Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 31. (Read 13552 times)

A Central American country is using it as a major form of payment.

I have quit posting my screenshots of my progress indicator as not to junk up the thread... but boy it got slow in that last 10% like a Windows 95 progress bar.  The way we were going before I had expected we would be synced early yesterday.  But at this point I am just hoping it will be sometime today. 96.91%

It seems to me that now it is very convenient for work. In my opinion, it can really be useful for work.

if you think the only flaw is the ui. then you have much to learn

its not a ui fault that destination funds are being allocated to yet another multisig meaning not sole custody funds. but another partnership.
its not the ui fault that funds between 2 people in a channel are being split into a third allocation.

even without a wallet display UI. people on bitcoin can just look at a raw tx or a web explorer of the blockchain and understand which funds belong to whom because they know which address is theirs.

if funds are going to multisig addresses then they are not going to YOU solely and fully your control.
thats not a UI error thats a function flaw.

i do actually hope you can find a way to dump your wallet keys into another wallet, so that you get to move funds into addresses that solely belong to you, and not have a situation of persistant issues where you fear the wrath of the fan girls and instead blame yourself for the issues of LN rather then admit LN is flawed, while still not being able to play with funds you hope are going to come your way at some point.

bitcoin came alive in 2009, and even in 2009 -10 people were not blaming themselves when they couldnt see or understand who owned what. because they knew who owned what. bitcoin just worked. LN is now 5 years old and still flawed and buggy.. and ontop not user friendly.. but the userfriendly is not the majority of flaws LN has.

dont try brushing the flaws under the rug and pretend they are of no consequence. especially where u are days away from even getting access to even see what belongs to you or not. or if after you get to see more if you even have access to funds you think are destined for you.

You are welcome to critisize my ignorance, but that is all that is on display here.  Following any bitcoin transaction is deceptively complex, particularly multi-sig transactions.  And the lightning implementations are complex, there is no doubt about that.

All of the trouble I am currently in is on ME, not the lightning network.  And I am learning that there are great safety devices built into both implementations I am using.

I am sharing my experiences here in spite of the fact it makes me look like a moron, but I do not agree with you that this reflects some kind of limitation with lightning.

Also, I think we have known from the beginning that building good UX/UI on top of these complex systems is an absolute necessity, and it is far from done yet.

what happened to the PR campaign of LN people saying that LN is "your funds" and "your in control".
and "permissionless" seems your proving the opposite.
1. you dont know who suppose to get what
2. you dont know why there is a third address you didnt expect to see..
3. you were not sure if any of your channels were closed whereby someone else closed them instead of you
4. none of the destination addresses seem to be yours

i guess if none of the value went to an address you own.. then none of it is yours.
by seeing YOUR address listed as one of the destinations, ud know which one was meant for you. but i guess. you got none of it, hense you dont know who got what. thus you lost it all.

sorry to hear of your loss. but i guess its a lesson to learn that LN is not as certain as people think.

however on the bitcoin network. real proper bitcoin transactions made by a proper bitcoin wallet gives you all the control. YOU decide who gets what and you are in control of the destinations and amounts and only you can sign and get the transaction sent to be confirmed.

LN has more hurdles to attempt to climb over before its actually user ready, and the amount of flaws and the methodology the LN devs describe as work arounds, doesnt show great hope for LN success

Right.  I have been doing lots of researching using 1ml and ambross... And I am not 100% sure that importing a HD wallet into Electrum shows an accurate representation of your funds as far as all of the choreography of channel closures go.  Most of my methods are hackery and I admit the way HTLCs are handled in lightning is kind of "black box" to me.  I get the overall gist, but know nothing of the intricacies of how they work.  I can see the most recent channel closures of my node.  This , for example is part of a recent channel closure where it looks to me, I am due part of the balance:

https://blockstream.info/tx/077c0bc0dcb2cbebc1773a1c8d169df6b1e1ce8bb85288312cb2ce01b675334b

What I see are three addresses involved in the closure... one with 100k sats (roughly) to a single sig sort of bitcoin address, and two others with ~500k sats each that have gone to longer multisig addresses.  I do not have enough data to know who was supposed to get what.  And I do not know why there is that third single sig address... maybe part of a reserve, not sure.

Most of this hackery and research has just been ways to try to peek into what is happening to my channels while my node is down and I do not have a full local copy of the blockchain yet.  But I am currently at 89.19%, and though it has seemed to be slower over the last 24 hours, I expect that SOME point today I will have the whole thing, and can hold my breath and start to see what I can see for reals.

shh dont shout it to the world, you will get years of hate from fangirls screaming and crying at you that LN is private, and that stat sites cant learn anything about LN users.

even worse you listed the sites (shame on you(sarcasm))

sites which show that there is a node that is the holder of 10% of the network capacity (>400btc of the 4,000btc) which al the fangirls were advertising as being a number that pretends to mean that LN is used by millions more small people than last year.. oops you definitely revealed to much
.. well seeing as you opened pandora's box
https://amboss.space/node/033d8656219478701227199cbd6f670335c8d408a92ae88b962c49d4dc0e83e025
>400btc.. but under 1000 channels. not all of them with funding derived from the user, majority is just the service offering inbound reserved balance to its partners (funds from the services own reserves)

I'm still wondering what that Lightning progress is all about!

Sounds like a plan to me!

It could just mean your channels haven't been force-closed yet. But you can easily check that using something like 1ml.com! Or https://amboss.space/. You enter your node ID and it shows you whether you lost any channels in the last few days.

Ohh that doesn't sound good. There are lock times and whatnot, but in my experience whenever I force closed a channel and waited for around a day, the money was back on the on-chain wallet.

Thanks for the help watching my pot boil... looks like by lunch tomorrow I should be looking at a full blockchain.




I am tempted to make sure lnd and lightningd are NOT running before I hit the sack tonight.  I think I would rather turn those on then just see them pop on randomly and trigger a cascade of justice transactions.  I know the result could be the same... but I want to :

1.  Perform whatever on-chain analysis I can first.
2.  Make a solid eyes-open decision.
3.  Be the master of my fate... if I am gonna lose value I want to have done it by my own act of will!

At this point I still do not know if either node will come back.  I have noodled around with the hsm_secret for ages looking at addresses derived from it, and they all come up blank.  I have even used the Xprivs I get with hsm_tool etc.  I just hope that CL uses some wacky derivation or salted something-or-another and I am just looking at the wrong addresses.  I hope what I believe is right.  That the database backup was encrypted with hsm_secret, and since it was able to be restored then I have the right one.

Same thing with the LND node.  I have a wallet in electrum based on a AZEED based seed that shows the on chain balance at the time the node crashed (by the way LND does seed words and derivation TOTALLY NOT the same way as Bip39 so if you need to know about it let me know... took me a while to figure it out) .  And since then SEVERAL channels have been closed unilaterally by my partners, yet no value has ended up in that wallet.  I am hoping that the node has to do something to complete those multisig contracts?  Or the funds are still not unlocked?  The LND node, sadly has no chance of being restored... I just want to see all the funds go back.

God help me.  (Seriously God... I owe ya already, but I am asking again)

Oh dear... who peed in your cornflakes?

I see lots of things wrong with your statements, and am not going to take the time to explain much of it as I doubt you would really be interested. 

As to failures routing payments...  I have not personally seen tons of that.  I do see them.  And more with personal nodes, or neutrino implementations.  Custodial lightning works basically perfectly.  And before you say "But that's not the right kind", I know... but what it does do is prove a well run node can not only manage payments well for a user, but for a whole country.  Therefore it is possible that node software, and light noncustodial wallets are going to improve over time, and be even more reliable.

As to fees... There is no real fee market yet.  People charge all different kinds of fees.  I will say that the VAST MAJORITY of my payments cost between 0-30 sats.  Only a handful ever go anywhere near 100, and only in special circumstances do I see them higher than that.  Particularly when opening a "turbo channel" or the like.

Anyway your point that lightning is far from perfect is true.  But I certainly do not see it as the failure you seem to... and I only see it getting better.

That sounds like a job well done by the Raspiblitz guys!

I like that idea, too, but I don't know how many years of uptime will be required to break even with a cheap, used laptop. As you said, under $100 is possible; see [Guide] How to run a Bitcoin Core full node for under 50 bucks!. It's not beautiful, compact, or power-saving though.
If I were to build another SBC node, I'd probably go for the latest-gen Raspberry Pi (better hardware and software support than Orange Pi..) and use the Argon One m.2 case with an m.2 SSD. They aren't that expensive anymore these days and the device will actually boot off the SSD. I hate to see a machine that is supposed to be reliable with a high uptime rely on a microSD card as a boot drive (Orange Pi can't boot off external drives - I'll elaborate in my Apollo BTC review - sorry for off-topic).

Likewise! Fingers remain crossed!

gotta love it.. the 'promise' of MICRO payments(microfees) under 100,000th of normal unit
becomes millipayments/milli fee's, under 1,000th of normal unit
and then centi-payments and centi fee's, under 100th of normal unit

seems you LN fangirls wanted to promise fee's of under 1 sat(complete route, meaning on average less than 0.05sat(to allow for a 20 hop route to still be under 1 sat)
where you have all been describing the mill and micro buzzwords ALOT suggesting 1000ths and 100th thousands of the times smaller. and all the promises of allow 'millions of payments.

check it out. do the math, run some scenario's
raths quote feb6th 148sat /25 events = ~6sat for his hop in a route
darkvortex 207sat /7 events = ~30sat for his hop in a route
raths quote feb 28th 647sat /60 events = ~11sat for his hop in a route
raths quote april 66sat /14 events = ~5sat for his hop in a route
darkvortex april 271sat /13 events = ~21sat for his hop in a route
n0nce april 44/21 events = ~2sat for his hop..

now lets take the average
rath averages 30sat/hop
darkvortex averages 26sat/hop
n0nce is 2sat

and lets show a possible route
user->rath->darkvortex->n0nce->destination
          30sat   26sat          2sat

so if a user wanted to pay destination using the average fee of known hops on just a THREE HOP payment..
that user is having to pay 58sat

seems their promise of millisat payments and micropayments has gone and now its into centi-payments. where fee's are above 10% of a a regular bitcoin transaction

imagine if a user had to pay someone not 3 hops away. but 15 hops away..  yep suddenly its not so cheap as promised and just a LN is half the fee of bitcoin
especially if n0nce starts doing the same average fees as rath/darkvortex that amount will go up more if the new averages are more than a few sats each hop

yet simple maths of simple examples today suggest your faked promises were just that and you all already have switched from bait to trap

still laugh when i see more and more LN promises fail..

oh its been months now and although people show stats of their successes. they are too AFRAID to show the payment fails % at differing amounts..
shame on you for your utopian fantasies. but hey. its your network and if your the only ones using it, it can only bite yourselves in the ass in the end. enjoy that experience
....
p.s i have been a LN observer, so very much on topic. i know your desperately want to get me banned or posts deleted to hide the issues. but hey a observer and a moral user actually wants to know the bad aswell as the good, to get a risk assessment observation, they dont want to observe the dream hyped up utopian promise trying to sell them riches of profiting from fee's. they want to observe the reality that if they themselves wanted to spend their own money. how much it actually would cost on average..

It uses the plugin framework and the backup plugin, but it is active by default.  And looking at the logs I would think it backs up frequently


My LND node was doing hundreds of routes a day a couple months back...  It was quite active.  But in recent times it has been much more quiet, and some days just a few transactions...  Lucky in retrospect.  The CL node never got anywhere near as active as the LND node.  Another reason I am going to use the static channel backups method on it.  Not that I had a choice... the rescue files I had were woefully outdated.  It's sad as the node has been up since 2019, and is a BOS ranked node... or WAS.  Now it will just be, I hope a nice pile of UTXOs I have the keys for.  


Understand.  I am split on them.  I like the idea that the node uses "night light" level electricity.  But it is still a bit Janky IMHO with an external drive hanging off the end of it...  I would prefer one of the stouter SBCs with a teeny custom case.  Or upgrade to some of the little thin-client+ type teeny form factor Dell machines.  Could also do an old laptop... but that feels even jankier than the RPi.  In a way.  Probably the best bang for the buck would be to grab a corporate cast off machine off ebay for <100$.  Some fairly nice equipment can be had for low figures...

I appreciate the good conversation, n0nce, whilst I work to see how much money I have set fire to in my foolishness.. heh.  I guess the sagging Bitcoin price has the dubious good effect of making that POTENTIAL value smaller each day!

I see! Yeah; that's odd. I wouldn't know what it tries to sync; Lightning startup from 0 is usually pretty fast anyway. Maybe it has to do with how many of your channel funding transactions are synced into the blockchain or something; but since you're at only around 50% of the blockchain download, it doesn't seem viable. I'm sure Raspiblitz have good docs about this.

Oooh I see, custom stuff. Alright. I'd always test such scripts before 'deployment', especially when it comes to something financially important such as Lightning backups. Or stick to existing tools.
But Raspiblitz backup sounds good; if it's within minutes of shutting down and you don't have a ton of activity in your channels, you could go for gold and restore those backups.
Does Raspiblitz backup everything by default? Or is it a plugin as well?

By the way; regarding channel activity, here a few impressions of fellow node operators from the forum. We have lots of days without any activity at all. So if you're anything like us, there's not going to be much to worry about.

This sounds like a very useful feature! For instance, letting the node start up (without broadcasting channel states or other functionalities); just for getting what the peer believes to be the latest channel state; then checking the backup and if they match, really start up (exchanging channel states and generally running the whole protocol again).

I'm not a big fan of SBC nodes due to their weak CPUs and my impatience when compiling software; but if I were to spin up another node on a SBC, I'd look into Raspiblitz with Core Lightning!

That UI is the Raspiblitz UI.  Well part of it.  It is just monitoring the amount the chain-sync is behind.  To be honest I have no idea what the "lightning progress" is though.  It actually sort of worries me... 68% of what? lol.

As to the backup, yes I wrote a script that put them on an external usb drive (flash drive), but I made a mistake in my calculations about space and rotation, and the thing had not been saving backups for a while.  As well as the fact that I was not really doing them frequently enough. I set it up on a cronjob... My error handling was also kinda ziltch.  But again, thanks to Raspiblitz the node seems to (fairly frequently?) make backups regularly to the SD card as well. And the one on the SD card was within minutes of when it was shut down.  So I am hopeful I will not see many justice transactions  I have not yet decided whether I just want to ensure I can get to the addresses and let the nodes close over time... or risk it to just turn the thing back on.  I almost wish I could set some switch that would query all channel partners for a current balance, and just accept it if I am within X% or Xsats.

I have become fond of Raspiblitz and Rootzroll and Openoms.  Using it reminds me of starting to use Slackware linux after having built a disaster of a machine doing LFS.  There is still plenty of room to noodle and configure, but LOTS of the tricky bits, and helpful things are built into the system... interesting project.  I have decided I will donate a percentage of everything I recover at the end of this madness...  If I get it all, that donation might actually sting a little haha.

I'm not 100% sure as I haven't yet had to restore a node myself, so I can't comment on that for sure but I'd tend to agree with your assessment.

What is this UI, by the way? I've never seen it myself so far.

Interesting! I have very limited experience with LND, but the theory of using the backup plugin and restoring a backup with is indeed pretty straight forward. I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out in practice!
Did you set it up to save the backups on an external drive?

Like shown here?

I want to add this.

I have only run LND and CL nodes.

I put a LOT more work, time and value into LND.  Through the last 7 months I have run the CL node, I am feeling a LITTLE like it is a more well rounded smartly designed product.

The plugin architecture is a major strength.

I put WAY MORE work into securing backups for the LND node... but when the rubber hit the road?  It is shaping up to look like the CL node will fair better.  And that is with truly reckless behaviour on my part.  In retrospect I was not careful at ALL about how I performed the setup and maintenance.  I think the reason for this was I intended for the thing to be an experiment with a few 100k sats on it just to say I was running it.  And I ended up putting nearly the same amount on ~13 channels with it as >40 on the LND node.

I am no genius when it comes to this stuff... as can be seen by my most recent issues... but perhaps hast gives me the credit to say CL is the more idiot proof as well...  In fact, if I keep running a node after this ordeal I might just stick with the Blockstream build...

All that said, I have recovered nothing yet. LOL.  I reserve the right to take it all back.  I might think just the opposite in the end.

Update to my drama:

I was able to restore the database so I must have had the right hsm_secret ?  I guess I have to wait now for the node to finish syncing to see if we have the keys to anything...  Or maybe the node is just working?  That would be odd.

My understanding is the sqlite database backup would not restore with the wrong hsm_secret.

Anyway... the CL node might actually SURVIVE this torture.  Not 100% sure about the LND node.  At the same time I still feel like I have a long way to go.  All the TOR addresses look different now, and I have no idea what the node ID(s) is.  As long as I have the keys to force closed channels...

The HARDEST POT to watch boil:

It's not even necessarily about their honesty; it's that you're at risk of accidentally cheating. And force closing may also happen without their notice since there are certain automatic timeouts, so don't be mad if someone happens to force close your channel. They probably didn't do it manually / on purpose. And as I pointed out, force closes will be better / safer for you (at the cost of some mining fees) since you won't be able to 'accidentally cheat' by publishing old channel states when attempting recovery.

Don't you have the hsm_secret? If so, your on-chain addresses are safe, no worries!

Yeah it looks like this caters exactly to users of Core Lightning's backup plugin!

---

I'd recommend actual non-custodial node applications.
[1] https://breez.technology/
[2] https://phoenix.acinq.co/
[3] https://muun.com/

Is there an IOS app that can use Lightening Network? I know of CashApp. Any others?