Topic: Is the Lightning Network centralized? - page 12. (Read 1981 times)

You're another one that can't believe the Bitcoin Cash Developers actually test code before releasing it.
Again your problem not theirs.

https://news.bitcoin.com/bitcoin-cash-8mb-block-479469-clears-over-37000-transactions/

They only produce blocks large enough to hold the transactions , they don't produce the maximum size blocks every single block.

That was the single attempt by some bitcoin core/segwit supporters to spam the Bitcoin Cash Network and they had an EPIC FAIL.
Wiped out their pitiful spam attack in 1 block.

@DooMAD , put your money where your mouth is,
if you believe you can spam fill the bitcoin cash network blocks and crash it , GO AHEAD!  
But I think you're just full of hot air.    

FYI:
Almost every ALTCOIN can exceed the ONCHAIN transaction Capacity of Bitcoin Core right now.
The Fact is Blockstream Lied and many non-thinking people believed them, that offchain was required to scale.
Crypto coins are nowhere near the point where Offchain scaling was the only option left.

You haven't proved anything until you can fill an 8mb block and sustain that throughput.  BCH only twice managed to exceed a paltry 200 KB worth of transactions in a single block within the last 48 hours.  

You.  Are.  Not.  Producing.  8.  MB.  Blocks.

And you definitely aren't producing 32 MB blocks, which I understand is the new cap.

You're producing an average of ~50 or 60 KB blocks with a maximum threshold you've not come close to reaching.

Co-Author of Lightning Network, kind of a conflict of interest , don't you think for an impartial opinion.

LN Hubs will be required at the least to report as a money transmitter at worst as a banking institution.
The expenses for these will make it so very few actually run a hub once enforcement of the AML/KYC regulations begin.

The LN hubs fees are also variable , it is funny no one thinks that their fees price can't also skyrocket.  

LN Hubs require constant internet access to avoid funds being stolen, a simple ddos attack at the right time could allow LN funds to be stolen.
There is talk of a WatchTower system to help prevent that, but it is also going to charge additional fees if it ever gets working well.



  

MIT researcher Thaddeus Driya, co-author of Lightning Network whitepaper and former technical Director of Lightning Labs, believes that the network will avoid corporate centralization in General because of its design, which does not require expensive and does not require specialized equipment 

pooya87 is the one with limited intellect,
otherwise he would realize that a larger block means than IT COSTS MORE TO TRY AND FILL IT WITH SPAM TRANSACTIONS.
* How many times has someone tried to spam bitcoin cash since it moved to 8 MB,  *
* It happen once and One 8MB block wiped out the whole spam attack at great expense to the attacker and the next block was again using less than 1 mb.*
* Bitcoin Cash Developers have ran tests verifying their network can support 32 MB blocks when needed (It may be 15 years or more before they fill it on a regular basis) , whether pooya87 can accept that is his problem. *


According to the idiots pooya87 follows such as Blockstream , 8 MB blocks was impossible and Bitcoin Cash proved blockstream all to be fools.
Problem is Blockstream had an agenda to get LN activated, as that is what the bankers paid them to do.
People like pooya87 that see bitcoin as a religion instead of a technology are stupid enough to believe the nonsense , blockstream puts out.

first of all if you don't use the space then creating it is pointless. it is like buying an airplane to go to your job which is 1 block away from your house!
secondly when you open up space (32MB) you are making spam attacks easy. it doesn't  cost anything to fill these 32 MB blocks and cause havoc.
thirdly you are not just a leach, as a contributing node you want to connect to different nodes and send/receive blocks and transactions. this means downloading and uploading. your monthly traffic is going to be ridiculously huge. check out Shorena's node status here, you will see very interesting stats. he is already spending 1-2 TB traffic per month.
finally it has never been just about the size. the problem is Zin-Zang doesn't understand anything about bitcoin. you are not  downloading a file. you are downloading a block. which means you download the blocks, verify each transaction and then add it to your blockchain. that verification is the bottleneck.

Lightning Network will be centralized.
Whether or not that dooms it has yet to be seem , but it will be no different than a Centralized Banking System.

As far a LN fees being cheap, it has not even begun to be used, so the promise of cheap fees may be exaggerated and proved to be false as usage increases.
LN is also a variable fee structure as such as it use increases so too will their fees.  

Bitcoin core transaction fees were cheap , but they increased in time , odds are so will LN's fees.

LN is:
not peer to peer
its 'managd accounts where funds are locked onchain and then you gt to play around in a 'account'(channel) whereby all paymnts need a authoriser counterpart. if you want to pay a third person you need not only your counterpart to authorise your paymnt but to also authorise them spending their separate account with that third person on your behalf. if thier is a need to pay a 4th person. then you need the third persons authorisation with your counterpart, and th 3rd persons authorisation with the 4th person.  its lik playing a game of hot potato.. the funds you carry do not leave the channel. its a case of giving it to the counter part... and then the counter part uses their ow separate funds to then pay the third party. and the third party uses their own separate funds to pay the 4th party..   
it only works if everyone along the route is well funded, online and willing to use their funds for others.

not a feature of bitcoin
its not something only btc will have privelidge of as a feature that makes btc unique. other currencies will use it too

not a bitcoin solution to make bitcoin better
its its own network without the requirement of peer review. infact unless you are reading the raw transaction data of every 'payment' you have no clue what your agreeing to and what opcodes the counterpart had put inplace into the tx. its so much of a separate network that its designed to allow other cryptocurrencies to work on LN and as such some counterparts will be incentivised to screw you out of your bitcoins via many different techniques (even the LN devs are saying becareful you can lose funds on it)
and at best to avoid costs of broadcasting expensive onchain fee's leave you only able to exit via crapcoins
LN is not dsigned to fix bitcoin issues. its used to lock peoples 'store of value' and eventually hand control of that value to someone else whereby the channel only closes when one side has nothing left. (there are many punishments that can be added unless you eagerly read every raw tx. so many ways to lose funds) and by the time its in a block. its too late

Firstly I would like to give my opinion on the lightning network and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a peer to peer decentralized network and the lightning network is a peer to peer network as well but whether it is decentralized or centralized is still to be known. I would consider it to be a decentralized network because its a person who opens up a channel and the other decides whether to join that channel and transact over it or not. So it depends upon us whether to join any channel or not. The fees won't be an issue because it will be much cheaper than the fees on the main chain and if at all it is costlier than the main chain(which I dont think will happen) , we will still have the option to do the transaction on the main chain rather than the channel.
So if there are options then I would consider it to be a decentralized network.

No it isn't and it will never be because of its design. Lightning Network is basically a P2P system which doesn't even need miners to confirm a transaction. They are needed later if you want to close the channel. Many people don't know how Lightning Network works or they might haven't even heard of it. People are only waiting for Bitcoin to increase in price and they are not interested on what is going on behind the scene.

Perhaps the best answer is to be distributed rather than pushing it all on to one project.

Have btc as the unit/storage of wealth

Several "good " alts with wide distribution - ltc, doge, etc, as spreading the tx load.

LN has it's place but it is moving in the opposite direction to the decentralised trustless end to end arena most wanted at the start.

when you boil all other alts down and take into account the years btc has been here it seems the limitations of btc are simply part of being so decentralised and so trustless. You want higher tps you have to give in the other 2 areas or open yourself to other issues.

There have been no solid improvements over btc design yet by other alts. LN is another work around but again you are losing a lot of what btc provided.

Some businesses will run cheap Lightning Nodes to collect and sell data. A block size increase would be mandatory to realize the full potential of the Lightning Network.

There seems to be some confusion about their block size increase.
They are increasing the Potential of a block to be 32mb, not that every block will always be 32 MB.
In Fact, they have only rarely used the 8mb blocks since they began, only when someone tried to spam transaction them , and they wipe it out in 1 block.

https://cash.coin.dance/blocks

As you can see the Bitcoin Core Blockchain is ~33GB bigger now than the Bitcoin Cash Blockchain.
Bitcoin Cash just raised the upper limit possible so they have no fear of transactions congestion for years to come.
Bitcoin Core was congested for many months with insanely high fees, Bitcoin Cash will not have to worry about it.

As you can see here :
https://www.blocktrail.com/BCC
Bitcoin Cash is using on average less than 100kb per block, so the fact it is taking less resources to run than Bitcoin Core.

So the worry that Bitcoin Cash will be more expensive to run is a pure Myth at the present time.

Considering a Bitcoin Cash node only has to run a full node to help the network , and that a Bitcoin Core Node and a LN Hub would be required for a stable LN network, it may turn out core full node and LN hub data & definitely bandwidth requirements would exceed anything needed by just running a simple Bitcoin Cash Node.  
But Time will tell on that speculation.
* The Bandwidth requirements will be much greater for Bitcoin Core's LN Hubs, the reason is if you ddos LN hubs at the time channels are scheduled to be closed,
it opens the possibility of one of the parties stealing the others coins, this attack vector is not possible on Bitcoin Cash Full Nodes so they will need less ddos protections.*



Taking the lowest average upload speed of 22.79 Mbps / 8 = 2.85 MB per second
So a 32MB file would be Relayed / Transferred in less than 12 seconds
0   Block Generated -1 Node
12 seconds -  2 Nodes
24 seconds -  4 Nodes
36 seconds -  8 Nodes
48 seconds - 16 Nodes
60 seconds - 32 Nodes
72 seconds - 64 Nodes
84 seconds - 128 Nodes
96 seconds - 256 Nodes
108 seconds - 512 Nodes
120 seconds - 1024 Nodes
132 seconds - 2048 Nodes
144 seconds - 4096 Nodes
156 seconds - 8192 Nodes
168 seconds - 16384 Nodes
180 seconds - 32768 Nodes
* All of this happens within 3 minutes, the fact is some will be running 1 gigabit or higher bandwidth nodes and they will increase the propagation at a much faster rate than above. *
* Essentially the 32MB blocks are no big deal even at today's average internet speeds.*

Unfortunately, the Core team is what has kept Bitcoin back from scaling into a full-fledged cryptocurrency. Even if the Lightning Network aims to solve scalability issues, it's not the permanent solution. A block size increase would be mandatory to realize the full potential of the Lightning Network. As such, the bigger the block size, the greater the Lightning Network would perform, but too much block size would further centralize the cryptocurrency.

A safe bet would be to increase the block size 2x every 4-5 years to maintain the coin as decentralized as possible. Since Moore's law states that storage costs would increase over time and prices would reduce by then, it shouldn’t be an issue if Bitcoin's block size becomes greater in the future.

Nevertheless, we'll see what happens once the Lightning Network becomes active and widely used in the mainstream world.



That's certainly true, mate. Bitcoin Cash will become extremely centralized as it increases its block size to 32mb on May 15th. This will allow less nodes to become available on the network, as storage and bandwidth costs will increase. The blockchain will increase up to 32x than Bitcoin Core. Therefore, people would prefer to run Lightning nodes and Core nodes as costs will be cheaper in the long run.

Before we know it, nobody would want to run a Bitcoin Cash node as it'll be very expensive to do so. On the other hand, Bitcoin Core and Lightning nodes will be highly accessible allowing anyone to join the network without spending a lot of money. In the end, Bitcoin with its Lightning Network scalability solution, would prevail over most cryptocurrencies we know and love today.

actually zin-zang is kinda accurate

for instance
a paypal dollar is not the exact same as a bank account dollar.
you cant pay anyone thats not a paypal accepting merchant with a paypal dollar

much like you cannot pay someone not using LN with an LN time locked multisig

it has to be authorised and broadcast into the normal 'community'(national banking) system and fully settled before a customer can then pay a merchant outside of paypal.

same as a american express dollar is not the same as a dollar bank note..
many amrican express usrs have to find an ATM get their paymnt authorised to get bank notes to then pay a bill with a merchant that does not accept american express

so if we were to say bitcoin was a decentralised "be your own bank" then LN is a centralised paypal2.0 network
.. but thats just going an extra layer deep into the anaology of analogies

so to keep it simple without multitudes of analogies inside of analogies

in my view
LN is a banking network like swift(US) or 'fasterpayment(UK)
a hub(hundred to thousands of channels) is a bank branch..
a user(node with just 1-3 accounts) only using it to spend is a bank customer
though it appars like a traditional bitcoin transaction. the locks and new features of 2014+
means that while inside the LN network. a tx cannot be handled by the blockchain (the locks)

anyway

the other parts about withholding funds (CLTV)
reversing/punishing users with chargebacks(revocation keys/CSV)
fee's for service
requiring authorisation
are all things that banks do. which is not what traditional bitcoin does

LN is the banking network for a currency that used to be 100% decentralised

---

the problem with trying to compare crypto to fiat in analogies of banking is that the fiat banking is a farse/scam.

take credit unions vs banks
credit unions do not create credit out of no where. they actually do use other account holders funds to give to others for loans
banks do not actually use other account holders funds to give others loans. they actually do create credit out of nowhere

which is where the banks have been for decades been lying to people about how FIAT and banking works, which is part of why satoshi dsigned bitcoin. to get away from banks/places that people have to store funds and require second partys authorisation.

yet LN it bringing it full circle back to being like the farse of banking(reality of credit union)

You could maybe argue that some decentralisation may have been sacrificed in order to scale but I think it still maintains enough decentralisation to remain relevant and survive. As a second layer solution I think it is the best we can come up with at the moment and I can see a future where you will need as little as a smart phone to run a lightning node, in a few years of course so over time it will become allot more decentralised. Like any protocol I suppose

no, that's inaccurate. intermediaries on LN are not creating new transactions. they are not issuing "notes" or "checks" or anything like that. they are only routing transactions, like bitcoin nodes. the only difference is they are routing transactions via their established channels rather than propagating them to any and all connected nodes.


as pointed out, there are no "bank notes" in LN. there is no trust involved.

miners charge fees on the bitcoin network too. so what? the only "penalties" are if you're dishonest and try to broadcast a stale channel state to the blockchain. if someone can prove that you just tried to steal their coins, yes you can be penalized.

no one can seize control over the collateral unless:

• your private keys get compromised (same as bitcoin)
• you don't monitor channel states and thus permit others to steal your coins
• you broadcast a stale channel state attempting to steal others coins

how will LN intermediaries know which transactions to censor? and you know bitcoin miners can censor transactions too, right?


no. all LN collateral is cryptographically secured. a channel participant can close the channel and broadcast the last state to the blockchain. as long as bitcoin miners will confirm the resulting transaction, the funds will be released. if you are saying bitcoin miners won't confirm the transaction, your gripe is with bitcoin, not LN.

People that run Bitcoin Nodes are routing transactions , they are not creating their own separate note for the transactions.

However people that run LN Hubs
are holding/locking bitcoins and using their own hub created LN Notes to make transactions.

In the old days
Banks
hold your gold (now worthless fiat) , and use their own created Bank notes (Checks) to make transactions.

Both hold something of value and then make their own notes to make transactions.

LN Hub is by definition a bank as it was designed to be.  

Banks & LN
Create their own notes for transactions
Both Charge Fees & Penalties
Both can seize control over the held asset under certain conditions
Both can refuse payment to 3rd parties if they so choose.

Bitcoin Full Nodes
Do not create their own notes
Can Not Charge Fees or Penalties
Can Not seize control over any assets
Can Not refuse payment to 3rd parties for any reason.

See the Difference.  
 
** Bank Checks/Notes are nothing more than a promise by a bank that ownership of the underlying asset (Fiat) will be granted to the payee upon request.  **
** LN Hub transactions are nothing more than a promise by the hub that ownership of the underlying asset (BTC) will be granted to the payee upon request.**
LN=Banks