Topic: Can Lightning network work decentralized ? (Read 1203 times)

Each business that accepts payments via Lightning will understandably have lots of nodes connected to it.  Each customer they have may elect to open a channel with them if that turns out to be the most convenient and cost-effective option.  It doesn't necessarily imply 'banks'.  

If you count the average number of times each week you buy something from a company versus the number of times you buy or sell something privately with another individual, it's likely that businesses will be the higher number.  So it stands to reason that more channels will be open with businesses than with other individuals.

maybe offtopic but still.

I just want you to know i will run ln node with near zero fees and will connect it to nodes who do the same. It costs me nothing and i will contribute/give back to bitcoin and its community. Least i can do.

Bitcoin forever <3

No not at all because the damage had been done and what will go down in our history books written next to the
section on Tulip Mania is that fees peeked at $55 and following this logic the BTC price should had been £500k
eight years ago.

Took years for main stream to trust digital coins, that trust has been destroyed completely for short term
miner greed and unfortunately BTC has dragged other coins  down instead of upwards like in the past and ETH
had a scaling problem but the miners acted sensible and didn't hike up fees to deal with it.

Any currency used for the exchange of good needs a stable price and the days of 1000% p.a returns will be over as
crypto-coins mature so I will look for a phoenix to rise that might for all I know be bound to the physical price of
gold or oil and not just paper oil/gold that's worth nothing to me.

If fees were in any way correlated to price action, you would have expected BTC to have pumped in March. It did not. Furthermore, many of the alts and Bitcoin Cash have even lower fees than BTC; however, they all fared worse, for the most part.
Also, we really need to get away from this need for total decentralization being necessary. It's never going to happen. There is never going to be a homogeneous distribution of resources, wealth, talent and luck. Someone is always going to have some kind of advantage. BTC is still indeed P2P digital cash.

Yes and I am in 100% agreement with these words before the thugs get sent in as usual to protect the other members of the congregation
and maybe it's time to see some good faith coming from the miners who thought they could rip us off for transactions fees and let them
provide lightning free of charge until a real fix by the development team is put in place to make on-block transactions scale.

We did not change the rules and forget about the excuse of China, Korea or Putin, it was fees that crashed Bitcoin price, plot it on a
graph to get a prognosis of what went wrong.

Sooo... it seems that we have a verdict. EXACTLY like I predicted, LN = centralization, it's easy to see now: https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ There are almost no 'client to client' channels, like the LN enthusiasts predicted. It's just client-to-hub. It's so ironic, people wanted Bitcoin for decentralization and now it's going to get centralized around 'banks' again.

Anti-Cen tries to use 512-bit RSA for Bitcoin keys (archive) (again!).  I suggest that his credibility on any technical topic whatsoever is absolutely zero.


And for sure, explanation of how 512-bit RSA is used in the Lightning Network because Bitcoin developers are ignorant doofuses who lack Anti-Cen’s deep experiential knowledge of distributed databases.

(Your suggestion is excellent, pebwindkraft, as would be known to anybody who knows how to successfully argue a point in a persuasive manner—instead of just starting pointless arguments everywhere.)

This is not mamma and papa banking ...
[/quote]
no its not, sounds more like a childish behaviour trying to hijack every lightning thread here. 
Anti-Cen! Already me and others complained... You try to put your fud and propaganda in every lightning thread. Nobody believes it, but that's a different topic. I propose to open a new task, where you state, that lightning is the piece of shit that you think it is, and explain at a very detailed level, why this is what you think it is. And of course, you can put all your weird assumptions into it (like paying high amounts of pounds/dollars/Euros), and also your excellent predictions of the future. And for sure the funny banksters comparisons.

The advantage of doing so is that you just need to put one comment into all the lightning threads, with a link to your thread ("I already described here, why..."). That gives you a special level of reputation as well. And it doesn't pollute all threads, reduces others from being diverted with funny explanations, which hampers reading experience.  So community would really benefit from a grouping of your arguments into a single thread.

Also, it reduces network traffic, and especially saves space. If you continue to comment on each and every task, it is like bitcoin storing only 227 bytes of tx data on thousands of servers, and based on your own argumentation, this is highly inefficient.

Help us here in the forum to get also more efficient!

Yes banker hubs will sort of balance out because money flows backwards and forwards in both directions and they have huge
amounts of BTC in the ledgers that becomes very liquid unlike me and you who's just have flows going out

See the network map https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/

This is not mamma and papa banking like they were trying to make out and just now the sub-branch, main branch banks
are getting setup ready for fee paying customers

Andreas here said that there are no incentive to become a huge hub because you must keep your private keys with a lot of fund exposed. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-nKuInDq6g

then he said (min 8:28) that LN tends to rebalance with some tecniques, if use route just in 1 direction and your balance is gone, then ln tends to rebalance using route in opposite direction.
seems that ln automatically open new channel. Someone can explain me this better?

I just watched your video. The problem is that a lot of articles/video's do explain the basics but don't explain it all so that's what can be confusing. When I started learning about LN I had to read several articles and piece the info together to really figure out what's going on.

This is the key though:

"A payment channel is a method to make off-chain transactions between two parties. To build up one you need to transact Bitcoins on a 2-of-2-Multisig address. For example, 0.1 bitcoin. 2-of-2 means that both you and the other party have to sign a transaction to make a payment. Like with bank accounts used for your rent deposit.

After both parties have transacted bitcoins to the multisig-address, they build a new transaction – for example, one who pays 0.1 bitcoin to each of them – and sign them. Now the tricky part starts; this transaction is not propagated to the Bitcoin network and not confirmed by the miners, but just shared between both parties involved in the payment channel. Instead of sending it to the network, they can modify the transaction as often as they want. These modifications of the transaction, signed by both parties, can be used to make off-chain payments."

https://btcmanager.com/lightning-network-primer-pt-i-building-payment-channels/

So again, the 'payment channel' is really just a BTC address. So from the ledger perspective, there's no difference if I transfer money to you directly or to the payment channel. It's just a transfer from BTC address 1 to BTC address 2. So the ledger just registers

                       1 BTC
BTC address A ----------> BTC Address B

Where BTC address B could be my wallet but it could also be a multisig address (= payment channel). This is why LN can be integrated because from the ledger perspective nothing even changes.

You did not answer my questions and I love KISS so maybe you need to go back and read what I said again
to understand it because from what you just said I cannot work out if your saying we need one, two or three
blocks of data changed on the BC even if we do play a game of dice over the channel and we roll the dice
700 times

See this link and watch the video about Bob buying Coffee from the coffee shop every day for a month
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.28395400

You really overcomplicate things. Really, from the bitcoin ledger perspective there is NO difference if you send money to me or to a payment channel. Both are just transactions from your BTC wallet to another BTC wallet.

I am trying to follow you so where physical are you saying these private ledgers are held ?
20,000 servers all replicating 10,000,000 private ledgers and trying to keep in sync or
one copy in my wallet and a copy in yours if we are working without middle men (Banks)

The private ledger is 'multisig' so you can prove that I agreed to send you $1 worth in the IOU's we
are using in the private ledger and these IOU's are as good as gold because they are backed
by real BTC on the block-chain that are now locked (Cannot be moved)

Yes just read what you said again and that's three transactions at a cost of $90 instead of one so I
am sure the miners would love you. Locks replace the first two you mention and when the channel
settles the BTC moves on the BC and the miners get $30 at this stage.

Any banking hub holding private ledgers is centralization unless all wallets open up ten
alternative channels they can use so forget propagating my IP-Address or the hubs
public address around 20,000 mining nodes because they are not only burning CPU's out
these days but the bandwidth is massive already

Star type topology of a number of specialist nodes to act as a type of cluster DNS servers
has got to be baked into this cake and I don't really object to that much but they are not
doing this or are but are not being honest about it. Others may not agree with me here

20 billion pings a hour to act as beacons would suit the designers because they are into
complexity, and wasting CPU's, energy and bandwidth as it is so please don't suggest this
to the team.

Come on it now costs 90KWH just to process one transaction and I ran the numbers myself
and came up with 70KWH but forgot to add ISP network  switches into the calculation so yes
it does seem right

That's how LN works. A payment channel is really nothing more than a specific type of a BTC address: it's 'multisig' which means it needs more than 1 signature. And there is a contract stating how much in the channel is mine and how much is yours. Think of it as an escrow account that gets released after, say, 1 month, but in this 1 month both users can change the percentage in the escrow that belongs to me and how much belongs to you.

An example: Let's say we both open a payment channel and we both wire 1 BTC into it. That's 2 onchain transactions, 1 from me into the payment channel and one from you. Now the channel is open, we have 2 BTC in it and the relationship is 50/50. Now we do a bet for 0.25 BTC. You win the bet. So now 1.25 BTC in the payment channel money is yours and 0.75 is mine. We both sign that 'transaction', so we agree that that's the new status of our common money. We keep on betting and I lose time after time. Now 100% of the payment channel is yours. Now we close the payment channel and one ON CHAIN transaction takes place, where the 2 BTC from the payment channel is transfered to your BTC wallet. That's all there is to it.

So in this case there were 3 on chain transactions and we've betted several times, these were free each time. But in the end our bets did cost 3x miner fee.

No, no and no because the only way you can move money on the block-chain is to pay the fees and
this then results in a transaction on the block-chain which then solves nothing.

it has to be locked to ensure that you can settle with the private ledger later.

what your suggesting would in fact result in two transactions on the BC if you spent $50

Bob-BC ---------------> Temp address ----------->Alice-BC
                Monday                                Friday

                                                   

Well to be a useful hub/bank you need to open lots of channels, have the hardware and money to fill the buffers (Trading Capital)
and a 24/7 program running plus network bandwidth and this set up shown blow just won't achieve anything

Claire--David--Pam--You--Harry--Deb--Peter--and Paul

Because if Deb runs out of money on deposit then "You" cannot spend even if your in credit with Harry and
even if we ignore internal fees on the private ledgers we are still in lots of trouble because Pam can close the channel
with you when she is in credit with you for just $1 and you then get to pay the $30 miners fees

Your combined deposits don't propagate up the channels only your spending or earnings propagate

Nothing is locked on the chain. A payment channel is really nothing more than a specific type of a BTC address. So when you open a channel, you simply wire money from your own BTC address into that BTC address, that's all there is to it.

Correct and it locks an amount for Bob and Alice on the chain (I assume that will be free, lock manager)

It was never in the channel as such, just locked on the main block-chain to ensure each party
had money to cover settlement so what really went between Bob and Alice was IOU's backed by insurance if you like


No they are free to open, real BTC on the BC never moved and the $30 miners cannot be split because
money on the BTC block is always sent and the sender pays the costs to send just like sending a letter

Think about it this way. We walk into a casino and both deposit $100 each with the cashier and she gives us both
100 cheap plastic tokens each so we pick a table and play flick the coin but it's only a two player game (Private ledger) and I end up with 190 tokens
and your only left with 10 so then we return to the cashier and the nice lady give me $190 cash and you $10 (Our original
money back) and she then looks at you and says it's custom here for the loser to pick up the settlement charge for us lending
you the table and you now owe the nice lady $30 please (Miners transaction fees)