Topic: The Lightning Network: A failure? - page 4. (Read 905 times)

I'd love to make 20 times more Bitcoin transactions than I currently do, but I can't because of transaction fees. And even if I'd just pay the higher amount, that means someone else can make less transactions because blocks are full already.
At best, a merchant would use a generic payment provider that also accept LN, as part of a long list of crypto options.

That's why I like custodial LN wallets (for small amounts only). I don't have to open channels, which is easier and cheaper, and I don't have to deal with channel balancing. I'm okay trusting someone with a small amount as a trade-off.

The problem of Lightening Network is too cumbersome because the process of setting up the Lightening Network is not clear to most us. And I think I have seen this kind of thread before and the developers of LN were saying that the LN has failed so they will look for an alternative way for smooth and less fee transaction. And if that is done then bitcoin will not have any problem again because the main problem of bitcoin now is the congestion of it network. And I can't see Lightening Network is a fail network but they can make things easy for people to use. and the on-chain network is always over populated and that is the caused of the congestion.

Going by https://mempool.space/lightning and looking at capacity vs. channels we see the channel count dropping off a bit but capacity staying level in terms of BTC

But BTC vs fiat has gone up a ton.

IMO the dropping of the channel count is due to a lot of people running smaller nodes no longer bothering to connect to other smaller nodes.
I USED to have about a dozen channels open to people with limited BTC locked up and those channels never saw transactions run through them.
So I closed them.

I also know a lot of people were 'forced' to shutdown their nodes over the last 18 months or so as the BTC blockchain grew. You could no longer run a node on a 512 GB drive so you could either buy a larger drive and rebuild it or just shut it down. At a guess a while from now when the BTC blockchain + LN node databases + other needed OS stuff bump over the 1TB point we will see a bunch of people once again drop out.

According to the larger players that accept LN those numbers have remained level in terms of transactions.

-Dave

3. blockchains either solely used within a private group/company still solves something at a cheaper cost.
namely: the lack of ability of one employee from changing records at a bank branch via access of the bank servers, as blockchains verified/archived at all bank branches prevent one employee from changing the database..
also data redundancy/backups alleviates the need for a team of IT technicians to be on shift 24/7 trying to keep one server alive and clean from attack

4. stop imagining that a cryptocurrency needs to become the dystopian world of a "one world currency" everyone needs to use all at the same time.. and even then the numbers do not need to be "millions of transactions a second" extreme that i feel you have read and recited without thinking

the whole stupidity of "all 8 billion need to only use bitcoin" and "lets destroy, abandon all fiat and all currencies" is nonsense
but if followed leads to more stupidity of "all 8 billion cant use bitcoin for all payments, so lets make a subnetwork of less security for everyone to abandon bitcoin and use a shoddy network for all 8 billion peoples uses and then middleman charge them per unsettled/unconfirmed payment" is nonsense

bitcoin doesnt need to nor have to become the dystopian "one world currency"

1. Bitcoin, and the blockchain architecture generally, was intentionally designed to be slow and expensive in order to make up for the lack of a central authority on the network.

2. Blockchain solves one unique problem: thwarting government subpoenas into transactions. That's it. It you don't want to solve that problem, it's silly to use blockchain.

3. "Centralized blockchain" is an idiotic contradiction because it's using an architecture that multiplies your complexity and cost and doesn't add any other useful features.

4. A correctly decentralized blockchain-based currency will never, by definition, scale to mainstream transaction loads.

5. Seeing this, many projects (like say Lightning) tried to do some variant of #3 in order to create the appearance of solving the scaling problem, but all that did was: a) counteract the only benefit of using the blockchain architecture; b) not really solve the problem since even "centralized blockchain" won't get you there in terms of truly mainstream transaction loads.

6. Bitcoin and cryptos generally have been very popular and useful by performing the role of meme investment instruments. People love to invest in things like this, and Bitcoin and the others fill this role. Just because blockchain isn't the magical solution to every single one of the world's technical problems doesn't mean it's a "failure".

Like BRC20 which got initial hype and was trending in the same manner I guess LN hyped and now no one wants to talk about it. LN if done correctly would have helped Bitcoin in gaining adoption as of now it is not gaining any popularity. There are many issues behind it and one of the biggest I feel is the complexity of creating an LN network. The next issue I feel is the trust issue as LN has encountered vulnerability issues in the past which can be another reason. I do not think that LN would help Bitcoin gain adoption as it was proclaimed to do in the past.

LN's problem is not about lack of users.. LN's success is not based on adoption... it has actual technical flaws and exploits and bugs..


but if you want to ignore the faults, flaws and bugs of the code.. heres something you might want to learn about just the user adoption stuff..  the more people that use LN, the more bottlenecks LN will have because routes share/borrow liquidity meaning they can only cater to soo much value per route

LN has not failed for the reason that it has yet to see widespread adoption of the Lightning Network. We can see that there are a lot of users holding their coins on exchanges, where simple withdrawal fees may not be too much of an issue. They prioritize speed and convenience on the network used. Cheaper alternatives like the BSC or TRX chains seem attractive in that sense. Perhaps at some point a LN boom, rising online trading fees, and a security breach on a major centralized exchange could cause people to rethink how they store their cryptocurrencies. .

The electric car dilemma.
You don't buy an electric car because there are no charging stations and businesses don't open charging stations because there are people buying electric cars!

Same with LN, nobody is rushing to implement it because there is no massive need for it, there was simply no progress in the number of people willing to spend crypto, I would say quite the opposite, it's less and less by day and during a bull run and an expecting price increase coming this year, there will be even less.
So why bother with something that is not used?


LN works, it does what it promised, the problem is that it solves things people are not really finding troubling anymore.
When you don't want to spend your coins at all and you keep them on an exchange all the time fees are like the last of your concern.

LN is not here to stay in the sense that its the default option.. it will find its niche, and when people finally wise up to the IOU truth of functionality i presume people will actually promote it as such EG as a visa credit system not a visa debit system. but the future of a proper subnetwork payment system of peoples value wont be LN it will be some other subnetworks yet to be built, but in the meantime bitcoin still needs to scale onchain even just to cater to the onramp/offramps. the idea of locking people into subnetworks and making it a headache/inconvenience/expense to re enter the bitcoin network is not the path to go. subnetworks will fill NICHE service functionality

Not failure, but rather has limited practical usage. At it's best, LN is great option when you frequently make small payment or want perform daily trading while avoiding storing Bitcoin on the exchange. Outside of that, i find on-chain TX is more practical.


Merchant or business whose customer doesn't make regular or frequent payment wouldn't see much LN usage. But exchange could see fair amount of LN usage.

I've always liked LN, and used to use it, but indeed, the lack of adoption is what gets me. I can use it at Kraken (exchange), but there's no point because I don't need to exchange micro transactions. And most micro transactions I do, don't accept LN.

I wouldn't call it a failure, but more of a problem in general: good tech doesn't mean people use it, and a hype gets more exposure. Compare the ICO/NFT BS with LN: LN is here to stay, the rest is a quick money maker until the guy who created it moves on to "the next big thing".
Another thing: many people still don't use Bitcoin for real payments, and many "Bitcoin users" only keep their funds on an exchange. As long as they don't use their own wallet, they won't use it for payments.

Most people think that LN is not a failure, but to me, something that has been around for a long time but is still not widely used is a failure. Until now, not many investors know and appreciate it, they are not even interested in it. If that's not failure, then what is?

In addition, talking about the development of L2 on the bitcoin blockchain, I think in the near future we will have more choices and LN is no longer the only choice. Many L2 projects are being invested by large funds and preparing to launch mainnet during this bull season. Let's wait and see which solution will be chosen and used by everyone.

Lightning network adoption is increasing but just that is is slow. More exchanges have lightning network deposit and withdrawal already. Binance included lightning network last year, there are other exchanges like OKX that has lightning network also.

https://github.com/theDavidCoen/LightningExchanges

If you don’t mind using custodial wallets, it works well but that’s one big if and I do mind it. I want to own my own private keys and I don’t want to depend on any centralized service so I am kind of moving away from LN lately. I’d like to use btc’s main layer for anything and If I can’t do that because of the high fees, I’ll be going to the next best project which has cheap and fast transactions. I think crypto loses its purpose if it loses its decentralization aspect. LN is fine if you don’t want to move away from btc but it is also like using centralized bank apps as long as you don’t own your own LN node and in my experience people who use LN usually don’t own a node. It is because they use LN for its low tx fees and creating a LN node ain’t come cheap. It is a paradox.

I don't think lightning is a failure at all.

Many people use it online for micropayments, and it is a really convenient way to spend sats in the real world.

It's a bit like carrying money in your wallet. You don't carry all your savings around, just a bit of cash. Same thing with lightning.

You can see that most of the transactions are between the US and Europe, but it is used worldwide:



Here's the live map: https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-channels-map

when you do bother to use it and stop acting like an inexperienced PR guy of something you have not used. you will soon learn the real issues
all i see is you promoting something based on false promises you were told.. not based on experience

there are whole countries that tried it and dropped it in months (el salvador/nigeria) dont pretend those calling it flawed/failure are people who have not used it.. instead admit its those that have not used it FALSELY thinking it works perfectly due to them just reading false statements and then copying them as if false promises is experience..
try it and realise the problems, dont just promote something you have not experienced. we already have too many idiots that do that
if you dont want to try it. then dont falsely claim that it works fine. YOU DONT KNOW

even the people that have used it admit to its flaws. its those that sound like snake-oil salesmen* that are the only ones that say its works fine
*dont know the product, exaggerate the promises, havnt used it but just promote it

Op you really pointed out good observation that need great attention, but I can't necessary tag it failure for now. my opinion towards it, is for the team to come up with more advert creating more awareness over the exchange, possibly check and see if there is any unfavorable condition in their platform that is coursing their initial plan of building the exchange not actualizing.

Alternatively given more time can be an option, but is tide down to first seen if they have time frame on how the exchange supposed to have gone which failed with that they can't restrategize by checking the actual course of not meeting their target at the specific time schedule.

Failure seems to me a big word to describe what currently lightning network is, they haven't done any blunder yet and they're doing just fine with what they're currently doing, they seem alright to me though but I guess some people haven't used it or don't care what it is, I haven't tried using it but I've seen how to set it up and to me it feels a little too complicated to do so because I'm not the go-to guy when there's issues on the computer in my house or office so that's why I find setting up LN a bit difficult, maybe it's the same for other people too, they find it hard to set up. Or the obvious reason of them all, lightning network don't have enough visibility that people probably haven't heard of it.

just needs time? nah LN wont function better even if you plugged in an alarm clock or patiently waited 1,2,4,8,16,1000 more years.. it needs to go back to scratch and start again learning from its own mistakes.. i guess you mean "time machine" not just "time"

as for the other issues you dont understand:
their own units are called Msats.. which are several more decimals deeper per unit than a sat/bitcoin. thus not the same as bitcoin

LN does not need actual bitcoin locked.. even thor turbo(bitrefills) proudly presents its instant channel creations. this is done by opening channels with msat balance which is NOT using real UTXO references, but instead uses a different channel policy of 'temp-id'
many people can open channels with no balance just so they can be connected with another partner who offers inbound balance.. inbound balance that has not been locked at the channel creation side of the inbound balance provider..

even if they did us a UTXO peg reference:
there is no LN network wide audit to ensure channel users have balance thats actually pegged from bitcoin network UTXO and nothing stops channel creators using the same UTXO over multiple channels

LN is not even a network that requires the bitcoin network. LN can bridge/peg to different currencies, so dont pretend its a "bitcoin layer". its a completely separate network that is not locked to be a sole function advantage to bitcoin

the devs of those promoting their involvement of LN are highly funded/sponsored. so asking people to tip them/donate to them wont speed things up
if you look at how many millions things like bitfinex/river financial have sponsored devs purely for LN development. the answer is then not to ask people to pay devs. they are paid enough but have ADMITTED LN HAS FLAWS EVEN THEY CANT FIX

what needs to happen is BITCOIN needs to scale, and new (from scratch) subnetworks created that learn from LN mistakes