Topic: Is the Lightning Network centralized? - page 7. (Read 1981 times)

The reason why the blocks are regulated to 1mb is to make the network scale up. That means the network should keep growing in terms of number of nodes as the hardware becomes cheaper and the bandwidth becomes faster. What many people have failed to know is bandwidth grows slower and slower as the years pass by, and network latency slower still.


You talk like Segwit is very complicated. It is a simple malleability fix. The block size increase is a side effect. Plus you talk of side chains, then why not a 2nd offchain layer?


It is, and Bitcoin's regulated block size to 1mb will scale the network up. A good example of centralization and its network designed scaled down is Ethereum. Their blockchain is 1tb large and increasing, and an increasing number of nodes cannot keep up with the network.

Consider that their miners, who control the gas limit, which also control the block size are playing nice by regulating the blocks.

Well, at least where I know about, Visa charges 1,5 to 4% of the payment depending on the merchant service provider. This may be cheaper than Bitcoin in the case of micropayments, but currently already a $10 purchase is more expensive with Visa. I know that wasn't always so - we had minimum fees of ~$3 (on weekends) or so in January, but this was because nobody was using Segwit then, so a giant backlog formed. And the likely spam attacks ...

The difference may be that Visa charges the fee to the merchant and not to the customer, while with Bitcoin, the buyer has to decide the transaction fee - but merchants (if there are no legal restrictions) can give discounts to Bitcoin payers (as some give discounts when using cash).

I think in these debates there will always be disagreement on terms such as centralized and decentralized, because they may be defined differently and some may view certain types of centralization more dangerous than others. I think there will be some centralization as the LN gets developed, but the blockchain itself will remain decentralized.

maybe in usd or euro but for other currencies visa is cheaper.

Well, "free markets" are currently deciding that max_block_size is a part of the protocol worthy to preserve (current relation: ~6350 to ~700)

You cannot dictate free markets what exact lines in the code are "superfluous". This line really doesn't add complexity.

So you want most people to use light nodes, right? But you know that for individual, non-mining users, running a full node is more secure - even if its' a pruned full node? I always sustained the opinion that a business/merchant, of any size, should be able to run a full node.

I think if we have the opportunity to keep the blockchain light, and using second layers (of various types), then we should do exactly that. As I already answered to hv_, the free market now is valuing the "Bitcoin [Core] way" higher than the "Bitcoin Cash way".

ASICS Miners make the money, ie: New Bitcoins & transaction fees

people running the Bitcoin Full Nodes (that don't run a warehouse full of asics) earn Nothing and that is the ones you are always complaining can't afford to host larger blocksizes.

If Miners donated 10% of their transactions fees to people running full nodes, your arguments go up in smoke.

All one has to do is look at Dash, their version of PoW using Masternodes is superior to bitcoin and they never have to worry about a node shortage,
which is all we have heard bitcoiners whine about since a larger blocksize was mentioned years ago.

Then you'd think the free market would have already found a Bitcoin that works like that by now?  I mean, it's had plenty of time.  The option has been there for a while.  I'm pretty sure it's been well publicised.  But the market hasn't found a Bitcoin without a restriction on the blockweight.  Yeah, it's a real mystery...    

You seem to be running into the same dilemma others are having, in that they have a preconceived notion in their mind about what would be "better", but the market seems to have an entirely different notion. 

We could keep talking about what a free market might find in a world where everyone agreed with your stance, but it's probably more realistic to look at what the free market already did find.  And then chose.  Past tense.  Bit late to change it now.

Even if you were right and that happened internationally, in every single country of the world (which I don't believe will be the case) - storage space is not the main problem.

The problem with a massive blockchain is the immense validation work required by all full nodes. In LN, there is a lot less work as nodes only need to validate transactions where they participate themselves.

I don't want to dictate that, and nobody can.

But free market forces would mean: If LN is cheaper for a day-to-day transaction than a "massive block Bitcoin (Cash)", then LN will be the the dominant solution. And if micropayments (=most of the payments that exceed the 1 payment/day per household "threshold" with a 23K tps BTC) are cheaper when carried out with client-server solutions (like Paypal) than when they use LN, these centralized services will continue to exist, but if LN is cheaper, then it most likely will "rule that world".

From all what I heard until now, LN is one of the cheapest solutions, and so it will be most likely very successful - if it works as expected.

Here we agree. LN is not part of the base consensus protocol, so it doesn't affect it.

nope, Lightning Network is not centralized in any means.

I'm very convinced of that real open markets and open protocols will solve that by alligned incentives.
If you want Bitcoin to be big world wide, think big and do not try to dictate how ppl should use Bitcoin.

We might agree on a truth: If you try to scale up a system (like a internet protocol), the base parts of it must be as simple as possible, that attracts all sorts of builders. Side chains included, sure.

> keep the Bitcoin consensus protocol as clean and minimal as possible, so decentralization comes in with world wide use and growth. 

You can argue for years but the Bitcoin Core developers will never be pressured to hard fork to bigger blocks because there is the minority in the community plus the sockpuppets, that is led by the fraudster Roger Ver, the scammer Craig "Faketoshi" Wright, and in connivance with Bitmain founder Jihan Wu. We are already witnessing network centralization of bigger blocks on Ethereum.

Plus you have your big blocks in Bitcoin Cash. As you want to believe, "Bitcoin has bilaterally split in two". Good luck to your big blocks.


The Kardashians drama? Hahaha. There were also rumors from /r/btc that Blockstream is part of the Bilderberg group.


Then do you believe that Roger Ver, Craig Wright, and Jihan Wu are the people that we should listen to, follow and support?

At worse case, LN Hub will be required to register as banks
at best case,  LN hubs will be required to register as money transmitters.

As such , it is against the law for them to discard transactions for up to 10 years after a person dies.
Business & Corporations transactions have to be recorded basically forever.

Thinking LN hubs will be able to discard data is a myth , that is going to bite them in the legal asset.  
They are going to be required to store all data, even if they don't store it in the block chain, it is still going to take up data storage space somewhere.

Truth be told , why fools waste money running free nodes has always been stupid in bitcoin, miners make money ,
yet PoW node operators (suckers) are supposed to work for free.

Give the Node operators a % of the transaction fee profits and then they can afford to run the nodes.

But why do these millions transactions per second need to be validated and stored by every full node, forever?

Even if we discarded LN (for whatever reason), I think solutions like sidechains, pegged alt-chains of various types (e.g. the Basecoin style or the BitUSD/Dai style), child chains and sharding do make much more sense than massive, monolithic blocks. All of these solutions are based on the on-chain transaction paradigm and so are not in danger of being restricted by the SEC or other organisms.

(And no, a IoT nanopayment network based on the Bitcoin technology and on-chain transactions is totally crazy. I think 100K to 1 million transactions per second are totally OK for a global currency. 23K/sec already enable to make every household in the world to make 1 transaction per day, which in most cases is sufficient.)

luke wantd to avoid hardforks....?? .. pfft.. no. luke wanted to avoid the network voting against the cor roadmap. basically not following the core roadmap, so  he went out screaming that everything not core roadmap was bad.. and then went on and became part of the 3 shell trick game to actually cause a harkfork (mandatory bilateral split)
i call it the 3shell game because it appears as if its 3 choices to make on august first, but when you look under the shells, the result is the same.
USAF, BLOQ, ABC are all part of the same thing all paid by the same investors. (DCG.co)

as for luke wanting to decrease the soft limit(policy.h) back down to 0.5mb and you wanting quotes.. and your love for reading reddit and taking what is said on reddit as gospel. i shall give you your dream and desire of quote and of format you desire.
so here it is, on reddit. that way its from the horses mouth and from the source media site most fanboys love. thus you cannot say its biased.. because its handed to you exactly as you would prefer
https://np.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/61yvvv/request_to_core_devs_please_explain_your_vision/dficjhj/

this is him talking before segwit about how moving the policy from 0.75 to 1mb was premature and how core devs veto'd all hard limit(consensus.h) proposals.. and how he wanted the soft limit back down to 0.5mb... he even went on to say when LN finaly works he would hope for 0.1mb blocks.

ask yourself WHY
(answer: bottleneck mainnet. say mainnet cant scale to keep people using LN and vault up the coins into 'factories' to recycle channels(fort knox) so all that people play with in the end is unaudited unconfirmed, non community verified tx's.. oh wait. thats fiat2.0


gota laugh though. Luke Jr was part of team USAF which instigated the mandatory split. even though segwit from november2016 to spring 2017 only garnered 35% community approval.

but those funded by the DCG.co invstors did not just say lets go back to the drawing board and find a compromise the community would accept. they tripled down to push it through by making it MANDATORY


and if you even want to dare say that 32mb or any size above 1mb wont work per block..
then please.. go tell netflix that 32mb/10min(3.2mb/min) wont work and netflix should close for business because netflix cant work
tell itunes that its impossible to download a 3.2mb mp3 in under 1 minute...
go tell all the live streaming/video call services that they cant work.

If you made a client, I don't get to tell you what you can or can't code.  It's your code.  If the community then freely chooses to adopt that code, it has the potential to become OUR network.  If a majority of network participants (both users and miners) agree with it, that's what Bitcoin would then become.  However, the community chose Core's code.  It is OUR network and OUR network chose Lightning.  If you can't respect that choice, you clearly don't respect OUR network, so what are you even still doing here?  Other than making a complete nuisance of yourself, that is?  Why do you still want to be a part of something you're clearly so disillusioned with?  



I agree the community would be better without the REKT campaigns against alternative clients.  I wish people were more mature about these things.  But the simple fact is, I don't get to dictate how they should behave, as much as I might personally find it objectionable.  It's just one of those things we have to deal with as best we can.  All we can do it point out how childish that sort of behaviour is and hope people don't pay it more attention than it deserves.  Much like I'm pointing out how childish your behaviour is and how much of a hypocrite you are by doing exactly the same thing they were doing.  Twisting the narrative, spreading FUD, manipulating things and taking them out of context to make them sound more sinister than they are.  You're doing everything they did, short of impersonating Satoshi to discredit the particular client you dislike.  

If you have a legitimate complaint about Lightning, I'd love to hear it.  But so far, all you've managed to present is either a gross lack of comprehension on your part, or a deliberate attempt to deceive.  



Bottom line is, there is no conceivable way to have one client actively enforcing a 4mb blockweight and another client actively enforcing a different blocksize on the same chain.  So... you can either cry like an infant with your conspiracy theories about dictatorships, or you can accept the fact that the two ideas are not compatible and a fork was inevitable.  There is no magical alternative that would have made this turn out any other way.  If there had been a way to prevent the fork and keep everyone on the same chain, we would probably still be in a heated deadlock where no one agreed on anything.  Is that what you want?  Are you some sort of sado-masochist?  Forks might not be a perfect solution, but anything is better than the quagmire we were stuck in before.

So there was a fork.  At the time of the fork, the BTC chain had the clear economic majority and clear hashrate superiority.  It's irrelevant who you blame for it.  It's irrelevant how you think it happened.  It's irrelevant if you don't think it was fair.  It doesn't change anything.  That's what happened.  We're at a different point in time now, so it's too late to change what has already occurred.  Fixating on your warped interpretation on the past doesn't change the facts of the present.  You are clearly not going to get whatever it is you think you want (and honestly I can't even tell what that is anymore).  Consensus chose Lightning, which you clearly don't like, but now you're just going to have to live with that.  You CAN choose what software to use, but your choice might put you on an incompatible fork because that's how consensus works.  

Seriously, what is it you want?  For everyone to play happy families and magically agree 24/7/365?  Do you want a time machine to go back and watch it unfold exactly the same way again because your insane theories are totally meaningless and wouldn't have any bearing at all over what happened?  Do you want us to un-fork and somehow merge the two chains back together?  Or, more realistically, do you simply want to lash out at Lightning as you clearly don't approve of it?  Are you still upset that more people didn't agree with your way of thinking and you don't like your views being represented by an altcoin?  Do you think your incessant tirades are going to convince Core to change their process?  Speaking of which:



It's called "peer-reviewed code".  Funnily enough, that means people get to review it before it gets merged.  

Go ahead and launch a client where it hasn't been thoroughly reviewed.  See how long it survives with all the bugs and security flaws you inevitably missed because no one checked it first.

It's like that for a good reason.  It's not their fault that the people who take the time to check the code happen to agree on the general direction.  It's also not their fault that the users then appear to agree with that direction, partly because people appreciate the thorough review process.  It might surprise you to learn that people find it reassuring that it's not easy to launch any untested code on layer 0 that could potentially cause problems.  Layer 0 provides the foundations for what we're now building upon, so it has to be secure and strictly vetted.  It's not a damned conspiracy.  Take off the tinfoil hat already.

What bugs have you fixed in BCH then?  I assume you've had loads of code merged into their clients if it's so easy to do in what I assume must be an ultra-accepting hippy commune, at least in comparison to Core's supposed fascist police state?  



Lightning has at least three separate dev teams.  Thus not centralised.



Only in your warped perception.  The way things are, if you can't respect this chain's decision, fork off to altcoinland.  The devs can only propose the roadmap.  The users chose the roadmap.  Get a clue.

"their code"
P.S in a real true decentralised open source network its not a THEIR code or THEIR network. its an OUR network.
did you se gmax go full wetard last year over wanting to sue altcoins for forking btc code.
one day he argued they had to name his group in the copyright, then he went full reverse arguing that he doesnt want his group associated with altcoin..
now thats not how open source mindset reacts

as for me dictating. ha ha ha. goodluck with that one.
if core were not dictators and "they" actually worked on a open level playing field with other software bases and actually used true consensus.. without REKT campaigns and without mandatory consensus bypassing techniques.. then WE as a community would actually see the real benefit of real decentralisation where WE could choose what software to use.

but the way things are. if its not cores roadmap, fork off to altcoinland.. seems to be the mindset.

thus centralised

take any altcoin including imagine btc with 32mb blocks. (i know you love trying to pidgeon hole me into the ver camp. but thats your failure of understanding and ur failed attempt to divert attention away from the real problem. so lets stick to the debate of scaling)

billions of users by midnight .. nope
gigabyte blocks by midnight.. nope

floopy disks vs microsd by midnight.. nope.
scaling over time vs leaping overnight.. nope.

people doing 100tx a day.. nope (people do ~40 fiat transactions a MONTH and only ~5 btc tx a MONTH)
so dont exaggerate... well i actually mean dont take the reddit script exagerations.. but you get my point

chill out on the reddit scripts of disaster by sunrise and realise the reality.. buffer space now to avoid deadlock/debate in years.
stop living in the floppy disk era of 1.44mb is more than enough.
many people have 256GB portable storage on their devices whether they need it or not. they dont go to shops demanding only a 1.44mb floppy because all they want to hold is 2 images

think rationally.. 20 years ago was floppy disk era. 10 years ago was SD era. now its microsd era.. imagine the next 5-10 years
P.S we are no longer in dial-up internet era either. .. fibre and 5g cellular has arrived

After studying a bit on google about lightning Network, it appears centralized to me.

You can run whatever code you like, follow whatever chain you like, create your own chain if that's what you want to do.  Total freedom.  The only catch is you don't get to dictate what code other people run or create, which sounds an awful lot like what you're trying to do here.  Stop telling people what they're not allowed to code.  I made the same arguments when some people here on these boards did their "REKT" idiocy with other alternative clients, so congratulations on becoming the very thing you claim to hate.  You're officially "one of them" now.  You are trying to use the exact same "REKT" methodology to attack Lightning.

Freedom means the users on this network are free to disagree with you.  And clearly they do.  None of your manipulation and propaganda is going to suddenly make them think you've got the right idea.

If you think freedom means you get to tell developers they shouldn't develop Lightning, you are against freedom.
If you think freedom means you get to tell users they shouldn't run the code that enables Lightning, you are against freedom.
If you think freedom means you get to tell miners what chain they point their hashpower at, you are against freedom.

None of that is your decision.  None of it.  The stuff you can make decisions over is:

• Your private keys (and corresponding wealth)
• Which software you choose to run
• The chain, or chains, you wish to transact on
• Whether you run a full node and influence the rules enforced on your chain, or just rely on SPV

Again, I will make the same arguments to defend alternative clients who propose changes to this chain.  You've seen me do it.  I defended XT.  I defended BU.  And I'd do it again.  Alternative clients are not an attack on this chain.  They are not a hostile takeover.  Not a power grab.  My stance doesn't change on this.  I support decentralised development.  I welcome competition from alternative clients because I believe it has the potential to make Bitcoin stronger.  But you have now taken on the role of the "REKT" attacker, using whatever lies and deception you can in an attempt to derail a project you've clearly taken a disliking to.  You're now arguing that Core are the attack, the hostile takeover, the power grab, etc.  Your hypocrisy is shameful. 



If you want your code added to Core, they can follow whatever submission process they want.  You don't get to decide what goes into their client.  If you want to code your own thing, go ahead, make absolutely anything you want to.  You have every right to do so.  See how the market reacts.  But you then need to accept that people might well tell you your idea would be better suited as an altcoin.  If your idea isn't compatible with what the users want the code to do, why should they accept it?  You can't force them to like your changes, they're free to run whatever code they want.  If they don't want to run the code you want them to run, too bad.  Your totalitarianism is impotent here.  And you can't blame the developers if the users don't like your idea either.  

Whine about it all you want, but every single person on the network gets to make their own decision about what they choose to run.  The users on this network are freely choosing the chain with SegWit and Lightning enabled.  

Apparently, this all boils down to the fact that you are bitter and resentful that your vision isn't being accepted by the users.  So in response, you troll the community with this pathetic nonsense about developers being in control and stifling innovation.  But anyone with even the faintest understanding of how Bitcoin works will know you're talking absolute bollocks.  It's just getting sad now.  



No thanks, reddit is a cesspool.  I was under the assumption that's where you were getting your mindless drivel from.