Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 17. (Read 13809 times)

Nice read.
I found another graph in that newsletter that caught my attention:



This is the kind of exponential metric that tells you bitcoin is not holder's dream: bitcoin is used because solves everyday problems.
And people are realising bitcoin can benefit themselves in a mostly unexpected way. Otherwise it would be difficult explain the broad usage of a LN wallet.
 

https://lightninglabs.substack.com/p/signal-over-noise-how-emerging-markets

don't sweat it, I also remember you and know you're ok


well, ok. it's only a theory, i didn't get super secret hacked emails from Wikileaks or anything

but everyone seems incredibly sensitive on this, why not just quit helping to spam Spamlord's stuff? any useful information is something he lifted from somewhere else anyway (except anything internal to the "mining cartel council")

Yes.  I know you have been here a long time.  So have I.

And sorry I attacked... it's been a shitty week/month/three years.

I just read the "paid troll" argument several posts back (and you are using it here too!) and it's just so tiresome.  I am all about adversarial thinking, but calling anyone you disagree with a paid troll is a shitty argument.

i agree with you Saylor is all about promoting Saylor.  But he has also bought gimongus amounts of BTC.  And has an incredible incentive to prote BTC and himself...

If you don't like him, you don't like him... I get it.  But seriously JJG a paid Saylor shill?  Me?  Bah.

Also, he does a really good job communicating what Bitcoin is.  Particularly to the sorts of folks who don't understand it and want to kill it.  Nobody is a perfect advocate for Bitcoin... not him, not Greg Maxwell for that matter.  But Saylor is not that bad IMO.

I've been known to advocate for Bitcoin before, or at least I was trying to.

for 10 years.


Spamlord pitched up about 2 years ago, and he's been shouting very loud and very often, really as if he's trying to take control of the conversation.

if I'm wrong about that, explain. if not, everyone advocating for him looks pretty weird at best, and shilling paid mini spamlords at worst. .

Thanks franky I'm super awake now. All this time before having read your post I never realized I was merely an amoeba drifting aimlessly in a sea of confusion. But now it is all so clear for you have guided me back on the righteous path.

Even when you agree with franky, he still finds something to disagree about, its remarkable!

Have a fantastic day.

@nutildah

when you open your eyes and observe:
market cap
network liquidity
company valuation.

are 3 terms of meaningless statistic of just numbers that are not actually used/backed. it will awaken you

bitcoins market cap is not an amount of fiat held somewhere as reserve
LN's liquidity/capacity is not how much all users combined can actually transact without bottlenecks
company valuation is not an amount of reserve/collateral or cashflow a company actually has

lets use the o'leary sharktank demo of company valuation

a guy walks into the sharktank. has $10k in his back pocket but asks the sharks for $50k for 5% of company
sharks give him $50k. now he has $60k real cash flow.. but company now instantly valued at $1m

advice: never think "market cap" means anything
advice: never think LN can handle true bitcoin volume transactions per day
advice: never trade fiat companies based on company valuations.

@nutildah response below
i dont look for ass kissers
if you agree with content A, but then start talking about content B
where content B shows you are unaware that company valuations are also fake but you want to state that it shows something meaningful.. then content B needs correcting

there is no get out of jail free card by being an ass kisser

if people stick to facts, observe, do research. and actually show they learn. then i dont kiss their ass, i just see nothing to comment to correct them about.

those that only want ass kissing responses, are not leading a good discussion

in short, if someone says factual stuff. they simply need no response/discussion/debate/alternative opinion..  because the details speak for themselves.

advice:
if you kiss ass and then say something silly. the kiss ass WONT absolve the silly

case in point
saylors bitcoin holdings are separate from his business dealings

his business does separate non bitcoin projects and is run and funded by fiat.
saylors fiat business is separate from his bitcoin interests

compare that to influencers like DCG who are highly bitcoin involved financially and project led.. yet no one in this group wants to talk about them.. funny that

This is one of the few times I actually find myself agreeing with Franky... I disagree with him on just about everything related to the subject of this thread, but whats the point of rehashing it.


Prediction for the record:

Its not going to end well for Saylor.

In addition to Microstrategy operating at a net loss for the last 3 years, there's already some hearty warning signs that things are going in an even worse direction for him.

Saylor simping is an exercise in futility, but the Saylor simps won't believe it until the end actually happens. And when it does happen it will have nothing to do with Bitcoin.

https://fortune.com/2022/09/07/tax-fraud-suit-michael-saylor-microstrategy-whistleblower-details/

Price of MSTR is down ~25% as of the writing of this article, price of BTC is down ~17.5%.

OK back to Lightning talk; apologies for the OT.

prime examples of social drama above

if influencer/ambassador/advocate just mentions "brand" but is not personally involved in a projects development..
.. they are just social drama(#FameForName)

it doesnt matter if they have 130k coin or 575k coin or 630k coin.
their underlying involvement means more. and what they are practising off camera means more than what they preach on camera(everyone loved o'leary.. until FTX got goxxed)

if you wish to waste time observing a influencer/advocate. and ignore the code, rules, protocol, security of a monetary system.. your observing the wrong things

if you only admire an advocate because they mention a flawed system you admire.  you really are pointing your eyes and fluttering your eyelashes at your crush. in the wrong direction(everyone loved o'leary.. until FTX got goxxed)

Nope.  And screw you.

Not because I like or dislike Saylor.. but because I dislike someone trying to tell me what to think.

Him...

Or you.

He advocates for Bitcoin... Whatever... maybe it's not perfect.  Here, you, on the other hand, are advocating against Saylor.

Whatever.

so

1. you're not getting paid
2. you reserve the right to spam Spamlord's spampaign promo material forthwith

okaaaaaaaaaay

i've said helpful things for Bitcoin, so have you JJG and several thousand others on this forum


we never tried to turn ourselves into a celebrity over any of it though did we?

please try to earn an honest living instead. why do you think he wants to use fake grassroots campaigns to become a Bitcoin celebrity? probably up to no good, especially when you consider that he has no talent or anything else to offer the space at all

I already said enough to defend Saylor and/or MSTR in terms of whatever I already posted.. to the extent that I was even attempting to justify anything in regards to Saylor and/or MSTR.  I don't need to be doing any homework that you assign, and more likely you are the one who probably needs to do your own homework to back up your own seemingly bullshit talking points - that ONLY seem to be getting more ridiculous the more you talk about it.  

Just off the top of my head, I am thinking that Saylor has some great perspectives that have already been helpful to bitcoin, ever since he got into bitcoin in around August 2020. .and he was quite public about the way that he was assessing bitcoin to be good for him and good for other businesses and good for the world.. whether you buy into his various talking points or not and whether you buy into whatever things that he has done as being materially helpful to anyone or not..including some of his informational efforts and some of the free courses (which I suppose you are going to assert as being either propaganda or merely self-promotions.. blah blah blah).  

Through the last 2.5 years or since the time that I have heard about Saylor and MSTR, I have criticized him in a variety of ways in the past too..  but generally, I tend to say good things about him, even if I might have some criticisms in there from time to time too.. such as criticisms of some of his seemingly over aggressiveness in regards to how he had invested and then also some of his seemingly less ability to relate to some of the ground-level censorship resistance, non-kyc and peer to peer perspectives, and hopefully some of his (and his company's) considering to put resources into lightning network development might push him more into a more grounded direction.. and I think that I was critical in regards to some of his mining counsel involvement.. but surely not overly so because I am not all caught up into researching the various ways that I believe that Saylor is out to damage bitcoin because I have considered him as a net good for bitcoin so he has not raised any red flags for me.. or at least not as many relatively speaking as some other folks, including my concerns about shitcoins and shitcoiners.. but still you seem to be coming off as quite jaded in terms of being skeptical about what Saylor is actually doing and whether he is actually helpful to bitcoin overall, and it seems to me that bitcoin takes all types, even if we might not agree with everything that they do or how they speak or whatever..

So sure maybe Saylor is potentially dominating the talking points too much because he is and has been quite popular, and you are going to be able to call him a dweeb or to point out the various ways that he is wrong . but your mere assertion that he is a spammer, an attention-whore or someone who is disingenuous seems to be lacking in evidence, so the burden seems to be more on you rather than me to establish your assertions that from my point of view seem to go contrary to actual evidence and/or facts on the ground.. and yeah, maybe he ends up not doing anything for lightning network or establishing some proprietary system that goes contrary to bitcoin/lightning network values, to the extent that those exist... but still it seems way to early to conclude that whatever he is going to end up doing is not going to have any value or is going to have merely negative value.

Your assertion that I am paid by Saylor is quite crazy and baseless too.... and it does seem that we are deviating from the topic of this thread in terms of at least matters related to Saylor getting involved in lightning network and gosh, I hardly seem to have enough knowledge beyond what I had already said. not that I should be needing to do any further research to respond to what seems to be increasingly dumb and perhaps even increasingly irrelevant assertions that you are making in regards to my objectives that are supposedly not as neutral as your seemingly crazy-assed whining about Saylor ones.  You seem to be the one trying to act like you are normal (and smarter than everyone else) while making the crazy claims. not this here cat.  

I dare you to find

1. anything he's ever done or said that is any different to any other investment firm
2. anything he ever does to that end in future

you/he won't, because his sole talent is spamming pictures of his face. everywhere.

you are helping him with this. it's because you're getting paid, isn't it?

Thank you! That confirms basically my suspicion that these both services have currently a wrong "view" of the network at this moment. It's strange however that it persists for so long this time. I'll try to reach out to them I've reached out to lookintobitcoin.com to see if they can try to reconfigure their nodes to fix the issue. And also perhaps to the youtuber who criticized LN based on this very likely flawed data.

I look forward to see if Saylor's announcement regarding further involvement in lightning network ends up in any kinds of open source contributions and/or innovations.  It seems that he had not been involved in lightning network for very long, and he had seemed to have had been less interested in the payment network aspects of bitcoin, so his thinking seems to be evolving in terms of being more open to the ideas of developing and building upon payment networks, so yes hopefully there are benefits to the whole lightning network that come from his (or his company's) involvement in such. 

If I come across some information that Saylor and/or his team put out that relates to the lightning network that I find to be interesting (and it has not already been posted or shared) I will forward it (which you call spamming, but you seem to have a way more strict (or would it be perverted?) idea regarding what is spamming, as compared with me - at least when it comes to Saylor).

n0nce
you got no clue at all
try to do more research and less social drama sucking up to certain people

EG read how the LN payments really flow
https://github.com/lightning/bolts/blob/master/04-onion-routing.md
not your comic book manual of deceptive wording

for people pretending to be observers. your choosy about what you want to see and what you want to close your eyes to,

open your eyes once and a while to the less than perfect case scenarios, you might learn more and while at same time promoting broke things less
you might even start to become risk aware for your own value security. rather than aimlessly think your value is secure

people want a good monetary system that works without the endless worry of funds moving without their consent and without being lost just by things like wanting to settle up or even just sleeping

if you want to observe things about lightning.. actually open your eyes to the flaws too. not be blind and only see the dreams
i know you only want to sales-pitch the "best case".. but try to now ant again open your eyes and observe "normal " case usage.. and maybe one day you might challenge yourself and open your eyes and observe "worse case".. and maybe just maybe you might become risk adverse to want to be making observations that are risk awareness

you have fooled yourself into dream of only best case dreams
the peg is the onion payments.. these are NOT COMMITMENTS!!
also, lets quickly explain commitments..
NEVER is a raw bitcoin transaction format of data of a full bitcoin transaction sent between LN users
they send small datapoints(mainly measured in msat) where each side builds its local commitment and its partners desired commitment via converting datapoints to sign locally and than swap signatures to check partners
(research htlc conversions)

now back to onion payments.
LN funds route around the network via onion payments where there is a different value UNIT that floats around which trigger separate things. the conversion of the value unit. is what your missing the understanding of

bitcoin format transactions do not loop around routed paths from payer to destination across a multi-hop
commitments are just the receipt.. which are not settled thus not secure either

if you think its soo fixed, secure, rigid and perfect. why do you think watchtowers, revokes and many other things are add-ons that become needed

---

have you even tried to read the malicious stuff of your idolised devs.. saying bitcoiners do not even own their value. that bitcoin is not a system of property ownership even in the link your provided

open your eyes

I have no 'beef' with Saylor, but he is just not too interesting for me, since he doesn't develop anything in or on Bitcoin / Lightning.
So he's just a big investor. That's not too interesting: 'buy low, sell high', 'look how much BTC we bought', 'investing in Bitcoin is working', etc.

If his company starts building Bitcoin products and contributing to open source (like Blockstream), I'd look into them more. For now though, Microstrategy is just an investor like Tesla and everyone else.

Yes, it's well-known that Franky just wants bigger blocks, but at the same time dislikes BCH. There's a whole thread for discussing with him about that, so let's not derail the LN Observer for this purpose.

because he spams his face and meaningless "interviews" in every piece of free internet column inches available, seemingly because he wants to become a bitcoin celebrity of some kind (Andreas Antonopoulos was the same kind of character, but even he wasn't as shamelessly obvious as Spamlord here)


so you'll all stop spamming Michael Spamlord's spam, because you aren't spammers, right?

Looking back at it now, in January 2023, it seems pretty definitive. As I suspected, their node is most probably dodgy / unmaintained. You can actually see that in the last year there were more 'anomalies' (marked in yellow) in bitcoinvisuals' chart. Those anomalies include data gaps, a plateau end of year and the 'crash'. These can be explained by downtimes, closing of some of their own channels (making them reach fewer nodes) and maybe even channel partners closing channels to them, which obviously lets them reach fewer channels on the network.

Especially due to the completely horizontal line from around October, it seems to me like they stopped maintaining their node and it stopped recording data; then probably people closed channels and the capacity crashed.



I am still confident that this has nothing to do with LN itself, because nothing proves me otherwise.
Again, in a decentralized network (even Bitcoin L1) there is no single, clear view of the network and mapping them is a difficult task. For instance, determining the total number of full nodes on the network has always been known to be basically unsolvable and that all the numbers we have are educated estimates.

As we can see now, a month later, https://1ml.com/ recorded no plateau or crash of Lightning balance, as did no other 'LN stats service'; further enforcing my point.

Since only bitcoinvisuals and lookintobitcoin show both plateau from October and crash in December, I am confident that they just use the same / each other's data.

If you want to call 2-of-2 multisig transactions an 'insecure peg', go ahead..

Have you had a look at this paper that covers the used scripts, yet?
https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

There are also some illustrations and explanations of the scripts in 'Mastering the Lightning Network':
https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook/blob/develop/07_payment_channels.asciidoc

you lot dont want bitcoin fees to be sub-penny amounts as thats competition

anyways
when just one exchange can cause a week long congestion of transactions on bitcoin.. bitcoin needs to scale
even if that exchange was to go LN.. when it then wants to settle all those channels.. guess what.. congestion again
LN solves nothing.. just delays things

but you stay in utopian best case scenario.. singing and praising when things play good and ignore/run/get amnesia the many examples of bad
(guess you forgot how LN failed el salvadors chivo wallet (oops your suppose to blame bitcoin, right))
(guess you forgot how LN failed to not fractional reserve (thor turbo) (oops your suppose to call that a feature, right))
(guess you forgot how LN can break its peg (oops your suppose to call that user error, right))
(guess you forgot how after 5 years. the bitcoin tx count is still under 2500 and the fee's are over an hours labour for unbanked country)


do you also need reminding that bitcoin does not leave the bitcoin network and what value is being played with ON ANOTHER NETWORK/SYSTEM is not bitcoin
.. nothing about a LN onion payment resembles bitcoin

need i remind you that LN is not a bitcoin feature solely to function on bitcoin and cant survive without bitcoin
.. yep i said it LN can function without bitcoin (yep without reprogramming/recompiling your LN wallet you can flip a button and play with other currencies)

LN is not a "bitcoin"
its much more emulating other crap subnetworks emulating that they are bitcoin (renBTC, wBTC) many many ways.. differing unit of payment, peg not secure to bitcoin. phishes to be bitcoin but is a different network entirely. yet LN doesnt even have its own blockchain or its own consensus..nor is a onion payment(ln's native tx mothod) something bitcoin recognises

---

as for saying that LN has taken on the strain to create some slack..
read this topic. where the most prominent LN-ers are showing their relay "events" of only 20-150 A MONTH

bitcoin nodes relay ~150-230 tx every minute

LN gets congested and bottlenecks just trying to route $600
(Average Channel Capacity 0.068 BTC$1,175.57) (2 participants =  average $587.78) per direction

---

oh lets not forget the whole liquidity thing

if just 7,000,000 people wanted to move 0.02btc($340) EACH.. just 5 hops using a node with one channel route direction
thats needing 840,000btc locked to process those 140k payments..

yep it needs for a 5 x hops needs 6x capacity to enable such hops

so now imagine binances 25m users of 575,000btc
needing to move 5 hops to destinations
requires locking up 3.34m just to process 575k.. whereby those (router/middlemen) of 2.8m of locked value is then stuck as 'outbound' and not spendable by the person that locked funds up.  able to facilitate further routes..  nor able to facilitate further routes..   as it was used to process the first 575k
(in this scenario of 1 channel hopping)

but wait.. let me guess "bottlenecks and payment failures are a feature or user error"
where you suggest they then create another channel set to find another route
thus now 6x becomes 12x locked just to process 1x of payments (rinse/repeat)

now do the multiples
Average Channels per Node 9.45