Topic: Article from Coindesk. Are Bitcoin Developers Losing Faith in Lightning? - page 2. (Read 933 times)

bitcoin is not deposited into LN.. bitcoin never leaves the bitcoin network
as for the LN balance that goes back and forth and renegotiated.. they certainly can double spend the UTXO reference across multiple channels. there is no network wide audit in LN(as for who eventually gets to win that actual amount at settling.. only one will and it may not be your rented channel/temp channel)
and secondly assuming the honour of only using one UTXO reference as collateral for one channel.. that becomes.. wait for it "credit limit" thus even in honourable facilitation of liquidity.. the reference is just a reference of credit limit

as for extracting value. there are many ways to cheat the punishments and evade the processes.. this is why LN didnt function via just punishments but now needs things like "watch towers" and other third parties to act as escrow and other means t prevent cheating

heck there are services that do the opposite of honourable credit
look at all the services that have channels that are years old but use that reference to rent temporary channels of inbound balance
the renter is not forming some funding lock to have 50% signing control of the value as that value was locked years ago

they are just shown some meaningless amount/balance from a reference they are not part of. and that can be taken away from them easily as they are not part of the signing process.. the actual UTXO owner can just sign his own tx on his own and broadcast it with a higher fee than the "state" the renter was supposedly given


..
here is the thing
try to put all the fluffy dream utopian promotional words you ever heard about LN into a box. and tape the box up and put it aside
then do this
imagine someone has invited you to put your hard earned value into a system.. and instead of blindly reading fluffy utopia. you decide you want to scrutinise it. and test it for bugs, and battle test it for weaknesses..

now just try to not think of LN as the happy dream they promoted to you. and instead think of it as a financial system that should be scrutinised before risking value in..
have fun finding the flaws instead of finding ways to ignore the flaws.. remember its your value risk you are putting up when you play ignorant or avoid wanting to see things outside of the PR game
dont fear scrutinising something when its your money on the line.. the devs wont refund you

It's not even remotely comparable to that. Because even if you go back and forth inside the channels as much as you like with payments, there is never a way to extract funds which are not deposited in the system, so the process of "calling in" the "debt" is always 100% automatic. The debitor has to do exactly none for it to work. And it works always, because the funds are always there, and they are in the same currency.

The only thing you can try is post an old state, which would be basically "renegotiating illegaly" to whom the funds belong which were already deposited into the system. There is no good analogy in the fiat system for that. Even if you take something like a shared bank account where two parties deposit money and eventually decide to settle (everybody taking the money they deposited), and one party tries to defraud the other one taking more, it's not the same thing, because the bank account has no inherent system to assignate the funds to the person they belong to, while LN does have that.

So if you still want to call that "debt", then do as you please, but it has none of the characteristics that make "debt" problematic in the fiat system. The owner of the funds is always controlling them, as long as they monitor the channels for a partner posting old states.

Your understanding is too "micro", it should be more "systematic".

then they choose to settle.. much like a bank can decide to call in the debt
you choosing to settle and pay up the debt or the other party decides to call in the debt. are both are still part of 'buy now pay later' known schemes

the fund locking and unlocking is not part of LN its part of broadcasting NOT TO LN but to bitcoin
when you know the difference between the functions and data thats processed in LN vs whats processed on the bitcoin network then you learn the differences of whats LN and whats Bitcoin

For me, the process of "locking up" the funds when you create a channel is already part of the "payment" process. Because the way LN is set up, with the money you lock, the channel partner is directly entitled to force you to pay your debt whenever they want, not when you want to settle.

So I agree with NotATether: considering these funds "debt" makes only sense if you analyse each HTLC separately. It's mainly a "technicality" to call it "debt". The "debt" however has characteristics which no kind of other "debt" in the financial system has. We could say it's a kind of debt where the debitor deposits 100% collateral in the same currency, and there's always security that you will pay your "debt", because the creditor himself (your channel partner) can enforce a channel closing at any time.

Bugs don't count, they are not part of the concept. We should not mix criticism of the concept itself with the discussion about bugs.

the "penalty" is not as strict as you think. its not a guarantee.. enjoy looking into it..

LN is not the bitcoin network. LN is the IOU network
you lock up the collateral on the bitcoin network and pay later when you close the LN channel
inside the LN channel you are using pegged value of unsettled IOU balance
enjoy learning that
you dont pay and settle inside LN.. you buy now pay later inside LN and pay when you close LN to settle
enjoy learning that

when you learn how channel creations are flimsy and penalties are not reinforced/guaranteed. and how bitcoin never leaves the bitcoin network.. you will learn that inside LN things are not as you beleive them to be

Well strictly from the context of the HLTC (or other kind of locking) script, this assumption makes sense, but you gotta remember that there is a penalty for broadcasting an old, previous state of the channel transactions on-chain.

So in the analogy of "debt" (which in the case of LN really only makes sense if it is debt with a collateral), it would be something like you defaulting on the loan but then your whole security deposit is confiscated - which in the case of LN happens to be whatever amount you put on the channel.

But you know what, this doesn't make sense either. Probably because there is no concept of "paying the lender back" on LN because there is no lender and no borrower, it is two parties pooling money together.

But that's not how it works. The Lightning Network is more like an organized mempool than a centralized entity storing those Bitcoins and issuing the users something else within the network. There are no IOUs in Lightning, they are actual Bitcoin transactions that haven't settled in the blockchain yet. A closer comparison for payments in LN might be acceptance of zero-confirmation transactions, not acceptance of payments in IOUs.

"buy now, pay later"
think about it

when using LN as a credit facility. you agree to pay someone at a later date(closing) which is a IOU
credit/iou is debt

yes you can always close the channel and pay off your debt sooner.. and yes if you are not renting balance then its like 0% interest creditline

A:10 -> 0:B:10-> 0:C

A wants to buy something for 5 from C, so enters a credit agreement (smart contract)
A:05 -> 05:B:05-> 05:C

when they close, the debt is settled. but until then A has a 'buy now pay later' where it uses B as a credit line for C. so
A owes B 5
B owes C 5

you can pay off B sooner or later but until close there is IOU waiting
(oh and many ways to default, bankrupt, evade paying(via flaws and bugs). and also many ways the payment can be forced via the other side sooner then you intend(via flaws and bugs),

and ways to scheme/switch the funds to replace you as payee to B for another person as payee to B via a route rebalance so that you then owe someone else in another routepath via re-balance) which in the world of credit/debt is called refinancing or balance transfer

---

here is the thing about currency, regulations of currency, etc..
when B acts like a route.. they are acting as a MSB (money service business) because they are facilitating a payment for another party for a fee. this fee is considered as commission or in terms of credit/debt. the interest/commission

a couple years ago the idiot group pretended that new regulations were a threat to bitcoin devs, miners and bitcoin node users being considered MSB(the lie) the real threat was to the subnetwork scene of routers being considered MSB

i sincerely hope you realise that when acting as a router. you then become a target of regulations of needing to become a MSB, and regulators know this and are currently drafting mechanisms to enforce it(which is why LN devs try to get people to darknet their nodes(and made false promises of privacy, which is broke))
and yes at later dates people will realise having their own locked value as credit collateral,  and enabling their channel to be a route = regulation requirements thus end up just renting balance from a MSB to evade regulations. (but that move is yet to flourish, but keep them in mind for now)

@franky1 is a conman as well.

sick of ur guys's lies. 

@franky1: No, I don't agree with the "LN is debt" analogy. You can always close the channel, and a channel closing does not depend on trust. You only lose the advantage to be able to transact instantly and for low fees, but only until you open a new channel.

You may lose some msats because that's the only part not "backed" on the blockchain all the time, but I don't see msats as a crucial part of LN. LN can work without any problem without msats. In fact, I question severely that the LN projects introduced msats as they probably will be never needed. Of course you can use a smaller unit for the fee rate but IMO this should be rounded up to whole satoshis when calculating the real fee. On the other hand, losing less than 1 sat when closing a channel will also probably never be an issue, you'll probably always pay thousands or more times this amount in transaction fees.

Although it was the minority, obviously it wasn't merely a "dumpster fire". It was starting to make the community see that SegWit will activate with or without the miners support, and it was also starting to gain open support from some of the developers. I believe deep inside, the majority of the Core Developers supported the UASF from a community perspective, but they'll never admit it openly.

Without the UASF, I'm very confident that Jihan Wu and Roger Ver would never have made the move to hard fork to an altcoin. - Barry Silbert would never have made the move to call the leading Bitcoin companies and miners to form the NYA.

bitcoin BTC never leaves the bitcoin network.. fact
we for years been trying to educate people about things like #not-your-key-not-your-coin

when LN is now admitting its flaws technically and economically (where people are now using custodians as work arounds).. realise that was the game plan all along.. its how the sponsors of devs get their ROI. by becoming middlemen scraping LN fee's/rents(loans) from users. as they know they cant play middleman on the bitcoin network. so want to make bitcoin a hazard, hindrance and headache to use, to push people into the LN promotion games

LN msat is a pegged unit of subunits of sats. they are pegged/unsettled credit iou balance of a decimal of a sat
much like how wrapped and pegged units of other subnetworks are not the actual asset..
rBTC wBTC L-BTC are not actual btc

LN payments are not bitcoin/sat payments.. the format is in msat of a onionized payment/invoice.. bitcoin does not understand msats

analogy:
having credit on a credit card does not mean you have bank account savings.. you have debt.
a dollar amount in a debit card is not the same as a dollar amount on a credit card.. and looking at the lack of fiat education shows why people see a big national debt of 34trilltion dollars and how the fiat economy has so many problems.. lack of education

we should not repeat the same silly fool games of playing idiot and pretending that credit/debt is the same as asset ownership
the whole point of bitcoin was to be something different to the uneducated fiat system of admiring credit/debt as something to aim for while selling off assets to accumilate debt (get a credit score to get a mortgage, instead of save up and buy a house in full)

people foolishly (due to bad education at school/lack of education at school, dont know about how money/assets work)
people who have a mortgage think they have ownership rights of a house.. wrong. the bank makes the decisions. if you dont pay the bank they evict you. you are only a few payments away from being evicted if you dont pay the bank. they wont let you stay, its not your home you cant just choose
you have the ilusion of being called a home owner as they dont want the liability of maintaining the home, but funny part is they usually have terms that they want you (they set the demands) on the upgrades you need to do to give equity to the home, they tell you they want you to insure it to protect them
fiat has many economic bait and switch schemes pretending credit cards are better then debit cards, when you learn how fiat economy is messed up you start to see the errors of other systems that play the same games


learn the differences of how things work. learn economics, and learn all the schemes played against people.. and this learning process will enlighten your mind about other things.. it will help you know the difference between bitcoin and LN both technically and economically

you need to learn alot about economics and how the real world works outside of the silly idiot games people play to try to syphon value from you when you fall into their traps.. and LN is the same trap as credit cards

---

LN fails many times as a technology, but also economically.
its not the same asset model as bitcoin.. its a debt/unsettled(unconfirmed) IOU model like credit card.

analogy
dont be fooled when visa credit cards say they "work ontop bank wire-transfer networks" credit cards are beneath assets and real savings/investments. we should not hold debt to a higher standard or hierarchy or present debt as something people should prefer or think is better then debit cards/actual savings/investments

Adding a thought about the "subnetwork" controversy.

Yes, I agree actually with franky1 that "subnetworks" are not exactly the same than the Bitcoin network. Transactions that are shared only by a subset of the nodes do not have the same security than on-chain Bitcoin transaction, be it LN or sidechains.

But we have to distinguish between Bitcoin as a currency and Bitcoin as a core technology (i.e. limiting this technology to "on-chain Bitcoin transactions" or "Layer 1").

The Bitcoin currency can circulate on all kinds of different technological platforms and solutions. Just like fiat can do that too: We can have physical cash (coins/banknotes), credit cards, bank accounts, prepaid solutions and maybe other exotic means of payment an storage. All of these have different characteristics, some have risks associated that others don't have. Same with Bitcoin: if you chose to only use a subnetwork, then you have some tradeoffs, but you are using the same currency.

But we would never say that a US dollar payment is not an USD payment because it was made with a credit card.

I would even argue that Lightning shares more with the "core Bitcoin technology" than what a credit card-based technology (censorable, depending on a centralized payment provider) shares with fiat coins and banknotes (difficult to censor, private). Lightning is also uncensorable, for example - while you could censor a route inside the network, you can't prevent the censored user to simply close the channel. So all what can be done by a malicious third party is to lock another party out of a particular channel, but not to block the funds (like banks can do). Centralized wallets are much more similar to the "credit card"/"bank-based" model than LN, even if the users can use them to transact on-chain.

Also, while Lightning depends on third parties in some way, it gives total liberty to choose your third party. With credit cards, you have only three major international providers, and even if you count each bank separately, there aren't that many options. On LN you have thousands of nodes you can open a channel with, and many of them are not even for-profit entities. And if you aren't satisfied with the existing providers you can set up one on your own.

I'm of the view that BIP91 is what broke the deadlock, so it I guess I don't agree with either of you.  UASF was a dumpster fire from start to fizzled out.  Looks like franky1 is so paranoid about conspiracies and cultists, he's too blind to recognise when individuals have different opinions (purely because no one shares franky1's moronic and delusional opinions). 

Man I don't think Liightning has failed at all. Sure if you look at L2 you got tons of Ethereum and altcoin networks doing billions in volume BUT that's mainly defi and memecoin games etc that's not really real utility, anybody including devs can admit that internally.

At least Lightning volume is all actual transactions actual utility.

We all know that's what's important in the end for Bitcoin.

Of course you would show that image to everyone in the forum without context and without the source.

This is the source, it's from Reddit /r/btc, the home of the big blockers, https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/8golyn/what_caused_the_miners_to_activate_segwit_threat/

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And for the context, that image illustrates that actual point that Jihan Wu and the miners cabal are working together with the signatories of the New York Agreement. In fact, they were also signatories of the agreement. The formation of the NYA also proved that desperation among them was starting because the UASF was not going to concede. It was actually starting to win some of the Core Developer's support, like Eric Lombrozo.

Newbies, study history, https://learn.saylor.org/mod/book/view.php?id=30784

wrong again.. you are stuck in doomad nonsense scripts of 2018

here i showed you and him(many times and many topics) a nice colourful image of the versionbit and user agents of the era..(you can verify it with blockdata and other stats)

blueline reaching its threshold, triggered the redline to then go from natural wiggles of 45% to unnatural /^-\ 100%

as you can see UASF didnt even get 20% popularity!!

now go do your research
even doomad occasionally realises he gets debunked and then comes to his senses and realises it was not UASF

the closest thing to an abbreviated term would be a ENAHF(economic node assisted hard fork)
however most commonly referred to it as the NYA agreement

due to how the NYA made old blocks get rejected so only new versionbit segwit flagging blocks got seen (the unnatural/^-\ rise to unnatural 100%)
NYA done its job by fake promising a later 2mb base, as long as everyon fell into line against their mandated blackmail of rejecting old blocks if people didnt fall into line... and as soon as segwit activated by the NYC scheme. the talk of a later 2mb base ended and the promise got broken


go read the code, go learn the NYA agreement and go verify the blockdata.

if you realy want to beleive one of your mentors clearer days of sounding as close to the truth as possible where he shows a bit of bravery to admit he was wrong and shown he could do some research

the whole LN network runs on third party.. its the entire business model of LN (using other parties to hot potato/pass the parcel of borrowed value)
learn payment hops
learn routing
learn channel partners

even if you lock your value into a bitcoin utxo on the bitcoin network and then reference it to set up a channel on the lightning network with someone else(channel partner). you only adjust your unsettled contract of IOU with/to go to your channel partner and then using onion agreements ask them to then use their balance of unsettled iou contract with their other partner, and so on and so on until the destination.

LN does not set the destination in the contract and then relay the contract(TX) around the network to settle... LN is nothing like how bitcoin pays a destination

come on its LN 101, basic stuff

Fees coming down, in my book, is when fee enters 1 digit rate. So they haven't actually come down, it is just not as terrible as it once were. Otherwise the average fee since February is 20-ish sat/vb.
And the decline in the number of channels intensified as we set the ATH in fee rate then continued as they remained high.

You can run a LN node just like you can run a Bitcoin node and connect to the network to send/receive transactions. There is no need for a third party.

frankandbeans says anyone debating him is "wrong" and he wants you to learn, BUT the "correct information" that he has posted is a conspiracy theory made inside his own mind that even big blocker Deadalnix himself would find very VERY foolish and laughable.

 

This gaslighting-4D Chess of yours will not work frankandbeans.

Newbies, it was the UASF that activated Segwit, https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/moving-towards-user-activated-soft-fork-activation-1805060

Study Bitcoin history. Study BIP-148.