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Topic: Cross Blockchain Interoperability using Lightning Network (Read 183 times)

legendary
Activity: 4396
Merit: 4755
Just thinking about the Lightning Network made me think over its possibilities. I have 2 more questions to ask and I don't want to create another thread for it.

1. If the LN supports cross Blockchain interoperability through Atomic Swap or any other medium, is it possible to use the LN to send altcoins like ETH from one address to another ?
Example: Sending ether from one address to another using Lightning Network

2. Although I have read that LN requires to open a channel between two nodes to make transactions but is it possible to use one channel to make transactions from multiple nodes.
Example: Starbucks opening a channel while the customers use it to make transactions instead of every customer requiring to open a channel with Starbucks.


If any of you guys think that these questions are silly then kindly drop a link below to a thread/article that has a detailed and easy understanding of the LN.

to explain point 2 in simple form its more about having pre connections of users who have connections to other users. if enough users are pre connected. you dont need to make a new connection to starbucks. but you just have to hope that those on the route of the connections already made, have funding and willingness to play the hotpotato game to pay the desired destination on your behalf

so imagine. even before thinking about starbuck
you are one of the green circles

u connected to the red..
red conncts to yellow and so on
imagine starbuck store in your area is one of th blue circles.

so although starbucks only has one connection direct(its nearest red) it is indirectly connected to 39 people.

you dont need to shift around and make a new deposit and new channel with a blue circle directly.
you can just hope your nearest red is online so your able to pay the red node,
hope the red node can pay the yellow node(hoping its online and accepting of the deal),
hope the yellow node can pay the purple node(hoping its online and accepting of the deal).
hope the purple node can pay the other yellow node(hoping its online and accepting of the deal),
hope that yellow node can pay the red node(hoping its online and accepting of the deal)
hope that red node can pay the blue node(hoping its online and accepting of the deal)


thus all fair and equal. if everyone happy to do so. the balances adjust as such, things get signed. and then starbucks treats it as if the funds it got from its nearest red, were from you(technically they werent) but its all about naming who credited the payment at the start

another way to imagine it.
imagine a channel is you and partner where you have 0.010 btc and your partner has 0.010btc
ergo
you[0.010:0.010]partner
and if you wanted to pay say 0.005 it would for this demo look like
you[0.05:0.015]partner
where your partner now has 0.015 and you only have 0.005
..
ok so at the beginning a route from green to blue would look like
green[0.010:0.010]red[0.004:0.016]yellow[0.011:0.009]purple[0.010:0.010]yellow[0.010:0.010]red[0.010:0.010]blue

and you want to pay 0.002
so each payment goes through each node like this
green[0.008:0.012]red[0.004:0.016]yellow[0.011:0.009]purple[0.010:0.010]yellow[0.010:0.010]red[0.010:0.010]blue
green[0.008:0.012]red[0.002:0.018]yellow[0.011:0.009]purple[0.010:0.010]yellow[0.010:0.010]red[0.010:0.010]blue
green[0.008:0.012]red[0.002:0.018]yellow[0.009:0.011]purple[0.010:0.010]yellow[0.010:0.010]red[0.010:0.010]blue
green[0.008:0.012]red[0.002:0.018]yellow[0.009:0.011]purple[0.008:0.012]yellow[0.010:0.010]red[0.010:0.010]blue
green[0.008:0.012]red[0.002:0.018]yellow[0.009:0.011]purple[0.008:0.012]yellow[0.008:0.012]red[0.010:0.010]blue
green[0.008:0.012]red[0.002:0.018]yellow[0.009:0.011]purple[0.008:0.012]yellow[0.008:0.012]red[0.008:0.012]blue

where by your funds are technically still locked in with your nearest red and the other participants used their own funds in their own channels. and blue(starbucks) just gets told payment originated from you.

as you can see though if you look closely. the pitfall of LN is that the channel you have with red, shows that red can only make another 0.002 payment to its yellow. meaning if you wanted another starbucks. or one of the other greens did or even if the red themselves did, they only have enough value left that only one more payment of the same amount can be handled before red runs out

so even though you still have 0.008 spare to make 4 more payments of same amounts. red cannot honour or be part of routing it for you. meaning at somepoint either red has to drop out, refill its channel or you have to make a new connection with someone that can route to starbucks
legendary
Activity: 1638
Merit: 1163
Where is my ring of blades...
This problem "scalability problem" appeared in ETH due to the fullness of the network especially with lots of ERC20 tokens.

that is an over simplified way of looking at "scaling issue". the fact is scaling is not just having full blocks, it is about not being able to process more than certain number of transactions which is only partly limited by the block size.
in case you have forgotten, ETH scaling problem was not just about fullness of blocks, it was mostly because of how the network was incapable of processing anything anymore. all the exchanges went dark as soon as there was a surge of number of transactions and that happened multiple times where they had to shut down every deposit and withdrawal because the whole network was down!
hero member
Activity: 2702
Merit: 716
Nothing lasts forever
Just thinking about the Lightning Network made me think over its possibilities. I have 2 more questions to ask and I don't want to create another thread for it.

1. If the LN supports cross Blockchain interoperability through Atomic Swap or any other medium, is it possible to use the LN to send altcoins like ETH from one address to another ?
Example: Sending ether from one address to another using Lightning Network

2. Although I have read that LN requires to open a channel between two nodes to make transactions but is it possible to use one channel to make transactions from multiple nodes.
Example: Starbucks opening a channel while the customers use it to make transactions instead of every customer requiring to open a channel with Starbucks.


If any of you guys think that these questions are silly then kindly drop a link below to a thread/article that has a detailed and easy understanding of the LN.
legendary
Activity: 4396
Merit: 4755
All these techniques are solutions to problems caused by the small block size, these problems appear more obvious in Bitcoin because of the full & too many bitcoin transactions, but appear less for the rest of the cryptocurrencies "large block size and fewer transactions = low fees."

The problem is that larger block provides just a temporary solution so you will have to extend block size every time after the growth of the amount of transactions. From this side LN seems more reliable.
if you knew how LN worked, ran some scnarios, tried it you would know LN is not more reliable
recently people tried buying pizza with LNs network. only 10% order success. not due to the pizza side of things. not due to locking bitcoin sid of things. but due to the LN payment part

secondly LN is not just a make 1 chanell and have freedom from blockchains forever. it requires preplanning spending habits opening multiple channels to hope for maximum success, which involves alot more bytes of data onchain to open/close channels than just 1 TX.

imagine you wanted to use LN to pay for your starbucks coffee. did you know its actually technically, physically an financially easier to just buy a starbucks giftcard using bitcoins onchain tx than it is to set up LN to handle payments for starbucks coffee

bitcoins network is not just about jumping up to 2mb base block causing network hard ship or jumping up to gigabytes causing network hardship. if you knew the different bitcoin network scaling methods you would know its not as controversial as you probably been told.
did you know from 2010-2015 bitcoin went from 0.1 to 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1mb without any required debate, the only issue that occurred was bug related, rather than the social drama games they now play to avoid just continually scaling bitcoin like they did during the first 6 years of bitcoin.

and yes we ar now at the 10th year meaning 3-4 years of no true bitcoin scaling and just debate and stall tactics aimed purely at only wanting to offer a new tx format as a geteway to another network to deburden bitcoin of bitcoin utility

A network similar to the lightning network is designed to work with ETH called The Raiden Network & BOLT: Private Payment Channels for Zcash & Trinity for NEO.
And now we should wait untill at least some of these projects will become somehow popular.

as for bolt raiden and other services you will soon see them all merge into LN which excuse the pun, would be more accurate to call the thunderdome rather than LN

but it would require using LN and running scenarios outside the 'perfect condition' glossy promo situations(meaning running real life tests/scenarios where things dont go as planned)
full member
Activity: 924
Merit: 148
All these techniques are solutions to problems caused by the small block size, these problems appear more obvious in Bitcoin because of the full & too many bitcoin transactions, but appear less for the rest of the cryptocurrencies "large block size and fewer transactions = low fees."

The problem is that larger block provides just a temporary solution so you will have to extend block size every time after the growth of the amount of transactions. From this side LN seems more reliable.

A network similar to the lightning network is designed to work with ETH called The Raiden Network & BOLT: Private Payment Channels for Zcash & Trinity for NEO.
And now we should wait untill at least some of these projects will become somehow popular.
legendary
Activity: 2646
Merit: 3911
as far as i can tell lightning network does not work on top of ethereum (at least no so far) so what you are explaining here doesn't make any sense and makes me wonder how they did it when there is no ETH LN  network to perform it on!!!
All these techniques are solutions to problems caused by the small block size, these problems appear more obvious in Bitcoin because of the full & too many bitcoin transactions, but appear less for the rest of the cryptocurrencies "large block size and fewer transactions = low fees."

The main objective of the lightning network is to rely on Blockchain when needed. In other words, it is an off-chain network.
This problem "scalability problem" appeared in ETH due to the fullness of the network especially with lots of ERC20 tokens.

The basic difference is that the design of the lightning network of Bitcoin to be used in payments only, unlike in ETH "there is a variety of services and ERC20 tokens."

A network similar to the lightning network is designed to work with ETH called The Raiden Network & BOLT: Private Payment Channels for Zcash & Trinity for NEO.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1137
as far as i can tell lightning network does not work on top of ethereum (at least no so far) so what you are explaining here doesn't make any sense and makes me wonder how they did it when there is no ETH LN  network to perform it on!!!

there is something else which you may be confusing with LN called Atomic Swap which doesn't need LN, it is a protocol that can run on LN or on chain too. it requires certain characteristics in the cryptocurrencies that you want to "swap" including time lock transactions and hashlock contracts which may be the way they used to swap that coin with bitcoin.
jr. member
Activity: 81
Merit: 1
im not fully understand,  already ethereum and (erc20 tokens) are not in the blockchain network?  Tenx Pay, which is what you call Tenx Tenx ,
listed on bittrex are talking about coin? or not?  Can you give more information or a link to the article? thanks.
legendary
Activity: 4396
Merit: 4755
yes lightning is a separate network for multiple coins to use at the same time.
lightning is not a network devoted/dedicated to bitcoin.

hero member
Activity: 2702
Merit: 716
Nothing lasts forever
I just read it on cointelegraph and was wondering if it even was possible to perform a cross blockchain transaction. According to the article a crypto startup TenX tested the use of its cross-blockchain interoperability protocol to exchange Ethereum’s (ETH) ERC20 protocol tokens for Bitcoin using the Lightning Network. This fascinated me and made we wonder if it is possible on the Lightning Network and on the bitcoin blockchain ?  If it was possible how would it determine the exchange rate ?

Drop in your commetns/suggestions.
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