Topic: Important Lighting Network reading- for everyone! - page 2. (Read 1258 times)

370 which was enough for him to get across his thoughts. You could learn a lot by his example.


It would be interesting to know if he still holds this view now or whether his thoughts have evolved along the same lines as those he handed the project over to.


I would be surprised though if he had changed his mind as to why he created Bitcoin.

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System

In fact, I changed my mind somewhat on that.  I thought it was a network necessity, because I made the error of thinking that with the LN network, it was impossible for "money to continue to go around in circles", somewhat akin, in electrical engineering, to push a DC current through a network of capacitors.  As channels can be pushed all the way, and cannot transmit in the same direction any more, I erroneously thought that this would kill every circular, steady motion of money.  I thought that the only way out was a central hub.  But in fact, Carliton Banks made me see my error.  So that argument doesn't count any more.

There may still be a centralizing dynamics in LN, nevertheless, like in every system with stakes and rewards.  But there's no theoretical necessity any more as I thought there was.   I see the main application of the LN, however, not in paying.  In my mind, crypto has nothing to do with currencies, but all with speculation.  Speculation, to me, is the art of extracting honest value produced by others in return for illusions, and leave them stripped.  Speculation is necessary to build evil empires.  LN channels seem like a great way to have "funds on an exchange".  It would be a first step to HF trading.  In that case, however, the natural way to pay through LN, would be to use your exchange as your "bank".  

Indeed, that's also why I'm here, I'm fascinated too.  My agenda here is to pump up my own understanding, that's grossly all.  It is also very entertaining.  Even dangerously entertaining, I spend too much time here.  My main problem is that I'm an extremely fast typographer.  I type as fast as I talk.  I learned that in high school, I followed typing lessons (back then still on mechanical typewriters ).  The exercise was to be able to type a heard-over discourse at "on-line" speed.   This explains my "walls of text".  It's not practical, but it would take me 5 times the time to go over it and write it in a better way.  I try to bring some relief by going over it and putting in bold, but unfortunately, when I do that, I get new ideas I want to say, and I edit and make the texts even longer.  

Apart from entertainment, as I said, my main goal here is understanding.  As I said, I'm fascinated too, but in a much less "enthusiastic" way.  I think it is a dark, evil and deceiving world, and I think nothing "good" (in standard human understanding) is going to come out of this.  But I firmly believe in its destructive success.  You can compare me to an astronomer that is studying the meteorite that is on collision course with earth.  That's fascinating in a dark kind of way.  To try to see exactly how the impact will be, what will be destroyed first, by what process.  Not scary, just dark and evil, and I have some fascination for dark and evil.

This is why I want to understand it - the only true pleasure in life before one dies.  My core idea is that the Singularity is unavoidable, but I never figured out how machines would do it.  I think crypto is the answer.

Thx to dinofelis, I got a learning session  appreciated.
As non native I got a bit lost in the discussion. I reviewed the links, and to my surprise found Schopenhauer and Kant. For sure well known authors and text for me, but at no level can I compete in a foreign language (whereas I am more in French, not English). I now understand, what the link is to win in front of an audience with arguments. But here in the forum we have open minded discussions, and liberty to speak. I can't see the necessity for "winning"... The only winner I can see is Bitcoin (and LN), maybe this whole new crypto eco-system. Fascinating.

What I observe (too) often, is that a statement is made, and others are asked to show that this statement is wrong. It is easy to make such statements (god is existent, Elvis is still alive, aliens brought live to earth, ...). And there is no way to proof the opposite. So from my point of view, this belongs in the area of metaphysics (having read Kant  ), and I feel the same is true for arguments like "LN is centralized banking hubs" or "non-mining nodes (without exchanges) keep miners in check" or "nodes want a protocol change, miners and exchanges want to keep the old protocol". (btw: this was not UASF. UASF was, at last from what I can recall, a response to a very very small team behind closed doors in NY, representing vast majority of centralized miners, which wanted Segshit2x failing dramatically).

I think there simply isn't a possibility to show that this postulation is false. And as such it must not be proofed to be wrong.

Answer: http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

I didn't count Satoshi's words, I hope it is less than 500.

Satoshi proposed a client/multi-server network ; we observe that bitcoin BECAME a client/multi-server network.  A client/multi-server network can perfectly scale, as Satoshi explained above.

BTW, I'm not AGAINST the LN network, and I can clearly say that Carliton Banks has induced me to clear up a misunderstanding I had about it, which I recognized without problems, and makes me see the LN as way more useful than I thought.  But I think that the LN is not a payment network, and that payment is not a good application (like payment is not a good application for bitcoin either).   The LN network is a good thing to make a fast high-frequency multi-asset speculative market.  I'm quite bullish on that.  I think that if it takes off (and I think it will), it can be much more destructive than classical speculative finance has ever been (even making the 1929 crisis, and its consequence, WWII, look like small beer).  I'm really keen on that idea.

Back from the shops after stocking up with beer and food.

At a quick glance, you've gone back to attacking the analogy, making whatever points it is you have against LN again and all sorts of other irrelevant stuff.

Let's try it this way.

Proposition:
The only way to scale a blockchain is to add an additional layer that allows off-chain transactions.

Explain to me in less than 500 words why that statement is false. I'm not interested in what you think is wrong with LN but why another layer isn't the solution. That is the topic of this thread.

And that's exactly where the "analogy" doesn't apply, as I showed, just to get a reply that "of course, an analogy doesn't fit althe l the aspects".


On the contrary.  First of all, there is no scaling problem in the actual structure of bitcoin, because, exactly, it is a client/multi-server system, and not a P2P system.  So there is no scaling problem to be solved.

But next, the routing problem in TCP/IP is an entirely different problem than the common consensus problem in bitcoin.  TCP/IP is concerned with moving data between users, bitcoin is concerned with everyone agreeing upon a data set.

On top of that, the big success of TCP/IP routing lies in the ease by which connections can be set up and broken.  This is what allows routing to be so efficient in TCP/IP.  However, in the LN, setting up a link is costly, and stops you from setting up another link, because you lock in funds.  In TCP/IP you can set up as many links as you want, and if some break down. that's at almost no cost.  In the LN, if your channel is dead, it takes fees and a waiting period to unlock them and to set up another link.

So many of the elements that made the success of TCP/IP are not applicable in this analogy.   Both solve different problems to start with, and the great success of TCP/IP comes from the easiness of re-routing, while exactly that is costly and slow on the LN network.

Unless, unless, your LN partner is a very reliable, trustworthy partner, who has very reliable, trustworthy partners and so on.

I haven't been.  There has not been a single technical argument here, where mine is taken step by step and shown how things work differently than what I say.  In fact, the onus of proof is on the claim that, contrary to what Satoshi said, contrary to what Gavin said, contrary to what I'm saying, non-mining nodes "do keep miners in check".  

In as far as an argument has been presented, it goes even against itself: the so-called UASF threat.  

What needs to be demonstrated, in order to deny my claim "non-mining nodes don't influence the functioning of the system" ?  One needs to consider two different cases, one where non-mining nodes WANT something, and act, and one, all else equal, they DON'T act, and show that it makes a difference.

First example: "non mining nodes keep miners in check".  Note that we are NOT arguing how "exchanges keep miners in check"  or how "other miners keep miners in check".  

So we agree that all miners, and all exchanges, act together, and that it is the sole presence of a lot of non-mining nodes, that keeps them in check.  If this can be argued, you won.  Non-mining nodes keep miners in check in that case.

A: there are not many non-mining nodes.  All miners, and all exchanges, have decided upon a protocol change.  They do so.  The protocol change happens.

B: a lot of non-mining full nodes don't want this protocol change.  Tell me how they prevent it ?  Suppose that out of the 10 000 non-mining nodes, 9000 of them are opposed to this protocol change.  What happens ?  Miners apply the protocol change.  9000 nodes do not agree, and don't accept the N+1 block.  They wait for ever.  The "good" N+1 block never arrives.   They don't transmit the "bad" N+x blocks.
Users, initially connecting to these nodes, don't see their transactions.  They look for other nodes, until they stumble on one of the 1000 agreeing nodes, on an exchange node, or on a miner node.  They see that the chain is way further now, and they can see that the other nodes fell behind and stopped at N.  They disconnect from them, and connect to the updating minority of nodes (from miners, exchanges, and a few enthusiasts).

==> the large majority of non mining nodes, not agreeing with the protocol change, didn't keep the miners in check, did they ?

B-bis: suppose that 9990 nodes are opposed, but suppose that miners and exchanges, agreeing on the protocol change, "sybil" and install 200000 new nodes.  Now, the "node count" in favour of the protocol change is huge.  What is that small minority complaining ?  They are disconnected from the network, because they fall behind.

==> the large initial majority of non mining nodes can be sybiled away.  They didn't, after all, keep the miners in check, did they ?

Conclusion case 1: whatever the non-mining nodes do, if miners and exchanges have agreed upon a protocol change, that protocol change happens, all else equal.


Second example: nodes want a protocol change, miners and exchanges want to keep the old protocol

This is the UASF.

A) only a small minority of non-mining nodes wants the protocol change.  No miner makes their blocks, so they stop.  

B) 9000 out of 10 000 non mining nodes want the protocol change.  They stop their old client (so they remove themselves from the network) and they install the new client, that doesn't find new blocks according to their desires.  They fall behind while the miners continue to make the old chain.   ==> same scenario as 1 B.

But suppose that somehow, I'm wrong here.  Suppose that a large majority of non-mining nodes COULD impose a protocol change.

C) now, imagine that none of the honest non-mining nodes wants a protocol change, but evil Joe does.  He makes a UASF node, and launches 200000 of them.  He has now clear UASF majority on the node network.  In as much as UASF could work (it doesn't, see 2.B, but suppose), then just any evil Joe can impose a protocol change with a sybil attack with UASF nodes.

QED.

This analogy is used correctly to explain that the only way to scale a blockchain is to add an additional layer. Much in the same way as you can increase the bandwidth of an Ethernet segment from 10Mb to 100Mb to 1Gb but it needs routing to making scale globally.

I cannot tell you how amusing it is that rather than address that you first start by trying to push the analogy past what it intended to explain in order to try and discredit it and now you're trying to discredit the use of analogies altogether. One might come to the conclusion that you're trying to distract attention from the fact it is correct and avoid the debate being on the subject originally intended in this thread.

Deception often mimicks as explanation.  There's not much of "explanatory power" in this analogy.  The only real message a was not one of "understanding" but of associating the phenomenal success of TCP/IP to the LN, in the same way that one associates "buying cleaning products" to "be a successful housewife and have great husband and kids" in TV commercials.

You really should go back and read the answers you've been given in this thread again. You seem to have missed all the times you have been corrected.


Analogy: A comparison between one thing and another, typically for the purpose of explanation or clarification.

You might also want to look up the difference between principle and purpose. In this case, you are alleging the purpose of deception when the actual purpose was explanation.

Now it's the 1st Saturday of the 6 Nations so I've better things to do than argue with a 19th century philosopher's scepticism of analogies. Enjoy your weekend.

The only argument was that someone said that I didn't understand the principles.  "you're wrong because he said you're wrong".


On the contrary: the principle of analogy is most of the time a rhetorical technique to deceive.  It not a rational argument.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Being_Right

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You must be reading another thread. In this one you've been shown to be wrong about the fundamentals of how Bitcoin works and unaware of the principle of analogies.

None ever has.  The only counter "arguments" fall in two classes:

- "he must be a FUDDER of the other camp", "he must have an agenda" or something similar
- he's wrong, because he's wrong.  (include in this, too: others already said he was wrong)

No technical taking apart of any aspect has ever been presented that wasn't obviously logically wrong in itself, like "look how well the UASF menace worked".

But, in its most succinct form, my argument is what Satoshi writes on page 3 of his paper, and comes down to what I already said:

"if consensus were to be established by node count (IP number count), it would be easily sybilled.  This is why node count shouldn't matter, and why consensus should only be based upon proof of work voting, not on number of nodes voting".   So whether Joe's node in his basement "votes against a block chain",  and whether even a large majority of online nodes vote against that block chain, shouldn't have any influence on the construction of that block chain (the consensus).  Bitcoin was designed that way.  And if that's true, Joe's node, nor his majority of peers, don't keep anything "in check", and certainly not the miners voting over the next consensus.

Others have already shredded your arguments so I have no need to add anything. If you can manage to concisely but a point across I might consider chiming in. I'm not going to waste my time continuing reading a War and Peace length post that rambles on incoherently after getting the first facts wrong.

That's exactly what I'm saying too.  A million nodes don't do anything. Whether they are "UASF" nodes, Joe nodes, my sybils or miner sybils. They don't affect the functioning of the system.  They don't matter.  Happily so.  And bitcoin was designed with that in mind.  Thanks for understanding.  Finally.

More colloquially formulated: "one doesn't give a shit".

+2 of no arguments.