Topic: Lightning Network Observer - page 5. (Read 13806 times)

It's almost as though it were a dick-swinging contest between USA and China.  Like it's somehow important for both of them to be seen as the "World Leader" by childishly stamping on free enterprise wherever they find it.  Whoever is the most draconian seemingly gets the bragging rights or something.  It's weird.

Overall any companies that are doing business in the USA or connected with USA residents are likely getting more and more nervous about various regulatory hurdles and perhaps even being a kind of atmosphere in which there is nearly no way to win, even if you believe that you are being fully cooperative and compliant.

Likely the USA is going to put itself at various disadvantages in regards to how stringent that they are, yet we cannot be sure how these matters are going to play out, in terms of abilities to try to operate outside of the USA and to NOT get touched by USA regulatory overreach. I am not really sure if Binance's mistake was to enter into the USA with its BinanceUS branch or if the USA might have still continued to pursue Binance in draconian ways, even if they had not established a USA division.   

Sometimes it might seem like damned if you do (cooperate and stay in the USA) and damned if you don't, even though if you don't stay in the USA, you might be able to try to hide for a bit longer - yet when any system is getting overly BIG, then US regulators seem to believe that it is fair game for them to regulate it, as if they were the world police. which just is an ongoing phenomena that have greater appearances of desperation in recent times, at least from the perspective of any of us trying to study and figure out what is going on with bitcoin in the USA as compared with other jurisdictions, and even that it seemed that in earlier times (with many incidents between 2013 and 2021), China was the seemingly overbearing regulator, but now the USA seems to be stepping in that role in a variety of ways, even though surely it is interesting to see various extents that some of the jurisdictions seem to be in line with each other and other ways that they seem to not want to align, whether it is aligning with the USA, aligning with China or maybe creating some other alliance.. Does El Salvador count as being somewhat out of the polar sides or not?

no need for conspiracy theories.. if you do your research you can find facts, not theories..

WoS does more then just a 'wallet' would. they offer other services too.. so WoS is not just a wallet its a money service business(MSB) also they are a VASP Virtual asset Service Provider

then look at what american regulations wants MSB and VASPs to do

Although it was observed that WalletOfSatoshi is set to have its record breaking month of processing 1.1 million payments through the Lightning Network, their team has announced that they will be leaving the United States. They didn't give any reason why.

Does anyone have any tin-foil hat conspiracy theories why they're leaving? Are dark market entities starting to use the Lightning Network for more privacy?

with yesterday's update to version 0.6.9-420, the Blixt wallet has added a new feature to its wallet app: the Lightning Box.
the new feature is an ln provider for mobile node like Blixt wallet, letting you receive lightning address payments directly to your phone. the whole thing can also be used for nostr tipping.
the complete changelog as well as the dl-files can be found under the following github link:
https://github.com/hsjoberg/blixt-wallet/releases/tag/v0.6.9-420

Having some DeFi-like instrument in the higher bitcoin layer is the holy grail in crypto.
This would greatly help the Bitcoin adoption, basically making every other alt useless.
Can't wait! Rooting for tgb TaRo Taproot Assets

I'm not an Ordinal user, but I remember reading they are files embedded into the chain. Like, a whole image. That ain't an NFT, that's just the definition of inefficient approach to storing files.

I know sane people like us want to do this in the most efficient manner, but apparently, this isn't about efficiency. It's about storing the damn chunk of bytes on-chain, because there appears to be some main layer evaluation. People just want to store files on the main layer, because they know they aren't going anywhere. And it's true; comparably to the off-chain and sidechain solutions, the main layer is the one which cannot be turned down at all.

Hoping for good things.  Best case scenario, we'll see some disruption of real-world financial services.  So much of traditional finance involves middlemen and this has the potential to replace a fair few of them.  If designed properly, there could be some fully decentralised, peer-to-peer financial use-cases that really benefit people. 

If it doesn't manage that, then perhaps it'll at least lure some of the ordinals junk away from the base layer.  Taproot Assets is a more resource-efficient and elegant approach to handling stuff like NFTs. 

today the first mainnet version of taproot assets was released. with this version (0.3.0-alpha) developers can issue financial assets on chain in a scalable manner.
if you want to know more about the taproot assets and which features the alpha version now offers, you should visit these two links:

https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-10-18-taproot-assets-v0.3/

https://github.com/lightninglabs/taproot-assets/releases/tag/v0.3.0

Very good content; thank you for sharing.

Why does the Lightning Network lead to lower fees?

This is a huge improvement in the adoption of Bitcoin, as the complexity of efficiently running a bitcoin node are becoming more and more critical. Channel management, liquidity optimization, and technical reliability are not granted, but the result of a dedicated effort.
In offloading this to an external provider, Blockstream, which is dedicated to this (and has scale economies) LN users can focus on the business case LN is adopted for.

the team at Blockstream is officially launching their lightning service 'Greenlight' today, which aims to make it more efficient and easier for businesses in particular to manage a lightning node - and non-custodial!


https://blog.blockstream.com/greenlight-is-now-open-for-business/

That is a very nice, well-written and quite few decent charts and surely good analysis throughout.

There are some places in which they suggest that their data might not be complete.. and perhaps that might be due to differences between public and private channels and some difficulties in measuring private channels - even though ultimately they are asserting that they are directionally correct in terms of lightning network continuing to experience a decent amount of growth - even when there remain some ongoing concerns in reference to custodial versus non-custodial solutions that are in place and still being developed perhaps a bit biased in the custodial direction (meaning through third parties, rather than having more self-custodial options and/or routing).  

the lightning network is gaining ground. since 2021, its usage rate has increased by 1212%!!! in august, 6.6 million transactions were completed using it. equal two years earlier it was 'only' 503,000 transactions.
in an october 10th report, River Research analyst Sam Wouters highlighted that the increase in lightning network transactions, which use more than two nodes to facilitate transfers, occurred despite a 44% drop in the price of Bitcoin and significantly less interest in cryptocurrencies overall. you can read the whole report under the link below:


https://river.com/learn/files/river-lightning-report-2023.pdf

Lately node and channel count, and aggregated Bitcoin count has dipped, only to partially recover during the last sessions.
During the ordinal saga, I would have expected numbers go up during this period when base layer was congested.
Any idea about the reasons for this?

yesterday the lnd 0.17 beta version was announced. the new release which again has 30 developers working on it, has among others the following features:

• simple taproot channels enabling a lower cost and more private ln
• faster neutrino syncs for mobile development
• more efficient watchtowers

the complete release notes can be found in the github link: https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/release-notes/release-notes-0.17.0.md and a detailed article can be found in the following link: https://lightning.engineering/posts/2023-10-03-lnd-0.17-launch/

There aren't more LN nodes than BTC nodes. There are more LN nodes than reachable BTC nodes. That refers to Bitcoin nodes that are listening for incoming connections. But the default setting when setting up a Bitcoin full node is to only accept outgoing connections. Site bitnodes.io estimates there are over 45 thousand Bitcoin nodes in total: https://bitnodes.io/nodes/all/.

That being said, it's also possible that both that estimation and the total LN nodes estimation is inaccurate. It isn't easy to have accuracy on finding the total nodes of completely peer-to-peer networks.

In the Italian board, the user @gbianchi, on his mumblings on the disgraceful ETH network, found a strange evidence:


The LN nodes are more than BTC nodes.

How is it possible?

• More than one LN node connect to a BTC node?
• A public LN node connects to a private BTC node?
• Data source is inaccurate?

with the (under the name Yvette++) lnbits 0.10.10 release, which has been published today, some bugs have been fixed and a bunch of quality/performance improvements have been made, like e.g.

• optional fiat conversion in wallets
• cln rest funding source added
• ...

in addition, there are 4 new contributors who now want to support the 'project' and drive it forward with their knowledge


https://github.com/lnbits/lnbits/releases/tag/0.10.10

i have already posted the update here: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.62741236

---

and something very important...!
when opening payment channels, there is a vulnerability in ln that can be exploited by a denial-of-service attack.
however, operators of their own lightning node who always update their software to the latest versions need not worry. the vulnerability is already fixed in the following newer versions of various lightning implementations:

• lnd 0.16.0
• cln 23.02
• eclair 0.9.0
• ldk 0.0.114

https://morehouse.github.io/lightning/fake-channel-dos/