Topic: [2019-12-03] Bitfinex ENABLED the Lighning Network on their platform (Read 254 times)

Someone should inform Peter Schiff, it appears that Bitfinex is also the first to provide the cryptospace of an easy access to invest in one of the oldest store of value in history. Gold hehe. There will not be a proof of audit, however hehehe.



Tether Gold "represents ownership of one troy fine ounce of physical gold on a specific gold bar," a press release said Thursday. The new stablecoins, with the XAU₮ ticker, will be issued on ethereum and tron as ERC-20 and TRC20 tokens.

"Tether Gold is launching in response to the growing demand for a digital asset that provides exposure to the world's most enduring asset and a geopolitical need for an alternative financial system," a spokesperson said in an email.

Source https://www.coindesk.com/tether-says-its-newest-stablecoin-is-backed-by-gold-in-swiss-vault

Bitmex now Support Lightning network too
A new report from the hugely popular exchange BitMEX sheds some light on the continued development of the Lightning Network. According to company executives, Bitcoin’s Lightning Network usage far surpassed previous expectations for the second-layer protocol. The news showcases the benefits associated with a Lightning Network integration, as well as a growing desire by investors to participate in this unique off-chain scaling solution.
https://www.bitcoinlightning.com/bitmex-gives-update-on-lightning-network-integration/

now we can deposit btc with lightning network at bitmex, i think in 2020, poloniex, coinbase and other market wil support too.

Thanks. It will promise to be a fantastic day for people in general and especially traders because arbitrage opportunities can be exploited even faster now transactions are being accepted instantly.

The main reason for Tether to have issued tokens on other networks is to provide traders faster settlement. Ethereum generally takes 2-3 minutes while Bitcoin could take up to or over an hour, but with LN it only takes a few seconds.

Trading pairs which nobody but gamblers use. Bitcoin won't lose shit if all the alts just disappear today. Maybe the blockchain will get a little bit more crowded but that's it. Losing shitcoin/btc pairs is not important at all.

The real pair which really matters is usd/btc.

ahhh, so they're actually taking the Tether coins multi-platform? I wonder which platform they'll use to roll out Tether-over-Lightning on? One would assume Omni.

@BitHodler it seems like it may not be so complicated, possibly Tether will be running in payment channels in the near future (i.e. perhaps as early as first half of next year). It depends how hard it is to get the Omni platform & protocol working in Lightning channels, but seeing as they're just colored Bitcoins running on the Bitcoin blockchain, the obstacles aren't so huge. The issue with enabling atomic swaps directly on the Lightnning network will remain though.



could be worse, but that's still 100 satoshis for a Lightning transaction, bear in mind that regular Lightning needs segwit addresses to work, and the cheapest segwit transaction is ~ 110 satoshis (although that's a 1 input 1 output transaction, generally impractical for a big exchange to actually do). So 10 satoshis difference isn't so fantastic a discount. They're literally throwing crumbs at you.

Also, I imagine alot of Bitfinex clients might open a direct channel with the Bitfinex node, makes sense to cut out any nodes inbetween if that's who your primary business is with. And with a direct channel, transactions can be as cheap as 0.001 satoshis (yes, that's 1/100 of 1 satoshi) per transaction, or at least that's the configured default in Lightning node software.

So although it looks cheap compared to their on-chain fees, Bitfinex are adding a huge markup to what the base costs are. And on reflection, quoting "LNX" fees is really dumb, do they have an "LNX" order book too? I feel underconfident in Bitfinex considering the way they've done this, and I understand something about it. Someone who doesn't really get the underlying concepts is gonna say to themselves "but I don't want this LNX stuff", they've pretty much ensured the continuation of the "actually an altcoin" angle.

Lightning does use different units to on-chain Bitcoin: milli-satoshis. This LNX thing is completely made up and confusing. This makes me think Bitfinex have no clue what they're doing, and that this is going to cause problems instead of solve them.

Bring on the competition, it's not hard to compete with this offering



right, but Bitfinex can really minimize opening fees, they can get their users to absorb most of that cost. Only if a client deposits fiat and withdraws BTC would they need to rebalance with more outgoing channels, and they'll have plenty of buffered outgoing balance slushing around as a consequence of people opening inbound channels to them anyway.

Merchants don't have to be exposed to the volatility. That's what centralized payment gateways are for. In this case, the ShitPay's of this world have to hedge the volatility, not the merchants themselves because they are paid in fiat. Also, price instability isn't an issue. It's present in every single emerging asset class that's speculative and lacks liquidity.

FYI; People will only open a payment channel if they plan to conduct more than one transaction, either at the same day or at a later stage.

Litecoin has had an active Lightning main-net for quite a while now. No one cares about Litecoin. It's an illiquid shitcoin. Litecoin's Lightning liquidity counts $6000 versus $6,000,000 for Bitcoin.

given bitfinex's size and the fact that exchanges dominate on-chain usage, i have to think it'll have a noticeable effect.

this seems like a pretty good incentive for customers to use it too:

I'll be the first to admit I still haven't wrapped my head around this area.

How big a deal and how useful to the system will Bitfinex offering their node to people be? Will it benefit the network as a whole?

They seem to be listing it as LNX on the deposit page which is a bit weird.

They use both Ethereum and Bitcoin. In fact, they also issue USDT on Tron (TRX) now. With Bitcoin, they use the Omni Protocol to anchor transactions to the blockchain -- not sure that would work with Lightning.

Ethereum's version of Lightning is state channels on the Raiden Network. It's in alpha. I'm having trouble finding much information on network statistics but I believe this is the contract: https://etherscan.io/token/0x255aa6df07540cb5d3d297f0d0d4d84cb52bc8e6

Sure, but it's not "The" Lightning network in this case. I think Tether (USDT for anyone who doesn't know) is moving or already moved over to become an Ethereum-based token. That means it'll be using the Ethereum payment channel tech, which is necessarily rather different in the way it's put together. And I have no idea how ready that tech is, anyone into Ethereum know?


I get where you're going with this (or maybe not, but someone else is bound to think it): atomic swaps for USDT/BTC. It's not going to happen anytime soon, there's a problem that no-one's solved yet; there's too much incentive for both parties to keep watching the exchange rate during the swap, and then the party that can get a better exchange rate by reneging on the swap will just do that, again and again. It'll not be much of a trading innovation if the trades usually fail.

So, hold your horses atomic swappers, it's an intractable issue, and it's probably going to need the design of specific sub-protocol to make it viable. Then the separate payment channel networks can do cross-swaps. But it may remain an unsolvable problem, if a solution was known, we'd know by now.

@CarltonBanks

IIRC, Bitfinex once said that they plan to issue USDT on LN. My question is, how realistic is that? Can tokens be issued on LN and operate similar to how they do on Ethereum?

It is officially "live" NOW. Bitfinex has enabled LN! I didn't expect it to happen so fast to be honest. Looks like we can now deposit/withdraw btc via LN on Bitfinex. Hopefully the others will follow.


https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/1201812641456513024

if you're truly reckless, you can use the wumbo feature to advertise to other lightning nodes that you'll bypass the BTC 0.16777 limit on channel capacity, then you can make channel as big as you like IIRC. Not recommended if you're running as a hot-wallet routing node, but if you set up your Lightning node as public but non-routing with a cold wallet, the risk isn't so great. You mustmustmust know what you are doing to get this right though, everything is your fault if it goes wrong.



Maybe that's an unfriendly & jargon-ey way to dissuade all but the most enthusiastic people from using it. Bitfinex would be unlikely to admit to such a thing if it were true. Or possibly it is just dumb marketing, who knows



well I think all exchanges are better placed than most other people to handle secure hot-wallet web systems, but of course, Bitfinex are amongst the more egregious failures in that department also. It's not inherently more risky than simply running an on-chain hot wallet though, I'm more concerned that Bitfinex clients are gonna get burned than the exchange itself.


To reiterate: anyone thinking of using this should setup their Lightning node to be non-routing, and for their spending keys to be password protected (and preferably kept offline).

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The advantages of this are potentially huge to both Bitfinex and it's customers. There's significant friction in deposits and withdrawals on exchanges, both the waiting for confirms and paying the on-chain fee. Also, amounts of BTC close to the on-chain withdrawal fees suddenly become viable to trade with, the minimum viable amount can have a much lower floor. If Bitfinex are smart, they'll take little or no withdrawal fee from clients, and in return they could get more liquidity, as people will be less inhibited from trading if they can deposit or withdraw fast and cheap in small quantities.

It is true. However, they refer to the lightning deposit/withdrawal button as LNX, which is very confusing because it could just as easily be a shit token. It would be better to have it be Bitcoin Lightning, or under the same tab as Bitcoin where you can specify if you want to use the main chain or the second layer.

I like how the most controversial exchange in the crypto sphere does the most for Bitcoin to be adopted by the mass, and have its throughput increase, and that despite there being risks attached to accepting lightning deposits and withdrawals for such a large exchange.

https://twitter.com/bitfinex/status/1201812641456513024

Looking at past news, HodHodl was the first exchange which support LN.

I wonder how may people will use LN to deposit their Bitcoin since LN is intended for micro-transaction which need fast confirmation time.

big news if true

https://twitter.com/BitcoinErrorLog/status/1201592790989361157

LN adoption is rising. This is the kind of news I'd like to see more. When LN gets big, a few more exchanges follow finex, none of the shitcoins will survive.

edit: It is LIVE now.