Topic: Lightning Network Discussion Thread - page 18. (Read 29772 times)

Lightning Network Mainnet Faucet - Community Jar

Although is this really useful when you can't open a channel without putting in some funds to begin with? Does anyone know of a node that will open a channel with you for no cost?

Just want to share a video here from two of the prime founders of Lightning network Joseph Poon and Thaddeus Dryja. The video was made in the year 2015.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zVzw912wPo

The video made me understand what lightning network is. 

Decentralized exchanges are still in a raw state. They are not newbie friendly, just like the Lightning Network. I wouldn't call them a failure because there is still a lot of work which needs to be done. We still lack user-friendly Lightning Network wallets which could provide channel backup and easy full-node setup process. There is a risk that the whole network becomes more centralized in the future because of people opening their channels to the biggest nodes or depending on a third party. Despite all this facts, the number of nodes and users is constantly growing and you must be asking yourself, why is that?

Lightning Network is still in its early state, why not compare it to the early days of Bitcoin when it was fairly easy to take over the network with a 51% attack? Give it some more time. Nobody expects to see every Bitcoin user using the Lightning Network this year.

Do we have an example of sharding that actually works and scales atleast nearly as well as LN? Has it been tested not just theorized? If that project exists than I am interested in it.



A socialist? Here on bitcoin talk? I never thought I would see that. No, but seriously, without a central planer how will farmers know which processing plants to route their soybeans to? How will grocery stores know which customers to route which products to? Having an entity "in charge" of routing is precisely the problem that I was hoping a truly scalable cryptocurrency could solve.

I could make some guesses about how it might be done but that is beyond the scope of this thread so we probably shouldn't go too far down this particular rabbit hole here. I'll say, it could work something like the address it's self encodes some data about its rough location on planet earth, then nodes early in the chain could just begin by roughing it "thattaway" and later nodes in the chain would have more detailed maps of their local network topography. That's just one possible idea out of nearly infinity. The inability to think of something here is not proof that it wouldn't work, its proof of a failure of imagination.

What matters for this discussion is not the solution, but whether or not it is soluble. What matters is, when cash is up for grabs, will individual entrepreneurs be able to figure out how to forward data in such a way as to get it generally closer to it's destination than it was before? That's actually not a tall order. Most of the time you will need to get to your nearest city first, then the nearest regional hub, then from there to the regional hub nearest your destination and same process out to your destination. It really isn't rocket science.

*edit* haha we don't even use source routing right now! there isn't even an centralized entity "in charge of routing" right now!

a request from Shelby. to be considered a last contribution, and perhaps further some more useful discussion on the matter (without his now banned input of course).

Once a problem looks to be a challenge on first layer, one should firstly think of improving the infrastructure. Bitcoin is not a rigid, dead system. This infrastructure has more potentials to be unleashed and yet we have sharding solutions in the horizon as well. Sharding is a first layer protocol, an on-chain scalability solution.

Sharding is more elegant and beautiful compared to ugly complicated second layer solutions like LN, which completely abstracts users from the consensus algorithm, the way google, facebook, .... ruined the Internet and turned it to such a dangerous place for ordinary people by compromising their privacy and security. I suppose you guys have a same agenda for destroying bitcoin by putting people behind layers of abstraction.

It is an insane strategy. Bitcoin needs fresh breath to breath interaction with users and simplicity. Only a corporate employee would take second layer development serious, a hacker, just don't GAS.  


Definitely. Imagine being able to bid for the transportation of discrete chunks of data. You just say "hey neighboring physical infrastructure nodes, I wan't this chunk of data to be transported to this address, who can do it the cheapest? who can do it the most quickly?" And your neighboring physical infrastructure nodes perform the same calculation, and the ones next to them the same calculation, et al. Then the price for each route comes cascading backwards all the way to each of the nodes that are physically adjacent to you and to you, you then pick your preferred trade off between price, bandwidth and latency. No need for data plans, almost impossible to censor, so much more private, and a network that could organically adapt to a living pulse of price signals. Heck even the north Korean government couldn't censor an internet like that. And that's surely just scratching the surface.