Topic: Reasons why Lightning Network will fail - page 4. (Read 1171 times)

You are right in most points, but I think LN will be successful for daily usage in cafeterias and similar places.

I think LN have /limited/ future.

It's far more complicated. Crypto currency is easy cause it's pretty much like traditional banking. LN is far more complicated. Even when all the tech terms are hidden behind a simple GUI: How to check if a user in a channel defrauds you ? What to do when you're defrauded? How long do you have to respond to fraud? With whom to open channels? How to manage your money over all your open channels? How much does a transaction cost? When does the channel expire? How to indicate that I don't want to open up my channel for routing? How to sign for a transaction? Etc etc etc

It's the same with cryptocurrency as a whole. How do you explain it to your grandmother?
LN is nothing special and person who already has vague knowledge about cryptocurrency should get the idea without a problem.
Despite its flaws, LN is the best option for bitcoin upgrade we have so far, there is no need to depreciate it.

Great point, I added it to my opening post. Most people here don't even understand how LN works. How are you going to explain all this to your mother or grandmother? For something like this to become mainstream it has to be simple to explain and to use and that's really not the case here.

It depends very much on users, does it not?

Segwit got activated 6 months ago and only 10% of users use it. It's likely that if the lightning network proves too complicated for users, they'll go down an easier route, which is to use another alt.

Every channel you open is an on-chain transaction so you pay high fees. Besides that, who wants to have money locked up in several channels? That's just a horrible situation.

Which points are untrue?

i agree, i was thinking the same , the only problem is sending to and back from the channels
if transactions continues to be so slow , everytime it would be a pain

but, you don't have to do everytime this transaction, and also if you want to maybe litecoin with the atomic swap would have its use case

I will be honest I only know the surface of Lightning Network but I will say this. All the problems you listed are technical and if there is anything I know it is that technical problems with Bitcoin can be solved. We have seen that last year and we will continue to see that with the development of Bitcoin. The main problem I see it now is the price of getting money to the channels (if this is true), if we can reduce that the system will function well. Again, I am not well versed in the tech I just knew that LN would lower fees overall and wait time, I don't know the nitty gritty.

Well, you are just doing copy and paste of that without kwnowing anything about the tech  (:


what you don't consider is that it will be incredible easy to partecipate to the network, as it will be profitable to partecipate also with small amounts (it's indeed more secure, because you are less a target of attacks).



so we will see it growing exponentially reaching easily hundreds of thousand of nodes, so what does it matter if a channel has not enough funds? you just
use more than one

it is in fact happening : as you can see here , https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ , the numbers of channels grown 40% a day in the last few days

Yeah, just look at Bcash's 100s tx's vs 80+thousand for Bitcoin. It's so funny to watch the deserted highway.  https://txhighway.com/    Bcash did nothing but make money for the creators.  No one actually uses it.

I believe Litecoin is used much more than bcash and there should be a reversal on bcash/ltc price.  

Apart from half of the points you state are just untrue, do you know of any feasible solution?
Bigger blocks don't solve the problem. DAG structures don't solve the problem.

IMHO a proper decentralized secure base protocol with second layer scaling beats any other proposals we have now, they all decrease decentralization and/or security at the base level.

It would not fall.. all those who are saying that it will be a total failure are probably being paid by Roger Ver in order to spam this forum with all that crap. Just relax, it will work fine if that is your real problem at all. And it will fix a lot of things in here.

Frankly, I'm not very knowledgeable in the matter and maybe some of your points are in fact quite valid but others certainly not. As I suspect, most transactions are made between just a few big operations like top exchanges and major online wallets, and LN will definitely help them lower the number of transactions to be written on the blockchain. So even a few payment channels will suffice to substantially decrease the load on the network.

This is good for bitcoin!

* The maximum amount you can pay in a certain route is determined by the guy with the LEAST amount of money in his channel
* Users can defraud each other in a channel, so they have to continually check if somebody is defrauding them.
* Unless you have a direct channel to your target, there is NO guarantee AT ALL that you can pay the person you want to pay.
* Users need to be online 24/7 if they want to be part of a payment route. If a user is offline, this particular route is not possible which of course has huge impact on the possible routes.
* Insane amounts of data are being sent because the network needs to be aware of EVERYBODY's payment channel's state (otherwise it can't discover a route)
* You still have huge fees if you want to wire money into/outside the channel.
* It's not feasible at all for bigger payments. Let's say you have to pay $1500 rent/month, are you going to open a payment channel and deposit 3 years rent in it ? Most people have difficulties enough coughing up the next month. But if you have to wire every payment into the channel, then you could just as well pay on-chain because you're paying that exact same on-chain fee.
* It's also not feasible for very small payments/channels. If you open a $30 channel with your coffeeshop to buy a few cups of coffee per week, then the price of your coffee doubles because of the huge fees to open/close the channel. Your only option is to route and HOPE there IS a route.
* Who is going to lock up his money in several channels anyway ? Liquidity, needed for routing money, is going to be a problem
* Very difficult to use and explain to users. No way your mother let alone grandmother is going to understand all this.