The Lightning Network FAQ - page 10.

n0nce

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on September 07, 2022, 06:56:24 AM

Quote from: n0nce on September 07, 2022, 06:47:01 AM

Tor is a solution, but ISPs can also censor Tor traffic in general (and there are precedents for that).

I have never witnessed a case wherein somebody was prohibited to using Tor from his ISP provider. Maybe it can happen on a place like North Korea, but not in the EU or the USA.

I know that a few people aren't able to access the Tor Browser webpage: https://tor.stackexchange.com/questions/78/my-isp-network-government-has-blocked-access-to-the-torproject-website-how-can
The next logical step would be prohibiting the network's use altogether, although I'm not sure about precedents, either.

Anyhow, as it's technically possible, I do think it's worth planning ahead and coming up with solutions before something like that starts to become commonplace.

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Quote from: n0nce on September 07, 2022, 06:47:01 AM

I don't understand why you mentioned the local ISP. I, and most people, run Bitcoin & Lightning nodes through Tor.

With speed I referred to the CPU, not internet speed, even though you can download blocks faster on a cloud than on a Pi. Either way, indexing is faster on cloud.

Quote from: n0nce on September 07, 2022, 06:47:01 AM

Tor is a solution, but ISPs can also censor Tor traffic in general (and there are precedents for that).

I have never witnessed a case wherein somebody was prohibited to using Tor from his ISP provider. Maybe it can happen on a place like North Korea, but not in the EU or the USA.

n0nce

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on September 07, 2022, 06:30:43 AM

Quote from: LoyceV on September 07, 2022, 06:12:54 AM

Moving back to running nodes at home, through your own local ISP, isn't ideal either.

Isn't ideal, in which manner? Sure, anything you do in the cloud is run much faster than in a Raspberry Pi at home, but the home device grants you privacy. I would never host sensitive content on a cloud service, regardless of which company hosted it; and when I say sensitive I mean two things: Money and private stuff, which is how I'd characterize my Lightning transactions.

I don't understand why you mentioned the local ISP. I, and most people, run Bitcoin & Lightning nodes through Tor.

When talking about ISP, it's not about speed, but rather that they can censor traffic similarly to a VPS provider.
Tor is a solution, but ISPs can also censor Tor traffic in general (and there are precedents for that).

Bridges can solve the problem: https://security.stackexchange.com/a/107510/234917

Truth be told: the internet is getting much more centralized and controlled, and less free, as time goes by.
There are discussions on Bitcointalk [1] and elsewhere about ideas how to create a new network, independent from the internet.

[1] https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/first-bitcoin-then-blockstream-satellite-how-about-we-go-fully-decentralized-5365021

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Quote from: LoyceV on September 07, 2022, 06:12:54 AM

Moving back to running nodes at home, through your own local ISP, isn't ideal either.

Isn't ideal, in which manner? Sure, anything you do in the cloud is run much faster than in a Raspberry Pi at home, but the home device grants you privacy. I would never host sensitive content on a cloud service, regardless of which company hosted it; and when I say sensitive I mean two things: Money and private stuff, which is how I'd characterize my Lightning transactions.

I don't understand why you mentioned the local ISP. I, and most people, run Bitcoin & Lightning nodes through Tor.

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Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on September 05, 2022, 01:26:25 PM

Quote from: dkbit98 on September 05, 2022, 12:44:25 PM

It is a problem because than LN is no different than ethereum that is also using mostly cloud servers.

I see people bring this as an issue. I can't say I don't acknowledge the situation, there's definitely a problem here. I don't cross my fingers regulators are capable of demanding from Amazon, Google, etc., to shut down whoever customer runs a LND / Core Lightning / eclair software, especially when these companies are known for being guilty for the biggest privacy scandals, but I zoom out and observe a worse picture: False sense of privacy. Can you imagine if all these companies (that, again, would do everything for a little more spying) decided to weaken the effectiveness of onion routing?

There isn't really an alternative, right? Almost everything is "in the cloud" nowadays, and a few large companies rule the cloud market. Moving back to running nodes at home, through your own local ISP, isn't ideal either.

n0nce

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Quote from: ?? on ??

Quote from: n0nce on September 05, 2022, 06:45:15 PM

Quote from: dkbit98 on September 05, 2022, 12:44:25 PM

Have you actually checked number of nodes on mempool website?

Yes: https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-networks
Out of 14,700 total nodes (as of right now), at least 11,443 nodes are Tor nodes.

500 nodes being on Amazon servers is just around 3.4% of total nodes.

I wonder if there are any LN node which use multiple hidden .onion domain name which could inflate the number. For comparison, reachable Bitcoin full node distribution between clearnet and Tor node has more even distribution[1].

[1] https://bitnodes.io/dashboard/

Good question. I don't know why, but I do know that some people actually just use Tor for Lightning and Electrum server and run Core on clearnet.
I even did it like that in my full node install guide.

Part of the reason is that the Tor network gives you a free NAT tunnel, meaning you can get to your Ride The Lightning and electrs and any other 'human interface' without dangerous and tricky port forwarding, while you do not need to connect to your bitcoind remotely in most cases.

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Quote from: dkbit98 on September 05, 2022, 12:44:25 PM

Quote from: n0nce on September 02, 2022, 07:05:17 PM

That's wrong; just the majority of the capacity, not the majority of nodes.
You mostly need more capacity for transferring larger amounts, but high node count and good connectivity of them is much more important to be able to send smaller payments reliably. You know; the kind of payments that unnecessarily clog the blockchain and where even a 1sat/vB fee has a too large proportional impact.

Have you actually checked number of nodes on mempool website?

Yes: https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-networks
Out of 14,700 total nodes (as of right now), at least 11,443 nodes are Tor nodes.

500 nodes being on Amazon servers is just around 3.4% of total nodes.

Quote from: dkbit98 on September 05, 2022, 12:44:25 PM

Just Amazon currently have 556 LN nodes, and everything you see on top are cloud servers like Lunanode, Digirtal Ocean, Hetzner, Contabo, Google Cloud, SHRD SARL etc.
It's clear that majority of Lightning nodes are still locates in cloud servers, I am not using any capacity for this stats:
https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-per-isp

The statistic is not very clear on this, but it should be obvious when talking about ISPs: It only looks at clearnet nodes.
There is no way to tell how many Tor nodes are self-hosted and how many aren't, but especially due to popular node-in-a-boxes often having Tor as default option, I can definitely see a large portion of this large share of nodes being self-hosted.

Quote from: dkbit98 on September 05, 2022, 12:44:25 PM

It is a problem because than LN is no different than ethereum that is also using mostly cloud servers.
They can ban everything and shut down most nodes with a single click of a button and order from regulators.

Not really. If a peer node goes offline, I can close the channel and open a new one with those funds with someone else. It's ultimately all 'backed' by the blockchain, in the sense that closing a channel always gives me back my balance on-chain, which I think we agree is decentralized and secure enough.
Even if you manage to shut down a lot of nodes, you can't hurt Bitcoin or put users' funds in danger; this is the case in Ethereum, though, as their actual layer one is not decentralized enough and there's nothing to fall back on.

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Quote from: dkbit98 on September 05, 2022, 12:44:25 PM

It is a problem because than LN is no different than ethereum that is also using mostly cloud servers.

I see people bring this as an issue. I can't say I don't acknowledge the situation, there's definitely a problem here. I don't cross my fingers regulators are capable of demanding from Amazon, Google, etc., to shut down whoever customer runs a LND / Core Lightning / eclair software, especially when these companies are known for being guilty for the biggest privacy scandals, but I zoom out and observe a worse picture: False sense of privacy. Can you imagine if all these companies (that, again, would do everything for a little more spying) decided to weaken the effectiveness of onion routing?

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Quote from: n0nce on September 02, 2022, 07:05:17 PM

That's wrong; just the majority of the capacity, not the majority of nodes.
You mostly need more capacity for transferring larger amounts, but high node count and good connectivity of them is much more important to be able to send smaller payments reliably. You know; the kind of payments that unnecessarily clog the blockchain and where even a 1sat/vB fee has a too large proportional impact.

Have you actually checked number of nodes on mempool website?
Just Amazon currently have 556 LN nodes, and everything you see on top are cloud servers like Lunanode, Digirtal Ocean, Hetzner, Contabo, Google Cloud, SHRD SARL etc.
It's clear that majority of Lightning nodes are still locates in cloud servers, I am not using any capacity for this stats:
https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-per-isp

Quote from: PrimeNumber7 on September 04, 2022, 04:53:01 AM

I don't think this is necessarily as big of an issue as if a hypothetical coin were to have it's relay nodes all hosted on AWS/GCS/etc. The owners of the LN nodes have financial incentives to keep their nodes running, so LN node operators should have contingency plans in case a cloud provider goes down/stop providing their services.

It is a problem because than LN is no different than ethereum that is also using mostly cloud servers.
They can ban everything and shut down most nodes with a single click of a button and order from regulators.

n0nce

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Quote from: darkv0rt3x on September 04, 2022, 05:29:08 PM

Anyone knows if it is possible to use an external Bitcoin address to open a channel in Core Lightning?
I have some funds in an external address to my node and if possible I wanted to use those funds to open a channel but I would also like to avoid an extra transaction (from current address to an address generated by my CL node) fee.

If it is possible, anyone knows what commands we must use? I've been looking to lightning-cli help but couldn't find anything that does this clearly!

I don't think you can import 'external' private keys (and corresponding addresses) in Core Lightning, unfortunately.
To be honest, it's a pretty niche use case (even some pure Bitcoin wallet applications don't have it) and an extra transaction doesn't really cost a lot.

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Anyone knows if it is possible to use an external Bitcoin address to open a channel in Core Lightning?
I have some funds in an external address to my node and if possible I wanted to use those funds to open a channel but I would also like to avoid an extra transaction (from current address to an address generated by my CL node) fee.

If it is possible, anyone knows what commands we must use? I've been looking to lightning-cli help but couldn't find anything that does this clearly!

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Quote from: dkbit98 on September 01, 2022, 01:05:33 PM

Mempool website added beta support for Lightning Network and you can find there lot's of useful information and pie charts.
First thing you see is that most LN clear nodes are running on Cloud servers (Google cloud, Amazon cloud, Data Web Global Group, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc).
However, around %80 of LN nodes are not shown here because they run on TOR, but 70% of liquidity and capacity is still coming from four biggest cloud servers with clear nodes.
Clearnet capacity is 4,187 BTC; Tor capacity is 367.76 BTC; and rest of capacity is from unknown.
This is clear centralization and I really don't understand what's the problem of running your node on raspberry pi or old laptop/computer... probably it's more convenient and cheaper to use someone else computer Tongue

What do you think about this?

I don't think this is necessarily as big of an issue as if a hypothetical coin were to have it's relay nodes all hosted on AWS/GCS/etc. The owners of the LN nodes have financial incentives to keep their nodes running, so LN node operators should have contingency plans in case a cloud provider goes down/stop providing their services.

I think it is likely that much of the LN capacity is from large businesses whose intentions are to profit from operating LN nodes, rather than individual users. Even if this is not the case today (I think it is), it will likely be the case when/if LN eventually has large transaction volumes. Individual/smaller LN node operators will ultimately be at a disadvantage compared to larger/institutional LN node operators because the larger node operators can provide more liquidity, and can provide routing to more of the LN network. Further, the LN protocol is designed to find the "cheapest" route, not the route that goes through "independent" node operators.

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LND v0.15.1 has been released. Its internal wallet now generates taproot addresses by default (in some cases it might be also possible to close a channel to a taproot address). More database optimisations. One can accept zero-conf channels.

n0nce

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Quote from: dkbit98 on September 02, 2022, 09:50:52 AM

Quote from: ?? on ??

Sorting by capacity isn't really accurate though. If you sort by Node, you'll see better distribution (although Amazon still has 16.64% share).

You can sort them any way you like, but majority of nodes are still on cloud servers.
Centralized exchanges are probably using cloud servers, for example I can see that Kraken exchange has Amazon ISP, Okex exchange uses Alibaba, and Bitfinex is using Google Cloud.

That's wrong; just the majority of the capacity, not the majority of nodes.
You mostly need more capacity for transferring larger amounts, but high node count and good connectivity of them is much more important to be able to send smaller payments reliably. You know; the kind of payments that unnecessarily clog the blockchain and where even a 1sat/vB fee has a too large proportional impact.

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Quote from: DaveF on September 01, 2022, 02:10:55 PM

I *think* a lot of the clear-net stuff that is cloud hosted is from businesses running their nodes.
Their website and back end commerce is already at Amazon cloud or Google Cloud or wherever so that stays there too.

This is probably true, but this is making Lightning Network much more centralized than it should be.
If something happens with major cloud providers that would shut down most of the LN nodes and capacity would see drastic reduction.
I know VoltageCloud is actually using googlecloud, and any privacy on LN is also questionable when we know all this.

Quote from: DaveF on September 01, 2022, 02:10:55 PM

As for most users, running one of the nodes in a box that I love or any pre-packaged LN node it's usually just a click to do TOR, or in the case of Umbrel something you can't unclick. So things like that probably make up a large portion of the TOR nodes. Where people want to do it, but don't want to do it by hand so to speak. Which is fine, I want to drive my car I don't want to know how to refine gas.

There are now so many options to choose from (myNode, raspiblitz, etc.) and Umbrel is just one of them.

Quote from: ?? on ??

Sorting by capacity isn't really accurate though. If you sort by Node, you'll see better distribution (although Amazon still has 16.64% share).

You can sort them any way you like, but majority of nodes are still on cloud servers.
Centralized exchanges are probably using cloud servers, for example I can see that Kraken exchange has Amazon ISP, Okex exchange uses Alibaba, and Bitfinex is using Google Cloud.

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Quote from: dkbit98 on September 01, 2022, 01:05:33 PM

Mempool website added beta support for Lightning Network and you can find there lot's of useful information and pie charts.
First thing you see is that most LN clear nodes are running on Cloud servers (Google cloud, Amazon cloud, Data Web Global Group, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc).
However, around %80 of LN nodes are not shown here because they run on TOR, but 70% of liquidity and capacity is still coming from four biggest cloud servers with clear nodes.
Clearnet capacity is 4,187 BTC; Tor capacity is 367.76 BTC; and rest of capacity is from unknown.
This is clear centralization and I really don't understand what's the problem of running your node on raspberry pi or old laptop/computer... probably it's more convenient and cheaper to use someone else computer Tongue

What do you think about this?

https://mempool.space/lightning

https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-per-isp

PS
I heard that Hetzner recently released some announcement saying that using their cloud for any cryptocurrency related services is against their terms, and they will have to ban that soon.
Same thing could happen with all other cloud providers at some point.

I *think* a lot of the clear-net stuff that is cloud hosted is from businesses running their nodes.
Their website and back end commerce is already at Amazon cloud or Google Cloud or wherever so that stays there too.

Look at voltage.cloud that we were discussing:

Quote from: dkbit98 on August 25, 2022, 06:54:54 AM

Interesting thing about VoltageCloud is that Alphabet invested a lot of money in their business.

Do you actually think that the nodes they host are going to be anyplace other then the google cloud....

As for most users, running one of the nodes in a box that I love or any pre-packaged LN node it's usually just a click to do TOR, or in the case of Umbrel something you can't unclick. So things like that probably make up a large portion of the TOR nodes. Where people want to do it, but don't want to do it by hand so to speak. Which is fine, I want to drive my car I don't want to know how to refine gas.

-Dave

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Mempool website added beta support for Lightning Network and you can find there lot's of useful information and pie charts.
First thing you see is that most LN clear nodes are running on Cloud servers (Google cloud, Amazon cloud, Data Web Global Group, Digital Ocean, Hetzner, etc).
However, around %80 of LN nodes are not shown here because they run on TOR, but 70% of liquidity and capacity is still coming from four biggest cloud servers with clear nodes.
Clearnet capacity is 4,187 BTC; Tor capacity is 367.76 BTC; and rest of capacity is from unknown.
This is clear centralization and I really don't understand what's the problem of running your node on raspberry pi or old laptop/computer... probably it's more convenient and cheaper to use someone else computer Tongue

What do you think about this?

https://mempool.space/lightning

https://mempool.space/graphs/lightning/nodes-per-isp

PS
I heard that Hetzner recently released some announcement saying that using their cloud for any cryptocurrency related services is against their terms, and they will have to ban that soon.
Same thing could happen with all other cloud providers at some point.

n0nce

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Quote from: Rath_ on August 26, 2022, 02:02:34 PM

c-lightning v0.12.0 was released a couple of days ago. Static channel backup is now available! Keep in mind that it should be your last resort. If your peers refuse to cooperate or go offline permanently, you might not be able to recover your coins. Using the backup plugin should be your main strategy as it is more reliable and lets you keep your channels operational after successful recovery.

What about using the built-in channel state backup functionality since v0.10.2 instead of the backup plugin?
It is easier to set up and only downside is no PostgreSQL backend support.

Quote from: n0nce on February 03, 2022, 12:47:58 AM

Code:

wallet=sqlite3:///home/bitcoin/.lightning/bitcoin/lightningd.sqlite3:/mnt/share/lnbackup/lightningd.sqlite3

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c-lightning v0.12.0 was released a couple of days ago. Static channel backup is now available! Keep in mind that it should be your last resort. If your peers refuse to cooperate or go offline permanently, you might not be able to recover your coins. Using the backup plugin should be your main strategy as it is more reliable and lets you keep your channels operational after successful recovery.

Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 10. (Read 32058 times)