Topic: Lightning Network -- Is it GOOD? (Read 415 times)

nah, i would also say, that this is not negative. probably the same people say that holding bitcoin and not spending it is bad

The lightning is all around, very good. It applies to micropayments and micropayments. It may also be able to handle very large ones.
There is another second-tier solution called Liquid, which is obviously used for "medium" payments.
Then you can still settle Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain as usual.

It's what adoption has to risk because if it's not for the channels created for the group of addresses, each of the transactions will cost very high. It's true that it's centralized, this is why it's suggested to only store a few BTC to a wallet using LN. Miners are not going to earn from the transactions inside this channel so there's this one negative side if you will look at it negatively. I still look at the positive side of LN to be greater especially because we as a user still have the private key.

You should take a closer look at BlueWallet and Strike.

BlueWallet is a custodial wallet, but it handles the channel management for their users. The payment success rate is quite high.

Strike has taken a different approach. Their users don't have to own any coins or know the difference between Bitcoin and Lightning Network invoices. All they need to do is to scan the invoice. Strike will automatically pay it and charge user's credit card.

Which wallet did you use? I find it very easy to install a LN wallet and make transactions.

The wallets I mentioned above are definitely easier than setting up your own channels. Just make sure you're aware of the trade-offs (mainly the custodial part). For small amounts, I'm okay with that.

what was hard? and would you say it got easier over time?

As such I don't have anything against the Lightning Network. But even with 4.5 years of experience in the field of cryptocurrency, I found it really hard to operate. That said, I would agree that the Lightning Network is an awesome innovation, as it enables users to send their coins with minimal fees, and get instant confirmations. But user friendliness also matters. No matter how much advanced an innovation is, as long as ordinary people can't use it, for me it is worthless. Setting up payment channels and all can be quite hard.

at least here are people with some kind of humor i can relate - maybe it's also my status as a newbie...

i personally do think, that agreement does add to the topic and i don't have any merits to give, a simple thumbs up (as a sign of agreement) would help a lot, but what do i know...

edit: oh i had a merit to give - the keeper of the private key got it

Some mods take censorship more serious than others. Some think that short postings don't add anything to the topic. So instead of just agreeing with one or two words you have to agree using a bunch of words, like "I concur from the bottom of my lonely heart and I wish that everybody else would learn about lightning, because it is so wonderful and awesome."

"I concur" seems to be a valid response, but my "me too" was just deleted by a moderator, why?

the question of the op was in other words: is lightning good and what are your thougs and my answer is like AGD said: lightning is awesome

I concur 

To remain completely objective, it's healthy not to speak in absolutes when it comes to this sort of thing.  How services control use Lightning will dictate the level of centralisation/decentralisation you will experience.

if exchanges only accept channels of min of say 0.04btc($1600) means a hierarchy becomes default. where users of say 0.0025($100) have to be a couple hops out from centre where they have to attach to a hub to be only a couple hops away from a exchange, else end up 15+hops away and thus costing more fee's per hop to get to interact with an exchange


imagine an exchange handling say $1mill at any one time.
they wont want to have 10,000 channels of $100 users
                                   or 625 channels of $1600 hubs

once more popular
they would have probably 100 channels(to hubs) of $10k. whereby those 100 channels are hubs with 100 channels(to users) of $100

its the game theory of the '6 degrees of separation'. but in this case the 100 degrees of separation
well mathematically
                                local       region    world
                 user         hub         hub        hub
per channel 100    *   100    *   100   *   100    >exchange (manages $10b with users only being 4 hops)
                ($100)    ($10k)     ($1m)   ($100m)    
ascending value hierarchy cloers to main services = least chance of depleted funds /bottlenecks. bad routes

its pure network efficiency logic

yes people can have inefficient channels that cost them more hops "for independance".. but they end up having routes unavailable due to their 'random' hop model somewhere not having funds.
eventually people end up closing channels and reopening them in positions that offer more guaranteed utility

by default people wont close a session and reopen a session in the exact same position where they experienced higher fee's and more bottlenecks and rejected routes

its the reason why banks dont just have a central bank with millions of customers. they have bank branches in each town where the bank branch services that town. so that the bank HG only needs to daily settle the brank branch reserve

To remain completely objective, it's healthy not to speak in absolutes when it comes to this sort of thing.  How you opt to use Lightning will dictate the level of centralisation/decentralisation you will experience.  It's certainly possible to rely entirely on third party companies, but no one is putting a gun to your head to make you use it in that way.  If you're prepared to put some effort in and learn how to keep your funds secure, you won't have to rely on any middlemen.  However, companies do offer services for the sake of convenience, so the option is there for people who prefer to use them, even though that often involves an element of trust. 

It's open to all.  Individuals and companies alike.  There are no gatekeepers.  Trust others or don't, it's entirely up to you.

The people who are claiming it is centralised and requires trust in third parties are the ones who seemingly want it to fail (keep in mind they may have a competing altcoin they'd rather you adopt instead).  It sounds as though they want to scare you away before you're tempted to dive in and form your own conclusions.  Honestly, Twitter isn't renowned for an abundance of empirical evidence.  Lots of baseless opinions.  Very little fact-checking.  Maybe don't place too much weight on the words of tweets from people on the internet who may have a hidden agenda.

To an ordinary person in the Bitcoin community, all I wish is for Bitcoin to function as money. Satoshi probably created Bitcoin as money more than anything else. So if Bitcoin in its current state cannot or can hardly function that way and the Lightning Network is making that vision happen, then I think it must be good.

I have seen pictures in El Salvador recently where cheap items such as food items are sold in Bitcoin with the use of the Lightning Network. Seeing those, I have to conclude that the Lightning Network must be good.

There have always been limitations in the cryptocurrency network. The lightning network has its centralized limitations and that can not deny its relevance in solving the outrageous fee associated with cryptocurrency networks.

While there are still certainly some issues to be worked out when it comes to the lightning network, it does also a ton of upside potential.  Personally I feel like it is taking longer than it should, but I guess things like this take a lot of time/coding etc.  I posted this a while back.. it's a write up about the Lightning Network that is explained as easily as it gets, I highly encourage everyone to take a read- https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.29271658

"Lightning Network enables Unicast Transactions in Bitcoin. Lightning is Bitcoin’s TCP/IP stack.
Melik Manukyan

It has recently come to my attention that there is a great deal of confusion revolving around the Lightning Network within the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash communities, and to an extent, the greater cryptocurrency ecosystem. I’d like to share with you my thoughts on Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Lightning from a strictly networking background.
To better understand how blockchain and the lightning network work, we should take a step back from the rage-infused battlegrounds of Twitter and Reddit (no good comes from this 😛) and review the very network protocols and systems that power our Internet. I believe that there is a great wealth of knowledge to be gained in understanding how computer networks and the Internet work that can be applied to Bitcoin’s own scaling constraints. The three protocols I will be primarily focusing on in this article are Ethernet, IP, and TCP. By understanding how these protocols work, I feel that we will all be better equipped to answer the great ‘scaling’ question for Bitcoin and all blockchains alike. With that said, let’s get started.
In computer networking, the two most common forms of data transmission today are broadcast and unicast. There are many other forms such as anycast and multicast, but we won’t touch up on them in this article. Let’s first start by defining and understanding these data transmission forms.
Broadcast — a data transmission type where information is sent from one point on a network to all other points; one-to-all.

Diagram: Broadcast Data Transmission
Unicast — a data transmission type where information is sent from one point on a network to another point; one-to-one.

Diagram: Unicast Data Transmission
Based on our understanding of these types of data transmission forms, we very quickly discover that blockchain transactions resemble Broadcast-like forms of communication. When a transaction is made on the Bitcoin network, the transaction is communicated or broadcasted to all connected nodes on the network. In other words, for a transaction to exist or happen in Bitcoin, all nodes must receive and record this transaction. Transactions on blockchains work very similarly to how legacy, ethernet hubs handled data transmissions.
A long time ago, we relied on ethernet hubs to transfer data between computers. Evidently, we discovered that they simply did not scale due to their limited nature. Old ethernet hubs strictly supported broadcast transmissions, data that would come in through one interface or port would need to be broadcasted and replicated out through all other interfaces or ports on the network. To help you visualize this, if you wanted to send me a 1MB image file over a network with 100 participants, that 1MB image file would, in turn, need to be replicated 99 times and broadcasted out to all other users on the network.
In Bitcoin, we see very similar behavior, data (a transaction or block) that comes from one node is broadcasted and replicated to all other nodes on the network. Blockchains similarly to old, legacy ethernet hubs are simply poor mediums to perform data transmission and communicate over. It is simply unrealistic to me as a network engineer to even consider scaling a global payment network such as Bitcoin via Broadcast-based on-chain transactions. Even to this very day, us network engineers take great care and caution in spanning our Ethernet and LAN networks, let alone on a global level.
To put it into perspective, if we were to redesign the Internet by strictly relying on broadcast data transmissions as exhibited in blockchains and ethernet hubs — we would have effectively put every single person, host, and device in the entire world on the same LAN segment or broadcast domain. The Internet would have been a giant, flat LAN network where all communication would need to be replicated and broadcasted to every single device. In you opening up to read this article, every other device on the Internet would have been forced to download this article. In other words, the internet would come to a screeching halt.
In computer networks, the most frequent form of communication relies on unicast data transmissions, or point-to-point. Most of the communication on the internet is routed from one computer to another, we no longer need to rely on blind broadcast transmissions of data with the hopes that our recipient will receive it or see it. We are able to accurately send, route and deliver our messages to our receiving party(ies). We learned that the transfer of a 1MB image file in a broadcast network would require the file to be replicated and broadcasted to every participant on that network. Instead, in a network that supports unicast data transmissions, we are able to appropriately route that image file from source to destination in a clearcut manner.
To me, the Lightning Network is the IP layer of Bitcoin. (I understand that these data transmission forms exist in both Ethernet and IP.) But, I do feel that these analogies help us to better understand these complex and largely abstract ideas: blockchain, lightning, channels, etc.
Let’s take a moment and ignore all explanations and overly simplistic definitions of Lightning that are perpetuated from both sides of the debate for a moment. Instead, lets objectively take a close look at Lightning and determine what we know. What do we know about lightning? It allows us to lock our Bitcoin and form channels with others. What else do we know? We can bidirectionally send and receive transactions between the two points that constitute the channel. What else do we know? We can further route transactions to their correct destination.
Based on these key understanding points, we are able to see that lightning enables unicast transactions in a system [Bitcoin] that previously only supported broadcast transactions. To me, Lightning nodes in Bitcoin are the equivalent of IP hosts — where we can finally conduct or route one-to-one or point-to-point transactions to their appropriate recipients. In traditional IP, we send and receive data packets; in Lightning, we send and receive Bitcoin. IP is what allowed us to scale our small and largely primitive networks of the past into the global giant that it is today, the Internet. In a similar manner, Lightning is what will allow us to scale our global Bitcoin network.
Where Lightning Nodes can be seen as IP hosts, I view Lightning Channels as established TCP connections. On the Internet today, when we try to connect to a website for example, we open a TCP connection to a web server through which we can then download the website’s HTML source code from. Alternatively, when we download a torrent file, we are opening TCP connections to other computers on the Internet which we then use to facilitate the transfer of the torrent data.
And in Lightning, we establish channels with our respective parties and are able to directly [point-to-point] send and receive data (transactions) similarly to TCP. Where Blockchain is similar to Ethernet, Lightning Nodes are our IPs and Lightning Channels our TCP connections.
To conclude, I see many similarities to our pre-existing network technologies and protocols that power our computer network(s) and I feel that we are redesigning the Internet. From a technical point of view, I don’t believe that scaling Bitcoin on-chain will ever work and fear broadcast storm-like events in the future. I welcome our new unicast transaction methods enabled by the Lightning Network. Even more so, I am excited for the ‘web’ moment in Bitcoin.
While everyone has their eyes fixed on blockchain technology, I look towards Lightning. Lightning is the TCP/IP stack of Bitcoin. Lightning is where we will transact on. Lightning is where everything will be built on. Lightning is what will power and enable our applications and additional protocols and layers. With this said, what is to become of the main Bitcoin blockchain? It will and should remain a decentralized, tamper-proof, immutable base or foundation layer which will provide us with cryptographic evidence of what is a Bitcoin.
Some individuals and groups within our communities and ranks spread fear and warn us of false narratives of “lightning hubs”, but fail to grasp that their scaling approach of on-chain transactions only pushes us in the direction of an actual (ethernet) hub design. If Bitcoin loses decentralization on its base layer, then we will lose Bitcoin. The past 9 years of work will have only resulted in a large, centralized broadcast hub with only a few remaining with the ability to operate such a monstrosity.
I wrote this article with hopes that it will help clear up the ongoing confusion about Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Lightning. It is designed to help better explain Blockchain and Lightning through analogies to concepts that we may be more familiar with. I also wrote this very quickly and it may contain typos. If you notice any typos, please bring it to my attention".

I am not the biggest  fan of Lightning Network and I don't think it's ready and simple enough to be used by everyone, not it is accepted by all exchanges and merchants,
but those who criticize it most are Bcashers and big blockers like Roger Ver.
Let's take a look at mining pool distribution for bch and we can see that almost 50% is controlled by Antpool and 3 pools are controlling 75% of their total hashrate, so you can't really call this decentralization.
If you run your own node for LN and open channel when fees are low you will be able to spend you Bitcoin for coffee and peanuts, but who does that anyway

Have you ever used the lightning network? Its fantastic!!! It works incredibly well. I am very excited to see its development path.

Lightning is awesome

I really can't think of any reason for this narrative. The only reason that comes to mind is that the original author just wants to spread FUD all over the forum and possibly all over the internet. And it just so happened that OP stumbled upon this that post and just shared it with either good or bad intentions. But the bottom line is that everyone should really study the information they want to share before even doing so specially in this industry since it may cause a lot of confusion and may do more bad than good. This is because by spreading false news you are not helping the majority but instead, helping the cause of the source. Good thing that lots of knowledgeable people have shed light about this matter in this thread that OP started.