Topic: Announcing the Thunder Network Alpha Release (Read 1075 times)

Visa can buy the blockchain.info, or the thunder network, but there will other providers appear. It cannot buy them all.

Correct, just read this part carefully:
Start with reading the Lightning Network wallpaper and finding ELI5 explanations.

Bitcoin is already cheap; I don't see why this would make a difference as far as that is concerned.

I don't really get the overall idea here, but what caught my attention are the scale and extremely cheap payments. 100k tx/s with only a few thousand nodes is a really great achievement. And with cheap payments,this could entice more people into the bitcoin world.

for me i just see LN and TN as a offchain solution like coinbase/bitstamp.

you have to send funds to a special address (just like depositing funds to a service)

then you have to log into a client (just like logging into a service) and then move funds within that system(service)..

the stupid things is that not everyone is going to be sending funds to the same destination when they do transactions within LN/TN and so the settling of funds WONT be aggregating from 100,000 inputs with 100,000 outputs.. into 1input 1output

instead these settling transactions will be HUGE, yet still limited to the onchain capacity of todays ~2500, near future segwits ~3800 or next years roadmap of ~7600 input/outputs per 10 minutes

infact many people are suggesting that the ONCHAIN blocks will start to show just ONE large transaction from a LN/TN that will cause issues for people wanting to use onchain transactions. which will also cause issues because the headache of getting the LN lock transaction accepted will mean people will end up forced to lock in more funds on a more long term bases into LN/TN for the chance of actually transacting, rather than for people to voluntarily just use LN/TN now and again, due to the fact that the onchain blocks are always crammed with a LN/TN transaction bloating the block.

imagine it instead of 2500 transactions from 2500 different people.. there will be 1 transaction with 2500 input/outputs that have been aggregated from maybe 3500 different people. some may say thats a benefit.. but if every block is filled with this single transaction.. then there wont be much left for people to use onchain transactions.

knowing that the average person makes ~42 payments a month (statistics of both bitcoin and visa) a system such as LN/TN is not the ultimate solution for scaling purely because of the inability to aggregate lots of peoples different destinations into just a few.

the 2 times LN/TN would be useful. is:
for something like coinbase where people move funds between deposit addresses but the ultimate settlement transaction is coinbases single coldstore address.

gamblers who send funds to the same 'bet' address multiple times a day, as it would appear as just one input/output(per user) at settlement as oppose to multiple input output per day onchain multiplied by users

in my eyes LN/TN will only be useful where there is an ultimate static destination that receives alot off volume per day or week from the same collection of users, rather than a system anyone can use to buy anything from anywhere really quickly

I'll obviously have to read more and maybe try this out soon, but it was my understanding that the speed of 100 000 TPS was more based on available nodes? With fewer nodes, fewer transactions? If that is the case then this technology seems pretty scalable to whatever is required by the network.

This seems like a bit 'overkill'. Bitcoin is far away from needing 100 000 TPS. I'd be very satisfied if we had a capacity of 1000 TPS at the moment as there would never be some kind of backlog due to inadequate amount of space (unless there was some kind of attack) for quite some time.

There might be attack vectors for the off-chain system, but that is rather unavoidable. However, I'm certain that those will be discovered and prevented on time (or at least most of them).

i guess this will be centralized enough to make me hate it, like LN is, i f it destroy the fundamental of bitcoin regarding decentralization

then it has no merit to even try to fix impertive issues about the bitcoin capacity

This will definitely be awesome if it works as expected after being stress tested but I'm just a little wary of off-chain payments. I believe this could potentially open doors to new avenues of attack that wouldn't be possible on the main blockchain.

Wow this sounds amazing, i paticullarly liked the "better than visa scale" comment.  more than a 100000 TPS 

It doesn't explain how routing problem is solved. Alice paying Ken needs to find a route via Dan, Eve and John. Any network maintained by peers will face the same problems as mesh networks:


If you ignore this problem you will likely repeat http://www.zdnet.com/article/painful-lesson-in-olpc-mesh-networking-for-mongolians/.

Looks like an interesting prospect but it's very, very early to discuss its merits.

They can't.

Interesting. Source?

"You fear"? Speculation is not how we determine flaws. Anyhow, people need to be much more open to these solutions especially since they're in very early stages of their development. There are bound to be problems, flaws and whatnot and that is not necessarily a bad thing (at this point in the cycle).

That is not true. I just do not personally trust blockstream, and I feel that they effectively have much too much power of Bitcoin currently. From what I can tell they effectively have a veto ability when anyone attempts to make any changes to the consensus rules. I do not believe that any one entity should have the ability to veto any proposed change.

If a scammer were to open a payment channel and engage in a series of transactions that results in his "balance" being zero or effectively zero (very small economic amounts) then he will have nothing to lose in attempting to broadcast an "old" closing transaction that would potentially result in him receiving more btc then what he is owed from the payment channel. The payment channel will be protected by the "penalty" transaction that they can broadcast, however it is not a 100% guarantee that this will successfully confirm and in the off chance that it does not then the scammer is able to steal from the payment channel. If the "penalty" transaction does confirm then the scammer will have lost nothing because he was owned nothing in the first place.

Each time a new transaction on the LN is done, a series of transactions must be signed and sent to the various counter-parties in a very specific order. I fear that LN clients will potentially be tricked into thinking that they have received a signed transaction from the other party when in fact it has not and/or being tricked into sending a signed transaction in the incorrect order, potentially exposing the owner to risk of loss.

As it stands now, it is fairly trivial to have a wallet stored entirely offline, even one that is used several times per day. The number of signed transactions required to complete a LN transaction effectively makes it impossible to keep funds continued in a payment channel offline.

Of course, everyone has the right intentions besides Blockstream. 

What kind of flaws are we talking about? I'm not sure where you've gotten your information from. Most of the "flaws" (that I've read about) was just 'ranting' in articles about how they will not be able to solve the decentralized routing and similar engineering tasks.

I don't think this is strange. I trust that blockchain.info's best interests are aligned with that of Bitcoin. I cannot say the same with blockstream. 

Maybe I was misinterpreting the announcement. I was hoping that bc.i was able to resolve some of the many flaws with LN. 

Strange.

Not really, no. You are speculating, just like everyone, as to what is going to happen with the fees. Whether you like it or not, there is no such thing as 'mainstream' adoption and a 'mainchain only Bitcoin'.

I have one concern with these off-chain solutions. We are bargaining on transactions increasing in future to a level where it will replace the block rewards and still make it profitable for miners to mine, because they will rely on miners fees from these transactions to cover their cost.

If we move over to off-chain solutions to do the bulk of the transactions, we will see a decline in on-chain transactions and we would never reach a level where miners fees increase enough to make it viable for miners to continue mining.

Do I still understand it correctly?

This makes me a little bit less uncomfortable with LN, however I would say that I am still overall opposed to LN.

I would be interested in reading the white-paper on the Thunder Network and am curious to see how it compares to LN. Does anyone have a link to the White-paper and/or know if one exists?

No. A system that they have no control of is of no use to them. Additionally, they can't kill Bitcoin in any form by buying any kind of companies. Besides, this is open source. Although I'm going to wait for someone to conduct and publish the results before I believe these claims as well.

Read the page.

I'll wait for the trustless implementation, thx.