocks for regular nodes and 2016 blocks for mobile wallets.

[buwaytress]

To those saying I haven't been paying attention to "on-chain scaling" are you talking about segwit?  That isn't scaling that is trying to remove information from the blocks.  Last I checked transaction fees were still $2.50 and currently bitcoin volume is very low.  Dozens of blockchains have proven you can 10x + bitcoin's blocksize and have no issues whatsoever.  

To me the only question is, how much pain is the community willing to tolerate before they finally scale?  Right now we have already lost 63% of the marketshare of crypto and counting.  Maybe when bitcoin falls to #2 people will reconsider things.

So after taking the pains to explain things to you, you don't respond to the discussions brought up by your topic headline, and instead pick on an argument that isn't even one?

Bitcoin has moved on from scaling as a priority to other development focus. Even its most vocal critics in that time have accepted that. Development is now on privacy.

Last you checked? What are you checking? I'm still paying 1 sat/byte... And you're talking about low volume but asking for scaling? 100s of blockchains can do 1000x bitcoin's blocksize but they don't prove anything except that the utility (again something I talked about that you ignored) there is negligible.

What is the point of an ultra big block or super fast tps that far exceeds the demand? When was the last time you checked for a full big block on one of these big block chains?

And the thing about scalability you guys seem to not get is that altcoins would LOVE to have a scalability problem. Scalability is a headache any developer would love to have. Currently, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the ones supposedly having scalability issues (I don't think they do, but apparently threads like these insist). That's because people actually use them.

How much pain? Well, the companies whining about scalability in 2016/17 but still on legacy wallets apparently still can tolerate a lot of pain. People moving to faux Bitcoin chains for larger blocks instead of adopting actual upgrades apparently can tolerate a lot of pain.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Last I checked transaction fees were still $2.50 and currently bitcoin volume is very low.

I have used bitcoin for years and have never once paid a fee of $2.50. If you are regularly paying this fee, then you need to find a new wallet and educate yourself about fees, because this a failing on your part, not bitcoin's.

Dozens of blockchains have proven you can 10x + bitcoin's blocksize and have no issues whatsoever.

Go and use one of them, then. BSV has blocks of up to 2 GB and a blockchain of over 2,500 GB and rapidly climbing. Due to the increased hardware requirements to support this, they are running a grand total of 49 nodes at the moment. Because of these large blocks taking much longer to propagate through the network, they have frequent stale blocks, and entire chain re-orgs of 6 blocks or more. They have been successfully 51% attacked more than once. And what's even funnier is that ~99% of the data in these ridiculous large blocks are third parties using it for data storage. If you feel that those are "no issues whatsoever", then you can go and use that coin right now.

Right now we have already lost 63% of the marketshare of crypto and counting.

Market cap is meaningless. Market share even more so. In the next hour I could create a new token, mint a trillion of them, sell one of them for $1, and now have the number 1 project by market cap. Do something less extreme a couple of hundred times (which is exactly what is happening with all the endless shitcoins and tokens which keep popping up), and you see why market share means less than nothing.

[Rath_]

It's been a while since i use LN, so i have to ask how common that channel remain opened after passing it's timelock?

I can't really answer that. From my own experience I can tell that it's not that uncommon, especially if you open channels to large nodes. If the other party is the founder, it makes sense for them to wait for you to come back online as commitment transactions usually pay a higher transaction fee than cooperative closes.

[DaveF]

If you look at the numbers, the amount of transactions on lightning appears to be going up all the time as does the amount transacted so from that aspect there is no reason to assume it will not succeed.

What is nice about lightning is that unlike some of the other coins that claim to solve scaling issues, you can run a BTC node and lightning node on a $75 RPi with a $75 hard drive attached to it and be done. So long as you have enough drive space you can run it on a pre-built VM on your home machine for free and once the initial sync is done you will not even notice it's running in the background.

-Dave

[dkbit98]

Here are the reasons why I think lightning is a failed idea and I would like your input about whether you see it succeeding or not.

You can't say something failed when number of nodes, channels and users are growing all the time for Lightning Network.
If you are trying to advertise some altcoins, I can tell you that most if not all of them failed to deliver what they promised.

Lightning is only necessary because the dev team refuses to scale the base layer.

This is not true.
Bitcoin code was chjanged many times on base layer, and some developers formed their own shitcoins and tried this ''revolutionary'' change.
Nothing happened, most of the miners continue mining Bitcoin and result is that you have trolls, scammers and liars like CSW Faketoshi and Roger Ver.
They worked together and then other people left them and fork their own crap.

The lightning network could be repurposed to be much more usable by dropping bitcoin from it entirely.

Lightning Network can work separate from Bitcoin, and there is nothing new about that, you didn't invent warm water again.

What are your uncensored thoughts on lightning?

I didn't notice any heavy censorship in other LN topics, unless you are CSW RV troll who is writing only their propaganda.

[ir.hn]

If you actually mean increase block size when you said "scale", most likely it'll happen after all viable scaling option is exhausted.

That is EXACTLY what I am afraid of.  Bitcoin is being treated like a hobby project not "money for the world".  And what I mean by that is if we wait until all other options are exhausted we will no longer be a contender for money for the world.  In other words it will be too late.

If we want to be digital gold then we will probably end up somewhere in the top 10.  We will become the Peter Schiff of crypto.

Bigger blocks means bigger storage requirements, which equals to less decentralization. Less decentralization = NO.

So there are about 15,000 nodes and each one would need to upgrade to 1TB hard drives?  I will assume at least 50% of them already have a terabyte of storage and a 1TB drive are about $50.  So it would cost the network $375,000 and would probably gain at least 10 Billion in marketcap (just from the news stories of reducing fees) and save 256k transactions per day at least a dollar per transaction (average transaction price is $2.25 currently) so it would save the network at least 93 million dollars a year in fees.  Seems like a good price to pay for under a half-million dollar investment to improve network storage capacity.

[o_e_l_e_o]

So there are about 15,000 nodes and each one would need to upgrade to 1TB hard drives?

It's not just storage, but also the bandwidth and propagation speed of larger blocks. You can see my post above about large blocks on BSV leading to frequent stale blocks and chain re-orgs. For you to receive a block from me, I first have to download it, validate it, and then send it to you. The larger the blocks the longer this takes. The longer this takes, the slower the propagation through the network. The slower the propagation, the more chance of another miner finding a block at the same height and causing a chain split.

So it would cost the network $375,000 and would probably gain at least 10 Billion in marketcap (just from the news stories of reducing fees)

Complete speculation.

and save 256k transactions per day at least a dollar per transaction (average transaction price is $2.25 currently)

Why do you keep repeating this lie? Average transaction price at the moment is 1-2 sats/vbyte, which is around 10-20 cents for most transactions.

[Rath_]

yes LN might be doing lots of 'payments' more then 1-3 payments a day per node. but thats not to buy real goods or do real transactions. thats just for rebalance and tests and debug crap. 

so stop the propaganda rhetoric that bitcoin needs huge capacity of 2gb blocks of billions of transactions a day to support bitcoin users daily needs, where LN is supplying the demand and handling billions of transactions a day.. ITS NOT

Stop making things up.

Over past 30 days @bitfinex processed in terms of percentage of tx count [dep/wd] (for #bitcoin related transactions).

60% #Bitcoin  (L1)
34% #LightningNetwork ⚡️
5% @Liquid_BTC
1% RSK

Top line numbers: Over the past 5 months have routed over 6700 payments worth over 1.7 billion sats earning me about 900k sats in routing fees; I've spent about 100k sats in on-chain fees and rebalancing fees.

6700 payments over 5 months means an average of about 44 payments per day. Note that TheJuice's node has less than 10 BTC capacity and there are many nodes with far more channels and capacity.

[o_e_l_e_o]

why oh why are these altnet fangirls only response to bitcoin solutions "go use another network"

Because your solution to simply make blocks bigger has been tried and failed multiple times already. Why would we go down a path we know doesn't work? If you want to go down that path, then there are dozens of shitcoins for you to choose from. If you want bitcoin to go down that path too, then propose a change on GitHub rather than just constantly whining about it.

which is more than meets real demand of real transactions.

Even if we assume your math is correct, what in 5 years' time when that isn't enough? Increase the block size more? What about in 10 years' time when that isn't enough? Increase it again? What about in 20 year's time? Increase it endlessly? Increases in block size are necessary, which is why we already increased them back in 2017 with SegWit, but they aren't a solution on their own and you can't just increase them indefinitely or you will end up like the failure that is BSV.

[franky1]

Even if we assume your math is correct, what in 5 years' time when that isn't enough? Increase the block size more? What about in 10 years' time when that isn't enough? Increase it again? What about in 20 year's time? Increase it endlessly? Increases in block size are necessary, which is why we already increased them back in 2017 with SegWit, but they aren't a solution on their own and you can't just increase them indefinitely or you will end up like the failure that is BSV.

segwits 'increase in blocksize' did not yield an increase in transaction count, because the cludgy code of "weight" did not cause a more efficiency of transaction data to match the 'block size' bloat increase.
yes block MB is now 1.3mb instead of 1mb but the average transaction count has not 1.3x
what actually happened is people made more 'weighty' scripts/signatures by doing multisig.

segwit made multisig more popular causing more bloat, which then needed taproot to counter the segwit effect(if people decide to shift from segwit to taproot when they transact)

however devs did agree that 4mb block bloat was no longer a harm to the nodes.. so pretending that blocksize of full utility 4mb would harm nodes is a dead propaganda to push.. it was debunked 4  years ago when devs allowed upto 4mb saying its safe.
so scribble out that script from your hymn sheet. its dead. obsolete

but while on the subject thank you for admitting that increases are needed(straight after arguing why they shouldnt be done(facepalm)). but these increases should not in the form of allowing more bloat in MB sizes, but instead allowing more transaction utility of that new size. which can be achieved by removing the cludgy "weight" code and just having a full transaction utility of upto 4mb. instead of being beholden to the 1mb base plus 3mb weight cludgy mis-count of data

as for the future of 20 years time.. well if you now want to revert back to kodaks 1999 fear of digital storage of photo's using the floppy disk arguments of 1.44mb storage space never being sustainable for 35 pictures of high resolution.. well we are in 2021 now and guess what. we have moved passed 1.44mb floppies. we are no in the realms of 1tb microxd cards the size of a fingernail.
yes high-res photos of 2021 are more then 2mb per photo. something kodak cried would never be possible to cope with on old storage theory.

so take that as a lesson when you want to talk about "but what about in 20 years", the answer is, storage and bandwidth is moving forward faster than bitcoins scaling is.
2010 had users on an average 0.5mb broadband. now average speeds are not 5mb/s(10x) nor 10mb/s(20x) but 50mb/s(100x)[speedtest]
100x internet scaling in 10 years and 1,000,000 portable storage scaling in 20 years

we are no longer in dial-up era we are in fibre optic era.
so please dont use old outdated and debunks rhetoric propaganda. stop using old scripts from the altnet support group. think outside of the box if you truly love being outside the block.. and think for yourself.

i know you want to hinder bitcoin scaling to give LN a niche need, using propaganda of bitcoin flaws to sell LN as a utopian place people should move across to.. but that niche option is not there due to technical hardware limitations of physics on bitcoin. its a political/commercial decision by devs that like altnets.

just accept it.
sure advertise LN as a separate network for the things that it can do differently than bitcoin. highlighting the differences. but dont even dare try to FUD propagandise that bitcoin is broke to try advertising LN as bitcoin2.0