Topic: Article from Coindesk. Are Bitcoin Developers Losing Faith in Lightning? - page 3. (Read 933 times)

true but for clarity
core devs that 'founded' blockstream (who then invented sister companies like chaincodelabs/brink to appear less centralised(pfft)
were coerced by money funding/sponsors to perceive and develop sandbox tests for CBDC via hyperledger involvement

its funny how CBDC is modelled after a central reserve chain just for the central/commercial bank transfers(reserves network).. with smart contract channel/federations subnetwork for the customers of the commercial banks(not a coincidence)

if they didnt mandate a bitcoin change before november 2017 they would have lost a funding target/goal. and not get paid.. so forced it in august 2017 to be set by november 2017 so that it would unlock their next tranche of income to continue getting paid to work
if they didnt suck up and say how certain features were the future they wouldnt get ongoing R&D funding from sponsors
if they didnt pretend these subnetwork sandboxes were perfect they wouldnt get ongoing funding..

(you can tell they rushed to push segwit. because core node didnt even have the feature of "sign message" in the node GUI for segwit.. and didnt finish it after activation as all they cared about was activating if for their payday target)

they however are now seeing funding dry up now central/commercial banks are doing their own beta tests of CBDC and not needing core devs so now you start to see all the previously sponsored devs and businesses involved of promoting the sandbox tests, start announcing publicly the flaws and admit the faults are bigger then they previously wanted to admit

Ordinals drove the point home that Lightning Network is not going to solve anything and will create new problems for users.  Not to mention the whole thing basically requires you to use a 3rd party which made it dead on arrival as an idea. 

It is nice to hear someone mention side chains (merged mined chains) as a solution.  I think people overlook that satoshi literally gave us an answer to the scaling problem as well as the internet censorship issue with merged mining and Namecoin.  If this was built upon to include merged mining chains for lower cost and faster solutions, NFT storage, data storage, smart contracts, etc. we would have seen Bitcoin mining explode in profitability while developers continued working with Bitcoin and not against it.  Unfortunately, Blockstream had a "scaling solution" they wanted to push and that made it so instead of everything being merged mined and working with Bitcoin, altcoins exploded and took away vital resources and talent from Bitcoin while causing a lot of drama and mistrust that still echoes in the community today.

read the quote you quoted of me, then read what you responded
i never said severe

but anyways
let me guide you word for word

"when fee's came down in 2024"
you too admit and confirm the PEAK(your word severity) was december 16th 2023.. thus "when the fees came down in 2024"
aka come down from peak(severity)

people were not taking the opportunity to move TO LN instead they took the opportunity to LEAVE LN at a faster channel decline than 2022-2023
look at the numbers.. the 2022-2023 number of LN channels were in an area of 80k-73k
but then dipped at a quicker rate down to near ~55k in RECENT MONTHS

also if you check your own charts
you will see that the september 2023 dip in fees's seen a dip in channels again(73k-68k) people were taking the low fee opportunity of sept-oct to LEAVE LN
then the next surge of congestion and fee. which peaked .. december 2023

also
2021-2022 where you and i say "before the attack in 2022" (we both know people started at the start of 2022 noticing ordinals was more then a petty thing,  so you agree the starting point of congestion was mainly from 2022)

here is where you try to disagree but the chart agree's with my stance
the amount of channels "before the attack in 2022" the channels were not "pretty much a plateau" before the attack
you can see that 2021-2022 was LN channel growth from ~50k channels to ~80k channels
(look below the channel chart at the part where you can scroll the chart with the scrollbar
(|    2020    |     2021     |<|     2022     |     2023     | 2024 |>)
                    ~33k   ~80k   ~80k                     73k~65k 55k  
                                      [                        =                       ]

2021 seen a growth of 33k-~80k  before the attack .. so not a plateau before the attack
then as the attack began.. 2022-oct 2023 was 80k-73k (a nearish plateau of small change(slow decline))
YOU mentioned the world plateau so im correcting where you see the "platuea" era you want to suggest.. actually happened

the plateau(your theory of 'plateau', i did not even mention) BEGAN after the 2022 start of congestion not before the 2022 date
which also proves that when bitcoin got congested/annoying. people still did not want to move over to LN as "a solution" after the congestion began
the channels BEFORE the attack(2022) seen 2021 go from 33k-80k based on your image of the chart
so there was no plateau before the attack
the plateau started as the attack started and channel declines when people could take the opportunity after some surge and dip in fee's


when fee's took a fall people took opportunities to LEAVE LN not join
even during the longer congestion people were not joining LN to escape the congestion

If I'm not wrong people were talking about the same thing almost a year ago and what's new? Lightning Network can't solve Bitcoin scaling issues because if it could it would have been implemented. This is just a positive step towards solving the scaling issue but in my opinion it's now worth it.

Bitcoin has done pretty well and now again halving is near and people are discussing this type of shit so that they can prevent the growth of BTC but it won't be possible and it's just a waste of time. People know that by establishing side chains BTC will solve scaling issue it's not dependent on LN networks.

That's true, with a hard fork we can fix a lot of bugs weirdness in Bitcoin protocol that would actually increase the efficiency and capacity. The actual size cap increase would also increase the capacity. SegWit2x was flawed, some of which I knew back then a lot more of it I know now.

But my point is that we are always going to need on-chain scaling and can not rely on other solutions like second layer to fix all scaling concerns.

Your speculation isn't backed by data.
The spam attack on Bitcoin under the codename Ordinals got severe mid 2023 (not 2022) and the peak was at the end of 2023 and start of 2024. (click for larger image)
This shows the mempool from January 2022 till today:

It is clear when the fee is the highest!

The following shows the number of LN channels in the same period (the green square shows the same section where the fee is peaking)

Source: https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-channels

From these two charts it is clear that when the Ordinals Attack got worse and caused the biggest fee spike at the end of 2023 and start of 2024, we had the biggest drop in number of LN channels.
Before the attack in 2022 when the fees are almost always low, the number of LN channels is also pretty much a plateau.

bitcoin scaling is about scaling bitcoin (any talk about needing people to leave bitcoin for other networks is not a scaling solution for bitcoin. its instead a abandon bitcoin and de-scale bitcoin solution)

subnetworks will become separate offerings of separate niche services, functions for different needs. but this is not to say the solution is to get people to stop using bitcoin and use other networks as "solutions" to bitcoin scaling

lightning is not a solution, its actually the excuse to not offer a bitcoin scaling solution. its the stall/stagnate/delay tactic

lightning wont even have a prosperous future because even LN devs admit it has flaws.
other subnetworks will start from scratch, learn from LN mistakes and offer other niche, utility, services for other features that are not part of bitcoins main function. but those subnetworks have yet to be built

bitcoin still needs to scale. emphasis BITCOIN

---

we have already learned from history that banking systems of bank notes did not scale the utility of gold assets. it actually done the opposite
we should learn from mistakes of the past. not repeat them

Ideally we get a range of scaling solutions for Bitcoin. LN is a great one if you earn and spend in equal amounts on LN. Like say in the future you get paid 0.01 BTC per month from your job on LN, and you spend roughly that amount per month - spending what you make. Like if today we were at the point where you can readily spend Bitcoin, I'd happily have a LN wallet for spending, replenishing it when it gets low with crypto trading profits from an exchange sent over LN from exchange to my LN wallet, that would work great and is totally within the use cases of LN. But its not useful for people who are mostly going to have one-way payments, either receiving of paying.

And honestly the average person would probably use some LN service where they say pay a few bucks a month or whatever to get liquidity and rebalancing handled for them and they don't have to worry about it. I know there is already an industry of LN liquidity providers, though I have no idea if the costs are affordable enough to make it a viable option for the average person. Sure that is "centralized", but most people aren't going to care about that, they are just going to want to spend their bitcoin and not worry about the technicals and tradeoffs of LN, especially considering LN would act more like a checking account, while you still just hold long term savings in cold addresses.


But there should absolutely be other scaling solutions with different tradeoffs. I think the only real problem with LN is that it was touted as the ONLY scaling solution needed and so the community for the past 5+ years has sorta ignored the problem because LN will be ready by the time people want to start spending bitcoin en masse. And it will be, but also let's see what other scaling solutions can be designed. LN might work really well for some people, but it also might not work well for others. It's a great solution but doesn't work great for every use case. We need multiple scaling solutions to allow Bitcoin to be globally scalable for every use case.

I never believed that Lightning could be really the one and only scaling solution for Bitcoin. A Lightning payment has a completely different character than an on-chain payment - at both sides of each payment. Someone who uses Lightning mainly to "pay things" has to regularly top up the channel. And for those receiving LN there is not only the infrastructure, but also the monitoring requirement. Old channel updates are more dangerous for those who receive Bitcoin frequently (and of course, the intermediate nodes).

It may be controversial what I'll write now, but I think the way to go forward is in this case (and only this one!): follow Ethereum! Ethereum has experienced some progress with Layer-Two solutions, above all with the rollup technology, which made tumble transaction fees. See Bitcoinrollups for a way to implement that in BTC. But there are also some other interesting L2 concepts like Nomic*. I could also imagine a "BTC stablecoin" based on a collateral/lend-based technology similar to Dai, which could be used on all EVM-compatible altcoins. Chain-based L2s have a crucial advantage to LN: they can be used like Bitcoin or any other altcoin basically -- no 24/7 requirement, no major monitoring costs. The only disadvantage to on-chain is that the security is a bit lower.

I still think Lightning is a part of a larger scaling solution. Several times I compared it with a prepaid card. That's how Bitcoiners should think about it - as a specialized micro- to small-payments solution. Not as a layer which has to be run by every single Bitcoin user, but by those who use Bitcoin frequently to make online (or offline) purchases like buying books, VPS, and other relatively low-cost items. For small payments, the attacks described last year are not profitable, so they will most likely never occur.

*The main problem I see for most of these technologies is that they are often using centralized tokens for some PoS/PBFT consensus. But these solutions are mostly open source so they can be forked, and a PoW token could be created for consensus.

Good that we are having a discussion about this. The community needs to put more pressure on devs, otherwise we will get nowhere. LN has been going stale and devs it seems have been running out of fresh ideas.

But Bitcoin is safe. Lightning was never a requirement for Bitcoin and even if it fails, something else will take it's place.

Bitcoin can be made faster so that everyone can enjoy the benefits of truly peer-to-peer transactions.  In order for Bitcoin to be peer-to-peer each party should use their own node.  This will decentralize and strengthen the network. Then we need to remove Replace By Fee(RBF) so that transactions can not be replaced before they are confirmed by the miners. Finally if we use the 4MB allocated to the block size for transactions and eliminate the NFT's from the chain we will quadruple the speed and reduce the fees.

The road blocks can be removed if we stick to the Intended purpose of Bitcoin - "a purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash".

The intended one for bitcoin creation was the buying and selling of goods and services in the digital world of cryptocurrency but that has been sideline and overplayed with investment and that is how I obverse it. I think if really the main purpose of creating bitcoin which was p2p of two customers of the shop as Alice and Bob did in the transaction. And I don't know if you have another intended solution apart from the p2p of buying and selling. You can still tell us your own.  So what is yours?

Lightning is introducing financial intermediaries into every Bitcoin transaction on the Lightning network. This is not the solution.

The solution is to use Bitcoin as it was intended.

Lightning is creating financial intermediaries at every level.  What is also very interesting is, like Lightning, every 3rd party application to date has add 3rd party intermediaries.

The concept is "a purely peer-to-peer form of electronic cash".  - Bitcoin white paper

The problem is that it doesn't fit the current business model of being a 3rd party in every transaction and we are struggling to understand what that means.

If we want Bitcoin to succeed in its vision we have to use it "purely peer-to-peer".

Lightning is anti-Bitcoin.

If there is any solution to the bitcoin network transaction fee to be reduced, I am always support because the Lightening Network is too cumbersome to understand. They said LN is the best to use when the price of bitcoin transaction is high and LN is the solution but I have not seen any solution from LN. So if there is anything that they can do to remove this high transaction fee I will like it. And another thing is that it is the developers information we need and not the third parties information. People are not really using the bitcoin Lightening Network yet it is the Solution to it.

It's possible you may have heard of some of them and not realised.  One of them is blockchain.info and their 'Thunder' client (pretty sure everyone here has heard of blockchain.info).  Blockstream and their 'c-lightning' or 'core-lightning' client are fairly prominent.  Lightning Labs and 'LND' are also pretty widely known.  There's also a 'Zap' wallet which is based on LND.  ACINQ and their 'eclair' client would probably be slightly less recognised.  There's one from Spiral called 'LDK' (which I don't even think I've heard of until just now).  And even Electrum technically has their own implementation (again, I'd imagine most people here have heard of Electrum).  I think there are other ones too. 

The fact that all these competing products exist gives me more cause for confidence than it does skepticism.  Clearly these unrelated developers all recognise the same potential in Lightning and they're all doing what they can to leverage that potential. 

Detractors are free to have their discussions and make their comments, but I'm still of the opinion that words are far less significant than actions.  Some people are actively building, while others are merely talking.  And I'm pretty sure I know which set of those people are going to be more influential in the end.   

Yea I'd figure that are multiple implementations, but knowing that I've never heard of the other implementations as a person that's pretty active in the bitcoin/crypto world(non dev though), is proof that it's probably not being widely tested by non-devs compared to the main lightning implementation.

or we can look at it the realistic way
when fee's came down in 2024 after the 2022-23 bitcoin congestion(fee wars).. people actually closed lots of LN channels and removed their liquidity from LN.. now whats left of locked value for LN is majority held by institutions that want LN to succeed purely because they sponsored alot of bitcoin devs to create LN in the hopes the institutions can make ROI from being LN middlemen offering payment route services/ balance renting(loans/credit/iou).. so thats why the institutions didnt leave but the individuals did leave. because individuals didnt enjoy their LN experiences but were strangleheld locked in due to congestion(until the fee's to unlock/settle came down and made it affordable to leave LN)

the reason why millions of people are not jumping into LN and instead sticking with other options(cex, mainnet use or even trying to use other subnetworks of bitcoin or altcoins) is because LN is FLAWED. and this topic aswell as others are now having confidence to start admitting to the flaws publicly

windfury you are soo wrong yet again
you cant even be bothered to read the NYA or the proposals or code, or anything to back up your mentors narrative you copy and recite like a drone zombie


the reality and fact is(which is backed up by the NYA own words and code and versionbits in the immutible blockchain, is that X2 was a FAKE/empty promise to eventually give the community (at some un-dated future vapour time) 2mb base block IF they first agree to the mandate flag of normal segwit first.  and yep after segwit happened the talk of the 2mb did not continue.. core+NYA got their way so 2mb blocks talk ended as soon as segwit activated

x2 was not a deviation away from core, it was made by core sponsors(nya) to bait and switch the community into complying with segwit via empty promises, basically core+nya came up with a faked second option to make it feel like a choice but all paths lead back to giving core and their sponsors what they wanted, try reading things for once. look at who funded and wrote the NYA of the segwit+2mb(x2)

try learning for once

I'm confused, because if indeed the community would support a hard fork into bigger blocks, then why does Bitcoin need to go through the Segwit soft fork? A hardfork would not only be an opportunity increase the transaction throughput, it would also be an opportunity to make Bitcoin's code cleaner/fix the transaction malleability issue, no?

That "other secret crap" that was behind 2X's proposal was to fork Bitcoin away from the Core Developers.

Since you mentioned Bitcoin payments, I would love to see a world where normal people can run their own *lightweight* bitcoin payment monitors.

Then we wouldn't have to congregate around centralized entities such as Bitpay, Coingate, Coinbase Commerce and the like.

BTCPay Server takes care of this perfectly but I am referring to all the infrastructure you need to set up to make it work - a full node, a LN node, etc. I think there is only Neutrino and some Electrum private servers that are light enough for this currently.