Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 29. (Read 13570 times)

Interesting ethic debate.  Those funds are stuck on the channel. You could recover all the funds and then be ready to return those if the poor fellow will ever contact you.
Just to prevent the fact an accident on your side could make those funds lost forever.

I'm not debating your claims, ser. The point of my post is if criticisms are something like what you have said before, that "Lightning transactions are made of IOUs", then that's absolutely wrong and misleading.


Who's denying LN's limitations? No one, franky1. We merely don't want FUD. In fact, I believe that it's a limitation that if node operators can't be incentivized by locking their capital in channels, network growth will be slow, or it might also decline.

A quick tip for lightning node management, particularly for LND.

Mind your zombie channels.

if you see a node go offline for a long time, it is good to just nix that channel.  If you have a failure (like I did) then it can be troublesome to close the channel because you need the partner to initiate a FC.  I only had this with a single channel.  And I might actually MAKE MONEY because of it.  Because if he does not show up after a certain amount of time I am just going to claim the entire balance via some wizardry... It's nearly impossible to completely lose balances... but I do not want to take any of his sats.  Then again if he is gone then at least one of us should have them.  I also am 99% sure he opened the channel and all the balance was on his side...  poor fellow.

So you really only want channels with reliable nodes.

thats the promotion, the hype, the hope. .. but please! actually run some scenarios without the pompus utopian best case scenario attempts

actually work it out and see that there are some work arounds but what those work arounds also cause

EG if a route has bad liquidity they then say the work around is for people to open up more channels for other routes. but that ends up with more liquidity needing to be locked up. or dividing peoples value down to have it shared across multiple channels. again causing issues per channel

also again. there is the issue of the hops = X * hops. just to process X
where by running a scenario of the utopian promise of LN being the service everyone uses instead of everyone using the blockchain.
take that down a few notches and say just 1M of coins is locked from an exchange and every one is X hops away.
how much is needed at each hop to also be locked and how many hops is then the distance limit before all 19m coins need to be locked just to satisfy the requirement of the exchanges 1m pegged amount then able to reach customers Y hops away.

add it all up. see and find the real limitations. and the real issues. observe the bad and dont just dream of the utopia

No one is trying to call FUD the constructive criticisms against Bitcoin, and the Lightning Network. If you believe that the Lightning Network currently isn't ready for the real world because of low liquidity, and routing problems/bugs, OK. But don't ignore the fact that these are resolvable problems.

I like these implementations of the LN, they have the great potential of showing the improvement of the LN user interface and the effectiveness of the payment processing.
This is what Jack Mallers has been trying to do in the US with the Strike integration in the NCR PoS. (Point of Sale, not Proof of Stake! /j)

soon a new Bitcoin bar will open in manchester/england. drinks and food can be paid with lightning and there will also be lightning arcade and various workshops in the future
for more info visit👉satoshisplace.co.uk

you might want to observe that exchanges do high volume trade and alot of cold wallet to hotwallet movements. so even a few hundred BTC is not a reserve problem for an exchange to lock to a coldwallet for months as their LN stash post peg. most exchanges have hundreds of thousands of coins in cold wallets.. so their reserves are not the problem

however it remains the issue of the routed hops within the network. the more that goes in the more multiples of that is needed just to supply those .. "other people payments" stuff

if LN acolytes/devoted users were wishing to actually have a good network. they would be prepared to actually observe, analyse and bug find issues.. instead of the head in the sand or in the clouds approach i always see

they would not fear making reports about the 'event success rate' of varied amounts. or model the scale of the network of average channels per node and nodes per network and average hops to reach the first 10% of participants, first 50% of participants and the majority 90% of participants..
(bitcoin devs didnt have this fear when they did their block propagation time trial reports)

but nah, LN acolytes fear observing the network and running scenarios, bug finding or actually looking outside the hype.

but hey,
if you want to stay in bliss and avoid stuff, then you will always be left questioning things and blaming it on an egg or a chicken. never realising the more eggs they make the more chickens they make.. chickens that are afraid of everything, and just hop around and never learn to fly.. oh and become very easy to pluck and roast

I'm not debating you in this instance. I'm merely saying that it might be a "chicken and egg" problem. The institutions might not want to use the Lightning Network because liquidity is low for them, AND the liquidity is low because they don't want to lock up the capital for nothing.

The altruism of node operators, opening channels in LN is like the altruism of those early miners who were mining Bitcoin with their laptops.

Oh sure; I thought you were relating it to some market condition. It's not any higher or lower opportunity cost now than anytime else if calculated in Bitcoin..

run some scenarios. you can do it for free with a pen and paper or excel

take bitfinex lnd0 with ~11% of the LN network cap (~460btc)

its not the fact that they are putting 460btc at risk into a contract. its the fact that if they had 460btc 'demand' to have withdrawals for people say 10 'hops' away. the liquidity needed on the network to make payments becomes more then the entire capacity of the network

run the scenario (rounded to 450, for lazy math/display)
from
BFX{450:0}H1{450:0}H2{450:0}H3{450:0}H4{450:0}H5{450:0}H6{450:0}H7{450:0}H8{450:0}H9{450:0}H10
to
BFX{0:450}H1{0:450}H2{0:450}H3{0:450}H4{0:450}H5{0:450}H6{0:450}H7{0:450}H8{0:450}H9{0:450}H10

just to move 450 from BFX to H10 level channels requires the whole network to have liquidity of 4.5k
thats 4.5k just to fulfil payment needs of just 450

i hope you can atleast 'observe' and acknowledge this basic LN concept: that say(for one example)  hop3 people not using their channel just for themselves(their own personal payment) but instead having their funds used by others..


and after that. Hop3 level people (for one example) have nothing spare to pay hop4,5,6,67,8,7,9,10 because its already used up by BFX

do you 'observe' yet?

aside from that are the MANY variables and flaws that are involved where not all hops have the equal amounts to even be able to fulfil payments.

but if you can first understand the liquidity concept. then you can move onto deeper scenarios of other problems large institutional services face.. and you might then be able to 'observe' why the el-salv chivo service dropped LN late last year just months after trialling it

Bitcoin is also a form of capital. The longer they stay in LN channels, the more that capital's potential for profit-making is locked/not reached.


I believe the institutions' hesitancy to use LN is not because of low liquidity. It might be because capital, in the form of Bitcoin, is needed to be "locked" to use the network. Unless there's an incentive or a profit-motive to "lock" Bitcoins in payment channels/provide liquidity, the hesitancy will always be there.

I don't think that there can be any new major breakthroughs. I guess that that project simply took advantage of the fact that all Lightning invoices are signed by the node which generated them (the signature is included in the invoice and it ensures data integrity).

Some websites, for example amboss.space, lightningnetwork.plus, require a signed message that can be verified against node's public key. The invoice approach is neat as it ensures compatibility with all Lightning wallets.

What opportunity costs? At the moment it's a pretty good time to open new channels, since Bitcoin is so cheap. Let's see if we can keep up this rate when Bitcoin hits all-time-highs; I'm curious to see if there is going to be any correlation.

Is this about 'Sign in with Lightning'? I remembered this from a few years ago; it's actually already almost 3 years. Have there been new developments in this space?

From the article, I discovered that https://www.lapps.co/join does have this Lightning sign-in, however it redirects to Twitter instead.

I think it would be interesting enough. But I don't see any movement in that direction yet...

when?.. if! LN devs ever fix the liquidity problem of routing..
.. many exchanges have played with LN and found the problems and backed off.

even el-salv 'chivo' backed off from LN and moved to a custodial exchange platform as the back-end instead of an LN hub system, they had many problems with users trying to get routes and channels along routes that could move funds without bottlenecking or close-rebalance-open to try to just pay someone

It's very good to see the altruism. Those people are ignoring the opportunity costs by locking precious capital away to help increase the capacity of the network.

When will all of the largest Bitcoin exchanges in the world accept/allow Lightning deposits/withdrawals? I believe there's only two of them, Bitfinex and Kraken? There should currently be more of them, considering that the Lightning Network started development during 2016. But shitcoins are listed before Lightning implementation.

This looks really good.  I understand the next point release will get that database reduction to be retroactive as well... awesome.

Actually in the wake of my catastrophe recently, I am seriously thinking about letting my old LND node die (though I still have 2 zombie channels I need to get closed first with quite a few sats in the balance) even though it was the older one with a really good reputation, huge traffic, BOS ranking etc.

I think I might just stick with the CL node from here... I really like how they are building better, I think.

Lightning Labs announced their latest version of Lightning implementation:



You can read the full announcement here:
Announcing lnd 0.15 beta: To Taproot and Beyond!


Micheal levine commented:



Levine added two interesting insight on the new foundation layer they area adding toward future functionalities:


Very interesting times approaching.