Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 29. (Read 33677 times)

I am sorry you got my question that way. You're right, I should have added more context, but I did say I am a beginner, and navigating this site, Github etc. can be difficult sometimes... I thought that this was the most appropriate place to ask such a question and thought that someone had an answer. I wasn't trying to inspire anyone to do any work for me. I have spent a lot of time the past 2 weeks reading about the technical sides of Bitcoin and getting myself familiar with the governance, and all the places where the community discusses technical details about bitcoin (so not places like Reddit). One thing that I found most confusing was the way BIP's are handled. I am still not quite sure where people have informal/formal discussions about new technical features of Bitcoin and where it is possible to follow them. The repo points to this forum and the IRC chat. I have been on the IRC chat for a few days and it is mostly inactive. At least, they do not have discussions about new features etc. I have subscribed myself to the bitcoin-dev mailing list as well but that seems to be the most confusing place of all. There is no context given on the discussions there, it is just a continuation of an existing one. I guess what I am looking for is the first proposal of the Lightning network. The first-ever place was talked about and proposed to the community. Is it on this forum, in the mailing list, in a bitcoin conference in the form of a youtube video etc. I have seen the Lightning Network paper, but there must have been some informal discussion beforehand I am sure? I tried looking on this forum by sorting posts with the most view and searching for posts related to the lightning network. However, I didn't have much luck. Now I am here asking anyone if they know the answer to my question! Thanks all for your help.

Something like the Lightning Network needs the right packaging for the masses to adopt it.  Android Apps such as Phoenix have taken a few of those steps out (such as receiving on-chain bitcoin and then choosing a node/channel to open) by simplifying the process to send on-chain bitcoin to your wallet, send it out via on-chain or lightning network.

Just because you can only see an occasional flash of light and some rumbling off in the distance doesn't mean there isn't going to be a Lightning (network) storm that's slowly building as it approaches.

No, that's wrong. Everyone wants or will want it, since it allows them to send BTC faster and cheaper. It certainly took many years to get to a well-working state; remember how just few years ago, everyone who was actually using it on mainnet was in the 'reckless club' and expecting to lose some funds sooner or later
It's technologically quite tricky and the protocol and implementation had to be thoroughly thought through and tested before the large audience could be tackled. It hasn't been until very recently that LN was really marketed towards the average Joe, so I am sure adoption will rise exponentially.

Merchants and services do usually offer Lightning; it's made very easy through software like https://btcpayserver.org/.
Exchanges not yet; I suspect to collect more fees. Especially when we see exchanges charging 25 bucks to withdraw BTC, while a 1sat/vB tx costs 0.08€ to send, it becomes clear they are making big gains on those withdrawals. If people ask, they just point to BTC and say it's because BTC is just so expensive to send, while it's not actually true.
They also simply don't actually want people to withdraw, because then people trade more, thus paying more fees to the exchange. And of course if holding custody of peoples' keys, the exchange can do an exit scam at any time. Finally, LN makes it easy and cheap to withdraw; both of which are quite bad for exchanges and also i.e. gambling sites.

you seem to be not up-to-date. although you're right, the cryptocurrency community probably wants something else like gambling, lying, loosing money and so on

Shower thought, are the Lightning Network developers trying to build something that a majority of people in the whole cryptocurrency community doesn’t want? It has been years and years of development, growth of LN is there, but merchants, services, especially exchanges are very SLOW to adopt it. In fact, almost non-existent.

I think you misunderstood me. Or I explained myself poorly!
I know no shit about Go and don't even want to know. Same goes for most web programming languages. My small knowledge sticks to C, Bash, a bit of Python, a bit of Octave/Matlab and a bit of Spice/LTSpice.
That was what I meant, about the code efficiency and obviously, for compiled languages, the compiler itself. We can have multiple levels of code optimization in compilers.

Anyway, I got what I was looking for, that is to confirm my counter-arguments for what is said in that video. That's all.

Hey, I know how application code works and that it is compiled into machine language thus telling the hardware what to do, you don't need to explain that to me. It seems to me though that you're actually the one not knowing that Go code indeed runs less efficient than C code. So it is the code that puts unnecessary additional stress on the hardware, mainly depending on how well it's written and which language (compiler) is chosen.

Current- and next-gen mobile processors such as found in Raspberry Pis are easily able to run a full node + LN when using c-lightning, while they're sometimes hitting limits already today where lnd is used. And that's a fact.

Yeah, I was saying: the guy is a classic clueless BCH shill. There's no way around it. You can't think BCH is a better or the 'real' Bitcoin and simultaneously understand LN, because if you would, you'd see your shitcoin is useless and solves nothing.

I understand. Many people don't like youtube videos. But, at least me, I can't deny that there is smart people everywhere, so watching other opinions, no matter if in youtube, facebook or reddit or whatever, is not a reason to say it's not valid thoughts of those people. And when we read/watch/whatever other opinions, we also open our own horizons.

Anyway, c-lightning, mostly being written in C, I think the same way you think about running in low power devices but still, it's not the application code itself that may put some stress on the hardware, is what that code "tells" the hardware to do in terms of data processing.

I didn't even knew but some people on Blockstream started a project to simulate, test and improve path finding algorithms  using a large test Lightning network with an accurate topology extrapolated from the current topolgy with 1 millions channels. You guys can check it on Rusty Russel github here: https://github.com/rustyrussell/million-channels-project

There is also this post on medium from Rusty Russel talking about the supposed issue, here:
https://medium.com/blockstream/letting-a-million-channels-bloom-985bdb28660b

So, I'm just glad this claims were settled and we can rest assured that LN will be able to overcome any possible issues.




Yeah, I understand that it is 3 or 4 years old.
This guy was clearly trying to create fear on the LN or something. But yes, he's (or at least was) completely on the wrong side when he says that the attempts to increase the block size were immediately shut down. This says we would agree with it, completely ignoring the consequences of that regarding centralization, storage issues, etc. And, yes, segwit did it and more, in a very clever way, no doubts about it.

Sorry for the OT but was reading the latest posts and when I saw yours it reminded me of something:

https://twitter.com/ElectrumSV/status/1445091823215464452?s=20

like n0nce i won't go into details (although i watched the video)

1. the video is 3 years old. just keep that in mind. a lot happened since then. but you recognized that yourself, mentioning the quote from rusty which is 4 years old
2. towards the end of the video, he says something like:
which obviously is wrong, the blocksize was increased with segwit
3. looking at the other videos on the channel, that guy is/was clearly on the wrong site of history

mostly ad hominem, i know, but sometimes i don't have the time for more...  

Unfortunately I don't have much time for YouTube videos, but looking at his upload list it seems it's one of the hillbilly BCH big blockers who still think it's a good idea to scale on-chain, just because it works on their un-used network and they resist development and evolution of the network. If he argues against LN because he thinks it's too hard to run on low-power hardware due to size constraints (I would get processing power, but storage? Really?) he is basically saying his own coin (that needs more space) is not decentraliseable because low-power device can't handle a lot of data. He is then actually arguing against the security of his own preferred coin (BCH it seems).

The use of Go (lnd) can be a concern on low-power hardware in the future, but c-lightning should run easy smooooth and cool on most devices.

So without even watching it, from what you wrote and seeing the video thumbnails & titles, I'd say this guy is clueless.

Hi...

I just watched a video and I would like to know opinions on it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGrUOLsC9cw

I don't exactly agree when the guy says raspberry Pis and laptops (or other devices, like mine, RP64) don't have enough processing power to deal with so much data!
I'm not a computer scientist or anything, but if these machines would struggle with the amount of data they need to process, I think these devices would easily heat up constantly and I think think that's the case in 95% or more of the cases.

Then he also mentions that another problem with the network is that there are channels opening and closing, therefore, path finding algos many times can't find paths for the payments because of this constant change in the network. And says the same with respect to balances of channels are also changing constantly.

Well, my argument here is that, yes, it is true that there are many channels opening and closing and yes there is balance updates every second, etc. Regarding the first part, I don't know how can he say such thing without backing up his statement without any data, like some plots of channels opened and closed per hour, for instance or how can he says that balance updates in channels is a problem when balance updates is something inherent to the network itself, probably at the protocol level... I'm not sure if this guy has anything at all to backup what he claims.

The guy quotes Rusty Russel on a post he wrote like 4 years ago on Reddit. I'm interest knowing if there was something done to mitigate the supposed problem...

What are your thoughts???

I stand corrected, I misread that into the onion_ files that popped up first from my grep, overlooking the libplugin-pay.c.

---

Reposting this from WO thread here as heads-up:



[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

not sure the first is (only) tor related:
source: https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning/blob/5c38e5a08fbf15cc4a7e31ef1a017b580b11a4c6/plugins/libplugin-pay.c#L1250

Makes perfect sense, I confused capacity with current liquidity.
Otherwise it would be possible to see which channels are used or not by taking snapshots of the liquidity balance from them. My thinking error.


Thanks, funny enough the two errors I get locally are not listed there:

From grepping the sources I conclude these are both related to tor connections in some way.
The first seems to be nodes down the routing path being unreachable and the second I do not understand completely yet but it seems related to a disagreement of nodes regarding some HTLC parameters.
Will keep reading the debug.log around successful and failed transactions to try to get a better understanding on what exactly happens under the hood.

No, liquidity is not advertised across the network. That would be a privacy infringement. It knows the total channel capacity, though.


Locally: Check out this comment. There are apparently five possible causes. lightning-cli listforwards returns the exact error if a transaction fails locally.

Remotely: Some node might fail a transaction locally or suddenly go offline. There might be some other causes that I am not aware of at the moment too.

Thanks for your reply and explanation, that's comforting to know, I first thought I'd possibly stuck my fat fingers too deep into the thing at some point


Checking further, I saw that I also have a few "Local Failed" transactions.
But I am still wondering what would make a transaction fail. I played around a bit with the "getroute" rpc command and I was under the impression that querying a route given a certain amount to transfer will only return channels that have the respective capacity/liquidity to route this payment. Is this wrong? Does getroute not know the capacity/liquidity of channels in transit?
Or what other reasons can make a transaction fail (locally or remote)?

When it's all done you need more then 500GB, between the blockchain, the LN database and the Electrum DB:
A 1TB will be fine for a long time to come, but 500 GB is just not going to work with everything.
You might be able just to shut it down and clone the 500GB to a 1TB but I would just let it resync.



-Dave

It's completely normal. I have successfully routed 84 transactions and I have 357 failed ones.


"Failed" means that the transaction failed at some further point in the route. If your node fails to route a payment then you will see "Local_failed" instead. You can't really do much about it. If you see a lot of 10, 10k, 100k sat failed payments then someone is very likely probing your channels. It can be done with any other amount as well.

I get about as much failed transactions as successful ones on my node.

Does anybody know how I can further investigate the reason for failed transactions (RTL just says "failed" as status) ?