Topic: Does lightning network really solve the scalability problem? (Read 1091 times)

we're waaay OT, but:

I don't think it's relevant, Satoshi's not here, or perhaps anywhere. To re-iterate, he wasn't perfect anyway, and he was happy to be wrong to make Bitcoin right.

I don't see the point in using something that no longer exists and wasn't always right as any kind of measuring stick

I believe Satoshi would say that the Core developers are on the right path. It's clearly the fee market structure that's what will make everything stick together.

Indeed, although it looks more and more like a very adept compromise every day. 4MB blocks are theoretically possible, but because the Bitcoin ecosystem took so long to support and use segwit addresses, the average block is only ever ~ 1.3MB



sure, but the best limit is the smallest possible. That might mean dozens of megabytes block weight, but it's really impressive to see the work being done to make more efficient use of 4MB. The ideal to me would be if further space utilization improvements renders 4MB too much, and a cut is instituted instead (assuming of course that 4MB is too much for a fully mature Bitcoin market with highest possible adoption)

    I thought segwit was a blocksize increase though. From my understanding, the witness data is still part of the blockchain and legacy nodes are provided a stripped version without the witness data. I don't see that as 1 MB being immutable. I'm sure if the developers can implement this work around to increase block size, there will be other work arounds in the future that increase blocksize.

A remarkable fact about Satoshi (which is all too often forgotten) is recorded right here on Bitcointalk: sometimes, he got even fairly significant things wrong


Even more remarkable: Satoshi was happy to be wrong, because he wanted to get Bitcoin right. He wasn't jealously guarding the design decisions made in the original Bitcoin 0.1, it was the complete opposite. He fully welcomed and encouraged others to poke holes in Bitcoin, to make it as good as possible.

What would he think now? Who knows (we may never hear from him/them again). We've got to get this right now, not him, and that appears to be exactly what he wanted.

What satoshi said doesn't mean what satoshi knew. He may or not have known that 1 MB blocksize would eventually become yet another value which becomes immutable due protocol maturation, what matters is the results, and the situation is clear: Reaching wide consensus to raise the blocksize at this point is basically as controversial as raising the max cap. You can find arguments on both sides, which as a result, the status quo prevails.

satoshi did at least predict there would be an opposition to raising the blocksize way before the blocksize crisis happened:



He knew. And so, he disappeared when Bitcoin took a life of it's own (impossibility to reach consensus to change it). Contrary to the idiots that think Bitcoin is doomed because you cannot buy coffee on-chain, that realization was the fact that Bitcoin was a success.

Correct, and don't be tricked into believing that you're wrong. In statistics, when there are outliers in the data-set that skew in finding the mean, then use the median.

    I'm don't think satoshi planned for the 1mb size to be immutable. When Garzik suggested a patch to increase block size, satoshi stated this can be phased in later. I'm not certain the segwit work around was quite what satoshi had in mind. https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/patch-increase-block-size-limit-1347

Just like 21 million coin limit is also an arbitrary limit of human imposition. The idea behind it being a simulation of gold's supply is irrelevant, what matters for all intended purposes is that it became an immutable trait of Bitcoin due the game theory involved, just like 1 MB blocksize has become an immutable trait of Bitcoin due the game theory involved, this is called protocol solidification.

At it's inception, any values would have cut it, since satoshi was calling all the shoots. Once the creature was alive, he disappeared, and im sure he was smart enough to know (either planned or in retrospect) that those values would never change. It couldn't go any other way if the project is indeed decentralized. This is the fact only for Bitcoin, no altcoin meets the criteria, which is why all altcoins are overpriced and Bitcoin is undervalued, at any rate.

Even if it's completely irrelevant, because it's an extreme case you're fabricating here - in both cases the median is nearer of the "typical" usage.

Okay, here we have distinct usage patterns in mind. If you want to use LN for a significant part of your wage/salary, then you very likely would transact more than once per week. For me, LN is more comparable with a prepaid card which you would charge once every few months and then use the credit several times a week.

The most "sane" way would be to avoid too big hubs.
1-channel-users (which are very likely to be connected with a hub) would be the typical PayPal/Coinbase user. Not those caring about decentralization. The risks of LN and Coinbase/PayPal are similar in these cases.

My guess is that you would have two big classes of "send-only" LN users: the "PayPal-type" users which would be only connected to an hub, and the "prepaid card-type" users, which would fill their LN channel via on-chain transactions to make online payments, but considerably less than once per month.
Then you have a smaller third class, the "sender/receiver" type, for example, freelancers that are spending money and receiving honoraries for their work. This one would be the most useful for the network, but I completely agree that it will be a relatively small class (maybe 10% of the total).
You have also the "receivers-only", which will be also a smaller class.

Correct, but where did I write that?

A channel factory rebalancing would not add no transactions nor kB to the blockchain.

That number was obviously a maximum number if the behavior of the one-channel user with 1 LN tx/day and 1 onchain tx/3 months was the average and the whole block space was used for LN channel openings and closings. So it's actually even more conservative than you estimation (a third of the block space/13 million LNtx per day).

In theory it could be even higher, if the typical user would use it for "micropayments" several times a day.

That would only be the case if the user refills all his 3-5 channels each 90 days. You could also refill one of your 3-5 channels each 90 days.

Yeah. That's pretty obvious, but then we would have another average "user persona"

Also pretty obvious, but that's not the point I was talking about which was a rough estimation about "maximum scalability".
But I, for example, am currently not using LN, but if fees went up again like they did in 2017, I would do that, even if I transact only roughly 5 times per month. Because LN would allow me to open the channel at a weekend or at night, when fees are almost zero, and then transact in the moment I want, even at 12 o cklock a wednesday when average fees even currently are at 100+ sat/byte.

This possibility to avoid fee volatility, combined with a faster confirmation, is actually very likely a major factor which will drive people to LN. Not massively at first, but gradually.

Haven't I wrote here in this thread that I guess that 1 tx/day per household is actually the maximum demand I estimate for Bitcoin? It may have been at another LN thread, but I never wrote about hundreds or dozens per day per person.

From a technical/scalability perspective, I am more open to this than I was years ago. But when I consider the social/political issues around it, I'm skeptical a non-emergency hard fork would ever be easy to pull off at this point. You think broad consensus is possible? What kind of timeline and activation process are we talking about, and how would we gauge the risks of a network split?

There is a false narrative that is always presented about lightning that it is intended to be the only solution to scaling which is false.

Bitcoin must scale in many ways -

1) Onchain with efficiency improvements like MAST and Schnorr sig aggregation

2) Lightning and other payment channels

3) Eltoo

4) statechains

5) sidechains like liquid / bakkt

6) and yes a future HF to increase the blocksize beyond the current 4MB of weight

Plus there are externalities. The costs to keep the network going would transfer to the miners, instead of from the users. The people demanding "big blocks" either never considered it, or know about it but wanted their hard fork anyway because "Satoshi said P2P cash".

My Bad,  
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsUXAEzaC3Q

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/59408/with-100-segwit-transactions-what-would-be-the-max-number-of-transaction-confi



@ETFbitcoin,
Interesting enough your reference block exceeded the max of even all segwit only transactions in the above quote and according to the block height was years before segwit was even activated.  
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ail257/interesting_fact_the_most_number_of_transactions/

Also interesting , is this block was useless in clearing the backlog.  2015-08-01 01:06 (4 years ago)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fd2a9/f2pool_setting_a_new_record_most_transactions/
 

FYI:
@Bob123,
You're still Stupid.  


FYI2:
https://www.blockchain.com/en/charts/n-transactions-per-block?timespan=all
*Average Number Of Transactions Per Block has always been below 3000 transactions per block,
so the max is no where near the average.*  

That sounds nice, but can you explain the economics behind it?

Users aren't paying a fixed fee, so we can't simply assume that more transactions = more fees.

If block size limits > demand for block space, then fees will drop close to 0 -- why would anyone pay when there is free space? Miners will include your transaction anyways.

Without fixed fees or a fee market based on full blocks, there is no basis for you to say that increased adoption alone will increase fee revenue for miners. You've suggested keeping a "buffer" between block size limit and observed usage, meaning no one would ever need to pay fees at all. With inflation dropping to nothing and fees dropping to nothing, you must expect miners to secure the network out of charity!

Wrong, check those blocks :
1. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/566575

Size (bytes)	2,377,364
Weight (weight units)	3,993,179
Stripped size	538,605

2. https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/367853

Transaction count

12,239

We could use Box plot in this case

firstly median is just a single number in the middle of a range
1,1,1,1,1,6,7,7,7,7,7
5,5,5,5,5,6,70,70,70,70,70
median is 6. yet using your own analysis of separating users vs hubs.
users only have 1 connections and hubs have 7.
users only have 5 connections and hubs have 70.

making 6 meaningless statistical error. its just some single use case sat amungst more meaningful data
median does not actually provide anything meaningful. as 6 has no relevance to the other numbers. the number 6 has not been derived from calculations nor from analysing other stats. its just a number that exists


when you say hubs have hundreds of channels. who do you think that those hubs are connecting to.....
when you say users have few of channels. who do you think that those users are connecting to.....
hint for each channel there are 2 sides. meaning for every 2 nodes with active channel between them thats a channel.
so adding up the nodes and adding upthe channels and averaging it out is fairer than your 'median'

people pay rent once a week but they get a wage once a month. most live paycheque to paycheque and can only plan/budget one month at a time.
having one channel to an exchange means one channel is funded with the wage. but what about the other channels.
oh and if you think everyone will just have 1 channel with an exchange. then watch that exchange get DDoS'd and
watch the exchange have to lock in a months value with every user.. bank2.0 centralisation i hear you scream.
oh and need i forget not everyone wants their whole wage in bitcoin. because bitcoin cant buy you everything. so then throwing a whole salary into LN is not helpful
oh and if people are locking to one channel with an exchange. watch the exchange ramp up their fee, because they only have the exchange as the only route.

think about scenarios. not the one time utopian perfect experience.
EG did you know when they done the LN pizza promotion, there was only a 10% success rate. not due to any pizza or delivery or settling fiat issues. but the channel issues of LN
actually 32mb was a technical based limit of networking related to packets. but 1mb is a arbitrary limit of human imposition
fee war is a wild west zero control human decided imposition that solves nothing but used to avoid real solutions.


funny part of your maths there is that to avoid onchain refills each fortnight would actually require factories to re balance channels without onchain usage.
so you cant say using factories after already describing a offchain factory scenario would further 10x up the scenario.

also even if there was a one channel user. with only a one onchain setup and one onchain settle.
the 1LN payment a day would be a ~88 deburdening of the bitcoin network.(90 payments done in ln instead of onchain. but then discounting the 2 setup/close onchain)
so not sure where you are getting the whole other random numbers you quote. especially 25-30million a day

but lets take a guess and say that a 3rd of a block is LN reserved. as your scenario suggests
average block ~3k tx so call it 1k LN users a block = 144k a day
but because those users are not transacting onchain on day 2 a fresh set of LN users can use the 1k = another 144k a day,
same for day 3-90=  ~13mill users a quarter before they repeat

where as the 144k a day transactors if doing 1 tx a day onchain. is just 144k which again is ~90x

so based on 1 tx a day with LN sessions of 3 months using only onchain bytes of lean measure (not that many channels)
LN

but if a LN user has 3-5 channels, the onchain bloat means less than the 1000 a block/144k a day.
but if a LN user sessions close sooner than 90 days, the onchain bloat means less than 13mill before ln users refresh

now. to get to the point of transaction numbers.
UTXO stats do not any large percentage of spends happening daily. most bitcoin users are once a week-every couple years
the percentage of daily spenders is low percentile.
so until / unless LN provides access to merchants where people can buy absolutely everything (toilet roll, car fuel, bread)
dont expect many to take advantage of daily activity.
apart from day traders/mixers/spammers

so if you think out of say ~500k transactions a day it some how will equate to 144k users moving over to LN a day.. forget it.
the amount of users desiring LN for daily use would be less.

oh and check visa stats. even when you can buy most things with visa, even they only have their customers do less than 2 tx a day average
so cool down on thinking everyone will jump into LN.
so cool down on thinking everyone will be doing dozens/hundreds of tx a day

Your explanation is a disingenuous way to make it look that Lightning is an IOU system, it's not. Plus we don't know if Lightning will scale Bitcoin to the amount in your example.

I can accept that LN is a software experiment that can fail, but there are no IOUs in Lightning. Stop eating those crayons. Hahaha.

You are still wrong.

I don't care what a random site says.

You were talking about the MAXIMUM amount of transactions a block can hold.

Now, since you obvoiusly can't calculate it yourself.. let me help you:

The maximum amount is reached if the transactions are the smallest (Is very obvious to everybody, just not for you).
A smallest transaction has the properties:

• being SegWit
• having 1 input and 1 output

A SegWit transaction with 1 input and 1 output has a size of 85 bytes (non-witness part).
With 1.000.000 Bytes per block, we have 1.000.000 / 85  transactions at a maximum. That's 12.195.


Wasn't that hard, was it ?


In the future you might want to stop posting nonsense / superficial knowledge which you got from somewhere without even thinking about it.


You can, of course, now start arguing like "bla bla a block never has only 1 input 1 output segwit transactions bla bla".. But it doesn't matter..
YOU started talking about the maximum a block can hold. And your statement was wrong.

And instead of accepting it and calculating it yourself, you started justifying yourself. Which obviously just backfired, because you are simply wrong.

And this is not the only statement of you which is plain wrong. Most of the stuff you are mentioning is nonsense.
I don't know whether it is because you misunderstood things, or because you are not capable of understanding it.. and it doesn't matter. Wrong is wrong.

---

Just saw this:

How do you even dare to talk about LN if you don't understand the very basics of cryptography / cryptocurrencies / BTC 

Now, do yourself a favor and first learn the basics. Then educate yourself about the advanced stuff.
THEN start discussing LN and its pros/cons.

Troll or stupid ?  




No, you can't even calculate your numbers correctly.

A maximum of 12.195 transactions fit into one block.


Go and get some math lessons.




Yes, absolutely.

Doubling something is called scaling..  

You guys amaze me each time, how narrow-minded people can be. That's hilarious.




A cab has nothing to do with the bus.

So.. you are saying the LN has absolutely nothing to do with BTC ?  Please just agree on that and everyone will instantly see that you don't have ANY clue at all.




You can not 'increase scaling'.
Do you even know what scaling means ?

Or do you just use it as a buzzword ?




Absolutely.

LN is protected by bitcoins security mechanisms and some shitty altcoin is not protected at all.

Absolutely the same.


Same question as above:
Troll or stupid ?




That's EXACTLY what everyone (except for your franky troll) is thinking about you.




If that's what you really believe, you are beyond help.




That's really the most retarded comparison i have ever seen.


LN to BTC is not like a cab to a bus, but more like teleporting to a bus.
You can drive each route with the bus.. or you drive once to a teleporter, teleport as much as you want for nearly no money in nearly no time.
And at the end, you drive back with the bus.


You are delusional if you compare BTC/LN with a bus/cab. This literally makes 0 sense.



I understand why you got red trust for shittalking.
Your account here is worthless, and so is your opinion.

Instead of complaining "bla bla bla Lauda is abusing DT bla bla bla" and "omf omf omf forum giving red trust for truth omf omf omf", you should at least TRY to understand that everything you say and think is completely wrong.
Work on yourself. Work on your understanding of BTC / LN.




BTW, regarding your signature:


I had quite a big argument with Lauda regarding security of operating systems.
We had completely different opinions. And we didn't find a common ground.. but somehow.. i didn't receive red trust  

So, instead of blaming everyone else, start looking for the reasons in yourself