Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 32. (Read 14270 times)

OK.  That's about enough of that.  I am fine with discussing what is negative about lightning.  Really.  But this asshole just rants and rants... but that last bit?  I think he might be a little off in the old think-bone.

I do not have all that many ignores on this site.  But I just added one new one.  I take some pride of being tolerant of all kinds of folks.  But that level of nonsense?  Don't have time for it.

Now... On to my topic of node recovery, which I appreciate you all listening to, and honestly I hope that MAYBE it would be useful to someone else.  I CERTAINLY would be a decent resource at this point for helping someone go through this ordeal with either LND or CL!  If someone is reading this and needs help, ping me.

CL node:
The CL node is back up, and running.  As if nothing happend, I think.  It is only missing 3 channels . Well two really since the third is my LND node. Lol.  That channel will not be coming back up.  The other two are "benthecarman" and "Rath [keysend]".  The latter is a forum member and posts in this thread.  Is your node just down?  The first one?  I dunno.  Anyone else have an active channel with him?

OK here is the freaky part of the whole thing.  I ran through all the restoration process, including decrypting/restoring the backup database.  When the node came back up about half the channels were connecting, but the other half were not.  Something seemed wrong.  When I went to look at the info for the node IT HAD THE WRONG PUBKEY!  Umm...  huh?  so I recreated the hsm_secret from the seed words (I had used one in a "rescue backup" originally).  After bouncing lightningd not only did I have the RIGHT pubkey, but most of the other channels connected right away.

This seems very lucky to me.  And I do not entirely understand what happened there.  I think it's safe to assume the pubkey in my backup file was the wrong one.  Totally possible. I was worried about this when I was restoring.  I think I went through the setup for the node a couple times, and I bet that as the first time. 

But how did the channel backup get restored?  I guess that the assumption that the hsm_secret has something to do with decrypting that is not the case?

And HOW ON EARTH did some of my channels come back up?!??!?  That part seems crazy.  And I feel lucky not to have set off alarms on my channel partners node.  The whole investigation was prompted by the fact that half my partner nodes were REFUSING connection. 

LND node

This node is in the process of rescanning the blockchain. 

Seems it is a slow process.  I see transactions up to 3/20 so as far as the LND node is concerned COVID has barely started.   No channels are connected, and that is as expected.  I am assuming that after the blockchain is scanned all the way through the channel closing procedure will continue.  I am hopeful I will get all my bitcoin back.  This is a place where the low power SBC is a disadvantage... I think it has plenty of ability to keep up with the blockchain in real time. But rescanning this is going VERY slowly.

To be honest... both of these systems are more foolproof than I had thought.  I am definitely the fool here.  I mean it was nice from frankie to try to shift the blame over the lightning, but nah.  There are two things at fault here. A shitty SDD failure, and my lack of good preparation.  I am not being self effacing. I am a wizard of hackery, and I have done things that most folks would be screwed trying to do...  like figuring out the CL pubkey was wrong and fixing it manually.  BUT my lack of being serious about preparing the right backup strategies for the node was an abomination.  And kudos to each implementation AND Raspiblitz.

I will be making a donation to the Raspiblitz project.  For sure.

Anyway, thanks, all for the audience.  I will quiet down about this now.

i wont repeat myself but you missed the whole point of the routing gossip and fake payment attempts to glean more info about available balance at any given second to then tally up when updates happens the routes taken and the balance change.. yea LN is more transparent than they promote. but glad your taking one step forward and call is pseudonymous rather than pretending that its all 100% private and no info can be gleaned from it.
LN is infact less private. because they name tag their channels/nodes. bitcoin addresses dont name tag their addresses by default

ill get to that point at the bottom of my post


firstly he called himself ignorance, and was blaming himself for the issues..
well if he has issues regaining some custody of funds just because he switched off his node.. that is a NODE flaw. not a human flaw.
bitcoin does not lose its keys/wallet when you close the wallet. people cant make moves against your funds if you just go to bed or turn your node off.. yet in LN they can!!!

having a risk that a competitor(partner) can take action and steal funds just because you turned off your computer or went to sleep is not a human flaw. its a protocol flaw

it wasnt me saying the flaw is in the UI. i was saying the flaw was in the protocol. it was capslock that was blaming himself and the UI,.. rather then blame the protocol..
yet its protocol flaws that make LN non viable for the utopian dream of offramping all bitcoin users to LN


"core" lightning.. ha, another buzzword/brand stealing attempt.. guess they didnt want to be original again
(oh dear blockstream(core brand owner) employee's how much i do laugh at you)

and dont get me started on the lightning observations i have of the flaws of the "core lightning" implementation(and many other LN implementations)


funny you should say that...
el salvador had massive issues with liquidity and bottlenecks of LN last year. and instead had decided to switch away from LN(strike) and use a custodial exchange that does the back-end of chivo and also handles the merchant tools(shopping cart)/exchanging.. yep go research "alphapoint"


this topic is about lightning observing. and i am observing lightning.
YOU may think its a topic of "lightning admiration" or "lightning kiss-assing" and only admiration should be mentioned. but some people want to know the con's too not just the dreamy utopian pro's of fantasy and fake promises

also scaling bitcoin is not just about "bigger blocks" thats the silly propaganda story you fangirls like to push as bitcoins only solution to more usability on bitcoin network. there are many ways to increase bitcoin usability on the bitcoin network and reduce the transaction fee and also scale bitcoin..
but hey.. seems you are just going to be another fangirl that just follows the same scripts of other fan girls.. without thinking for yourself and having a response thats not a script i have heard before word for word..

and yes i say fan girls because the stereotype fits.
girls are more stereotypical followers of influencers. much more then women, men or boys.
(fangirls are even more 'influencer<->drone' follower stereotypical than a herd of cows)

if you cant tell the difference between a girl and a woman.. thats on you.
disliking the trend following social script repeating stereotypes of girls that are a fan of something. has nothing at all to do with hating woman.
try to learn the difference

Oh no! Franky! Did I just expose Lightning?
In all seriousness; public Lightning channels are comparable to Bitcoin on-chain addresses. They're not anonymous, but they are pseudonymous. And the activity going on in those channels is - well - off-chain, so that's hidden, as well. But sure, if I know someone's node ID, I can look up who they have channels with and how much BTC is locked up in there. I don't think it's surprising or news to anyone..

I don't think people assume a high number of Lightning users, just because of the fact that large nodes exist. That would be a wrong conclusion, indeed. They probably estimate that through download numbers and such.
Anyhow; why do you emphasize 'fangirls' so much? Do you feel hatred against women?

Franky, cAPSLOCK is right here. I'd not call him ignorant, but his node went down, so the other nodes can take actions just like it's defined in the protocol. If he has no backups, they can cheat; it is true.
There are ways to remove uncertainty, such as maybe having a 'backup node' where you can import hsm_secret and channel state relatively quickly, or you could just choose longer timelocks for those channel closing transactions. That way there will be no rush to get your node back up very quickly. In any way, this doesn't mean that you don't own your coins when using Lightning or any of those implications you brought up.

It's not about UI; this is the protocol. It can be used with CLI, GUI, etc., so it's not the 'user interface' we're talking about here. It appears to me you got some stuff really wrong; maybe you should spin up a testnet Lightning node and play around with it.

Lightning Network has grown a lot since then, got some great improvements like static invoices and e.g. built-in backup functionality in Core Lightning. It also got a lot more usable as more and more merchants accept it. It's integrated in BTCPayServer, it's the main technology that businesses in ElSalvador use to receive Bitcoin payments and a bunch of exchanges now support cheap and fast Lightning deposits and withdrawals. It also makes them more private.

Initial block download is always like this! The first few years of the blockchain are downloaded and verified super fast due to empty blocks.

I still don't understand this either. There is even a dedicated 13-page thread where different users try to understand what's franky's mission / vision. From my understanding, franky believes bigger blocks are the solution, yet he doesn't want to switch to BCH. Why, is still unclear to me. This is off-topic for this thread, so if he or you want to discuss more about this, I guess that thread will be more appropriate.

Sooo what are the results? Got everything back?

Oh great googly moogly: 

Custodial nodes are more reliable because it is complex software and currently better managed by professionals.  This will always be true.  But the self custody solutions and light wallets are going to just get better and better.  I have said it many times.  Bitcoin is a revolution, not because you HAVE TO run it yourself, but because you can.  True for bitcoind, lightningd and lnd.

So you hate lightning.  I get it.  Why are you here?  Why not go somewhere where you can help scale bitcoin a way you think is right? 

It has to scale.  And the lightning protocol is the most trust minimized  decentralized attempt of scaling bitcoin out there yet.  Liquid is also a pretty interesting scaling layer that trades of SOME trust for certain advantages?  Maybe you should try that.  It is a LOT more like the regular Bitcoin workflow that you are more comfortable with.  Built on basically the same mechanics, adding some privacy and utility, and pegged to the base layer in arguable one of the safest trust distributed ways possible.  It's not lightning decentralization wise... but it's still good.  I would rather have big blocks there than on something like BCash.

Think you can do something better?  Well go do it.  Think we should just have bigger blocks?  Well those projects already exist too.

Seriously... why do you hang around here waving your balls at us all the time?

NOPE
el salvador had lots of issues and bottlenecks and liquidity issues in late 2021 due to LN
.. now they are using a central exchange custodial model(alphapoint) to be the back-end of the chivo wallet

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!