Lightning Network (another proposal to make bitcoin scale)

[marcus_of_augustus]

Mike Hearn wrote a good article on the challenges of developing and testing the lightning network:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e

Yes, the uptime requirements for nodes, concurrency of hot-swappable redundant servers with loaded hot wallets and signing keys, etc. Tough problems. Sounds almost like real banking and payments  

[1538088215]

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[1538088215]

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[cbeast]

Mike Hearn wrote a good article on the challenges of developing and testing the lightning network:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e

Yes, the uptime requirements for nodes, concurrency of hot-swappable redundant servers with loaded hot wallets and signing keys, etc. Tough problems. Sounds almost like real banking and payments  

Except these are engineering problems for a key management system. Key management can be permanently isolated and offline.

[marcus_of_augustus]

Mike Hearn wrote a good article on the challenges of developing and testing the lightning network:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e

Yes, the uptime requirements for nodes, concurrency of hot-swappable redundant servers with loaded hot wallets and signing keys, etc. Tough problems. Sounds almost like real banking and payments  

Except these are engineering problems for a key management system. Key management can be permanently isolated and offline.

You make it sound like "engineering problems" are not tough problems. Note how Bitcoin is hard in theory, even harder in practice.

[cbeast]

Mike Hearn wrote a good article on the challenges of developing and testing the lightning network:

https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e

Yes, the uptime requirements for nodes, concurrency of hot-swappable redundant servers with loaded hot wallets and signing keys, etc. Tough problems. Sounds almost like real banking and payments  

Except these are engineering problems for a key management system. Key management can be permanently isolated and offline.

You make it sound like "engineering problems" are not tough problems. Note how Bitcoin is hard in theory, even harder in practice.

They are hard problems. The principles of Bitcoin have been known for decades. It took Satoshi Nakamoto finding a breakthrough to make it work. The hard part is finding clever ways to use well known principles without taking compromising shortcuts. Compromises like POS are an example. (Note: I am not against POS, but it should be 100% transparent with full identities known and never anonymous or private.) Kludges are okay until elegant solutions are found as long as there is solid backup and redundancy. Breakthroughs are great, but incremental innovations are what wins the day. So SPV as micropayments is an innovation, but making it into a full blown payment system will require building the tools to kludge it together. I am certain an elegant solution can be found because it will challenge our best and brightest.

[BitUsher]

Lightning Network Expected 3rd Q 2016


https://www.coingecko.com/buzz/eric-lombrozo-7-use-cases-lightning-network

Older links --

https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/
https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

[AlexGR]

The paper suggests a soft-cap to combat "Forced Expiration Spam".

An attacker who causes many of the channels to be prematurely closed at once could overwhelm the network.  

What happens in the opposite case: if an attacker tries to fill the channels with unsettled / open transactions, by breaking, say, 100 bitcoins into billions of transactions of few satoshis and letting them intentionally unsettled, so to speak, for the lolz...

I'm thinking whether the LN network can be bloated to such an extent that it becomes unusable, if the proper fee or dust disincentives aren't placed there (?). In general there are very few scenarios where very low cost use can't lead to very low cost abuse.

[BitUsher]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lgYYz3y_hY


Lightning Network as a Directed Graph: Single-Funded Channel Network Topology