Topic: Criticisms of the Lightning Network - page 4. (Read 1471 times)

That's interesting. Xian01 had been posting his Lightning Network node stats in the Lightning Network Discussion thread before it was closed and he actually managed to earn a few satoshis. If I recall correctly, he was using LND with its built-in autopilot. Here's one of his posts.


The Lightning Network experienced a DDoS attack in March last year. 20% of all nodes were down at that time due to the attack.

Another criticism is, how secure is Lightning? Has it experienced any attacks of some kind? That should worry the users, because we simply don't know.

I believe the reason why no one has yet shown any interest in attacking Lightning, is because the total capacity is not that big yet.

How much in total in USD was commited to the DAO?

I've seen this discussion going towards the financial side of running a lightning node... Just to make sure no urban legends get created, i decided to share my own statistics..

Just some background info: I've been running a lightning node from before reasonably good lightning node explorers were around... Basically from the moment the first relatively stable beta version of c-lightning was released (once a week i still build c-lightning straight from the head branch on github).
I've used lightning-charged on top of c-lightning and a homebrewn payment system on top of lightning-charged for a long time. Recently i retired my own code and lightning-charged, and put btcpay on top of my c-lightning node. I've created hundreds of invoices and actually received +100 payments (so far).

Now, for the actual, up-to-date, statistics of my node:

So... currently 17 open channels, 7 with funds on my side of the channel. Dozens of other channels have been closed since i started running a node.

All of them have funds on the other side of the channel

yup... That's right... A grand total of 0 msatoshi in fees made during the months i've been running the node  

The minimum_depth (a number of confirmations) is usually greater than 1, so it takes more than 10 minutes to fund a channel. The timelock is negotiated before funding a channel and it is usually 144 blocks (~1 day). For example, Eclair Mobile clients become an exception if the user enables payment receiving over the LN. In such case, the timelock is extented to 720 blocks (~5 days) for a local uncooperative close and to 2016 blocks (~2 weeks) for a remote one.


A 1/10 th satoshi fee sounds better to me than a 1000 satoshi one. Miners already receive a block reward while node operators don't get anything.

But you need 2 on-chain transaction to open and close channel, which means you details with fees again. If user only need to make 1-2 transaction in some time, then create 1-2 on-chain transaction makes more sense.


I don't see how it's centralized, you always could route your transaction through another node, even though i won't deny most likely these "super node" will have big advantage, unless they decide to charge high fees for routing.

IMO those "super node" doesn't mean centralization, but concentration and monopoly.


Your example doesn't show centralization because "United States Payment Channel" is the destination & government don't force their citizens to route LN transaction through their channel, even though it could serve as big honeypot.

Besides, if government could force their citizens to route all transaction through their channel, they also could force them to use wallet which created & managed by government.

The lightning network is a great concept in general and has better privacy. However I'm a big fan of transparency and I think the way the current Blockchain displays all transactions that have occurred is a good way of doing it. In the lightning network you cannot see what transactions are going on because they are not stored within the Blockchain. One of the trades off of this is people who know your address will know how much you are spending which could be a privacy concern to those that are trading often and dealing with strangers a lot. Also we should look at the way fees work in the lightning network. They are generally much lower than on chain Blockchain but if you are routing through others payment channels then they will probably request a cut of the transaction which some might not like. It works in the same way the current Blockchain works but instead miners are receiving the cut.

I'm going to try and go through most of the pros and cons of the lightning network and see who agrees with me. I'm not an expert at the lightening chain but am definitely watching the space as I consider it to be one of the most interesting off chain developments being worked on and because we only have the Blockchain to compare to I'll compare each point to that.

Blockchain Vs Lightening Network

Privacy:

Without a doubt the lightening network is far superior to the Blockchain when it comes to privacy although despite some of the criticisms with using one address it has no major trade offs for the improved privacy. Basically when you send a transaction via the lightening network there is little worry to it being recorded permanently on the Blockchain and if it were to get recorded it does not display sources or locations of the funds. One of my favorite things about the Blockchain is it uses a sort of onion like encryption method to nodes so that nodes cant monitor addresses and transactions which is a much improved version over any other implementation of nodes interacting with the blockchain that I have seen.

Confirmation Speed:

This is a big one and one of the biggest criticisms that Bitcoin has is that transactions take too long to confirm. However this is intentional to allow miners to use their hashing power to get cuts of the transaction and keep the network alive and circulating. The only problem with this is depending on the current average network fees you could be waiting days for your transaction to confirm. In comes the lightening network which offers instant transactions almost like your credit card in how quick transactions are sent. I say "almost" because we have to allow for latency on the network but this is generally zero and your transaction should be sent right away. The blockchain manages transactions differently and actually purposely makes transactions confirm before being sent. This is to check whether all nodes on the network are up to date and a double spend hasn't happened.

However there is a drawback to this. You could continuously keep on sending your transactions on the same payment channel and have they sent instantly and received instantly too. However if you actually want to deposit this amount onto the Blockchain remember that the lightening network is off chain and the Bitcoin won't be deposited or recorded to be on the Blockchain until you decide to deposit it by closing a channel. depending on network usage and a few other factors this usually takes around 10 minutes. This is where things get a little complicated too. If the user that you are sending too requires 6 confirmations because of their business practice or whatever you will still have to wait despite you streamlining the process by using a off chain solution.

There is also another problem when dealing with the lightening networks confirmation. Basically it requires two people to open and close a channel. Opening and closing a channel usually takes around about 10 minutes like previously stated however if one side of the transaction doesn't agree to close the channel then the channel will remain open and this could take up to two weeks to be resolved. Therefore anyone you deal with on the lightening network requires a little bit of trust when dealing with them that they won't just disappear and not close the channel because that could be a pain in the arse for both parties. I can't see why anyone would do this on purpose as it just slows the process down for both but I would think that this does happen.

Fees:
Bitcoin fees can become expensive especially when the network has been congested like in the past. This does not really happen on the lightening network as you are not paying miners to use their hashing rate exactly and instead you are paying for the use of payment channels which every payment channel that you go through will want a cut of the transaction. This is usually pretty low when compared to Bitcoin fees though.

Centralization:
Because of the nature of the Lightening Network it is at danger of becoming centralized. What I mean by centralized is there will be great benefit to those that send transactions on a daily basis to use the same node every time which in time people will see the need of creating what has become known as "super nodes".

The best example I have seen of this is if you were to go to a fast food restaurant and they have created a node for their store in the city. They would keep this node open so that customers could pay instantly without having to create a new channel every time. This could eventually evolve into a nation wide and potentially worldwide payment channel rather than smaller ones being made all the time. America might decide that all american citizens can pay their taxes through the "United States Payment Channel" which would mean greater centralization in nodes.  

The last time I checked the Lightening network did not check for existing channels and it is possible to broadcast to a older payment channel. However the best practice would be to make sure after every transaction the payment channel has been closed unless you are sending transaction fairly regular to justify keeping that payment channel open. My recommendation is to always close payment channels regardless though to increase privacy and decrease the potential of centralization.

I'm no expert on LN, but isn't there a risk of broadcasting an older channel state (by the other party) if the closing transaction doesn't confirm on time? From what I understand, you can't just wait for a very long time if Bitcoin on-chain fees go up.

They've made the mistake of looking to streamline, and simplify the service, but without giving the optional option for those that understand fees a little more. I don't think they should scrap the "priority", and "standard" options. I think instead they should keep these as the default values, but allow any user which wishes to customize their fee the ability to do that within the same window.

Mobile wallets are a small exception here. Once you enable payment receiving in Eclar Mobile, the timelock for new channels changes and you have to appear online once every two weeks. It's not bad when you compare it to 144 blocks (~1 day) default value.

Regarding criticisms, the need to keep private keys online and regularly monitor channels limits the appeal.

For me, the choice of whether to use Lightning is question of how pressured I am by on-chain fees. For now, the answer is "not enough." I'm hoping by the time that changes, the UX issues will have improved somewhat.

As for success, the jury is out, but it seems inevitable at least as one of several approaches to the scalability question.

There's a limit to how much the UX can be streamlined or simplified. Part of that is because both Bitcoin and Lightning are still under massively active development, and with Bitcoin that's 10+ years of work (and that's not even counting all the ruminating on possible designs that Satoshi possibly did, then the prototypes attempts, all before Bitcoin itself was worked on).


And what that's demonstrating is that we've (Bitcoin users) all adapted to Bitcoin's most simplified concepts, despite how technical and sophisticated those remain. All in the name of independent money. I'm sure that automobiles or telephones or firearms were criticized as overly complicated at their advent, but the potential advantage to be gained was too tempting, and so instead people wanted to learn. And now we're all driving around, busting salvos of M16 fire into the air out of rolled down windows, with cryptographic gold kept in electronic wallets on our keyrings


So I expect Lightning's perceived UX issues to ameliorate a little, but mostly through familiarity-driven self interest.

It's not a matter of being noob friendly or not. There was no option to set fees for closing channels. There was only one option to close friendly or unfriendly (something like that, dispute or not dispute, don't remember). I choose the one with lower fees , but even so fees were not customizable.

O believe every wallet should let users customize their fees, on sat/byte.
Because this would really lead to lower fees in general, everyone would look for lower fees unless absolutely necessary.
Free market would really work better.

For now most users just use "priority" or "standard" or whatever navme the wallet choose, but that really doesn't let you control the fees.

Perhaps you should give Wallet of Satoshi a shot. Their tagline says it's so easy that even your mom could use it. And most importantly it is fully custodial.

This is developed by the same people behind RoomofSatoshi.

Look em up.

Bluewallet is the only thing that made me use LN for the first and probably the last time. It's so hard to fire it up on your own knowing the technicalities involved to just make it work. Perhaps I'm not that technically competent when it comes to these things but seeing you guys having the same problem as I do somehow makes me feel better (lol). It's a great solution to reduce the load on the main network, don't get me wrong, but with the technicalities involved in getting it right the first time just to send pennies/a few dollars is definitely not worth the effort and the time--unless of course you use a custodial wallet/service that does the messy stuff for you.

Which is why I said


People will gravitate mostly towards the easy solutions no matter how hard we beat our drums about privacy and controlling your own funds as opposed to someone else controlling them.
And I think this would be beneficial for the adoption of the tech. The easier the tech, the faster the adoption.

As long as you use a custodial service like bluwallet (ios), using LN is pretty easy but custodial services has always been easy to use anyway.

It is a bit pain if you want full control of your funds and for that you need to own your own node and this is where the fun (some might call it pain) starts.

I reckon 99% of that 95% have never used a lightning network. They're positive about it because it's something to deflect present criticisms without having to put any thought into it.  

I sampled a testnet wallet before it went live. I couldn't get it to work. It's an extra layer of noodling that I quickly abandoned. It may be way better now but I'm in no hurry to return to it.

If people believe Bitcoin itself needs UX work, that's nothing compared what LNs need. BTC feels rather more fire and forget.

While I am personally yet to use LN myself, for any purpose, but the fact that it almost went viral on twitter and was wildly talked about was pretty rad. People were having fun with just like they were having fun with btc transactions back in 2016-17, people were transacting just for fun and that caught on.

The learning curve will get easier once this grows beyond the immediate geek-squad niche and move into more of a commercial side of things.


This can be a problem. I know for a fact about one gal that custom set the fees on her greenaddress wallet and waited like a week to see her transaction get the first confirmation. Something like that can happen on the LN too.

I think there should be a noob friend, fire and forget kinda solution for LN.

The fees were high at the time (like 40 sat).
But I opened the channel with very low fee. I didn't thought that eclair would just use a "recommended fee" (I hate this idea) to close it. It costed me about 0.0004 BTC to close it.

I believe every wallet, lightning or not, should let you decide which fee to use.i would use 1 sat byte to close the channel, and waiting 5 days would be ok to me.

I have a c-lightning node, and i quickly looked up the man...

It does look that, without editing c-lightning sourcecode, you cannot set the fee for the onchain closing transaction... I never even tought about this problem, i very seldomly close a channel, and when i do, i have never tought about changing the fee...