https://sites.google.com/site/bitcoinblocksizedebate/in-support-of-a-block-size-increase/lightning-won-t-be-ready-for-a-while-and-it-has-many-drawbacks
One exists, one doesn't.
Lightning is centralized by design. It's something like a centralized ledger that is capable of pushing out finalized transaction states to the real ledger at anytime.
Drawbacks:
- It screws with the UTXO set, because you can't tell where the money actually is in the system
- It's 100% centralized and could be prone to regulation. I've seen them talk about this and they say if the centralized node starts to whitelist addresses or something to that effect, they'll just start another one.
- It's incredibly complicated and will be prone to errors for the first year or two
- It's not really that useful if you're paying different people with every transaction you do. It's more useful for subscriptions or companies that are paying each other all of the time.
- There's probably more, but I lost interest
The masternode network is decentralized by design and can pretty much do anything a centralized system can do but in a completely decentralized and stable way, including fixing all of these issues with scalability they're having in a much more elegant way.
This is very informative thanks.
Mike Hearn just published an excellent OpEd in arstechnica, which in part discusses the Lightning Network:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/08/op-ed-why-is-bitcoin-forking/
Thanks....I found a link to another article on it I hadn't seen before.
https://medium.com/@octskyward/the-capacity-cliff-586d1bf7715e
Actually, the last link is essential reading.
It raised a question or two on some issues I hadn't considered before. The first one relates to back-ups. Lightning network hubs: what's the fail over plan? Does data just get lost?
What happens to MNs when they are holding a transaction and one or more gets taken down? Nothing, I guess. The MNs just select another group to complete a transaction, because users funds are still in their control during mixing.
Hmm. Interesting.