needing to run a full LN node to use LN is like telling someone they need to take their desktop computer with them when they go buy a coffee at starbucks
..
what ends up happening is people will end up depositing funds into central payment processors(LN factories) and so users can just have lite wallets and trust their watchtower wont mess around when they are not eyes-glued to their app
LN will not get rid of payment processors. as the whole investment is to offer these payment processors a nice new niche of customers to manage.
i know many people will say that LN will be a bright glittery network of hop model nodes all independant and in unity of allowing their funds to be spend as routers
but the reality will be centralised hubs with reserve sharing channels between hubs offering cheap fast route via the hubs and their own special app so that users dont have to manage their own funds.
by this im not being anti-LM.
im being critical thinking of the real life scenario end-game
Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 41. (Read 32053 times)
It seems to me that in this decade we'll get rid of the payment processors.
I highly doubt that will happen this decade. Except for crypto enthusiasts, the world still revolves around fiat. As long as the seller can't use Bitcoin LN to pay his suppliers, there's not really a point in keeping it.Quote
— Is it really possible for a LN user to lose his revocation keys or the commitment transactions? Has it ever happened in the past to you?
As far as I know, it's possible to lose LN-funds in various ways. That's why you shouldn't deposit more than you're willing to lose. I can't really comment on the technical part though.It hasn't happened to me yet, apart from losing small amounts on centralized websites (but that isn't caused by the LN-side).
Quote
Shouldn't Bob update Charlie's balance after Alice confirms that she got the money?
Bob shouldn't be offline for this long, that's no way to run a LN-node. This will probably lead to more centralized nodes, instead of running it from your home. 
So by reading the news and some bullish tweets of El Salvador, I saw that people are actually using the LN pretty casually. It seems to me that in this decade we'll get rid of the payment processors.
Although, I found a stackexchange thread and I'd like to ensure that transacting with LN is secure.
— Is it really possible for a LN user to lose his revocation keys or the commitment transactions? Has it ever happened in the past to you?
— Can you really lose your money if the node goes offline? I haven't fully understood this:
Shouldn't Bob update Charlie's balance after Alice confirms that she got the money?
Although, I found a stackexchange thread and I'd like to ensure that transacting with LN is secure.
— Is it really possible for a LN user to lose his revocation keys or the commitment transactions? Has it ever happened in the past to you?
— Can you really lose your money if the node goes offline? I haven't fully understood this:
Shouldn't Bob update Charlie's balance after Alice confirms that she got the money?
By the way, @DaveF how is your upgrade going?
It's not. Lets just leave it at NewEgg and Amazon along with USPS and FedEx Ground have all conspired to screw up my planned hardware work for the last 2 weeks and leave it at that.
I am grabbing a NUC out of storage this week that I am going to see if I can use.
Its actually at the point that I have to get some things moved off of the box since we are eliminating some fiber runs by the end of the month.
-Dave
I have just finished doing some research on LNDHub which is also used by BlueWallet and found out that lndhub.io shows the URI of the BlueWallet's node along with the current state of all of their channels. I expected them to have many small channels, but it looks like they have opened only 3 channels themselves. What a shame that they do not accept channels lower than 0.1 BTC; limits over 0.03 BTC are already absurd to me.
By the way, @DaveF how is your upgrade going?
By the way, @DaveF how is your upgrade going?
Agree with Carlton but if you want to test anyway, let me know and I'll spin up one of nodes running c-lightning and get it updated. Might take a day or 2 since I have not been using them for a while.
Thanks Dave! The mempool is slowly clearing up, so I would appreciate if you could do it in your spare time. By the way, are you going to open any more channels in the near future? I would like to maintain channels with a few forum members but it would nice to improve my node's connectivity this way.
So I was going to do a bunch of things this week with some nodes and other hardware. Ordered some equipment to upgrade some things and move some other things.
I ordered some things from Amazon and some others from NewEgg.
Amazon stuff was supposed to arrive Tuesday. Now scheduled for Saturday....which means next Tuesday since the office building is locked over the weekend.
According to the tracking number the NewEgg stuff is still on their shipping dock so unless it's coming in overnight I guess it's all happening next week.
-Dave
Yes it's a bit outdated and more money then setting up a RPi or getting a used machine from eBay.
I've never used a RPi, I use an old laptop for testing. It's cheap, still fast enough, and comes with build-in UPS and display.Quote
And you can bury it under / behind something for security and nobody will know it's there.
If I ever build an underground mancave, a hidden and fire proof backup storage space with power and network connection is on my list 
On Lightning Network Stores, I found another LN gambling site: blockbet.club. This site makes you bet on when the next Bitcoin block will be found. You can select the start and end time for your bet. Deposits are anywhere from 10 to 10,000 sats, only through LN. Based on the low deposits, it looks like meant as proof of concept instead of a commercial gambling site. Both deposits and withdrawals work from Phoenix Wallet and BlueWallet.
It's the first site I've seen that only shows a QR-code to withdraw. It's easier than emailing myself a payment request (from my mobile wallet to my desktop).
Update: It didn't pay when I should have won the second time. It's a small amount so I don't really care, but just a heads up: it has bugs.
And you can bury it under / behind something for security and nobody will know it's there.
apart from the WA Redmond AI analyzing all the phone-home data from Windows
with a fully-fledged server, you can run multiple lightning instances anyway. Maybe running 1 or 2 LND's will prove useful for different reasons, I'm not currently in your position where I have a decent enough machine to try.
Maybe keep the Pi as a local watchtower, powered (also the internet router) with a UPS? Or at some other location, of course.
Slightly OT to all of this but I was at my local Microcenter yesterday to pick up a few things and saw this:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/636691/lenovo-thinkcentre-m90n-1-mini-desktop-computer
Yes it's a bit outdated and more money then setting up a RPi or getting a used machine from eBay.
But it's tiny, has more then enough SSD storage, RAM and CPU (4C 8T) to run a full node, has space for a 2nd drive for mirroring, uses very little power.
It comes with Win10 Pro so it has Hyper-V if you want it.
And you can bury it under / behind something for security and nobody will know it's there.
Not saying you should run out and get one, but with hardware in general spiking up in price it's not a bad option.
-Dave
with a fully-fledged server, you can run multiple lightning instances anyway. Maybe running 1 or 2 LND's will prove useful for different reasons, I'm not currently in your position where I have a decent enough machine to try.
Maybe keep the Pi as a local watchtower, powered (also the internet router) with a UPS? Or at some other location, of course.
I have 100k sats there that you can open a channel with.
I am not sure what you are driving at. Dual-funding is currently supported only by properly configured up-to-date c-lightning nodes.
Might delay me getting the c-lightning up until the end of the week but it will make doing other stuff easier.
Take your time. I am trying to figure out how to use lightning-cli funderupdate which allows you to control the behaviour of your node when some dual-funding compatible node opens a channel to you. I can't find any detailed documentation about it except for a short explanation in the command line.
If you want to peer and keep a channel open in general I just made an on chain TX to my main node running LND @ 15 sat /b so it should clear overnight you can peer to it at
0345e4b0a36a5dc56450421637555bf7dc3025b59db78501609b78a7c187d8b346@bajjf27ngq6266p7ol6a36yziuajxedm434z3b4r54aybabqlqofkead.onion:9735
0345e4b0a36a5dc56450421637555bf7dc3025b59db78501609b78a7c187d8b346@bajjf27ngq6266p7ol6a36yziuajxedm434z3b4r54aybabqlqofkead.onion:9735
I have just connected to your node. My new node should be reachable at 0273da0a525390c36857841e208f1d289275c76ebfa7ecfde697c6cbf4f235b4f5@fjpmf23cd2c6sqp7e4wzexa6ixkttl3jabivldakwq733tw634ymjbid.onion:9735 . I am about to fund its wallet and start reopening my channels.
I have 100k sats there that you can open a channel with.
Just ordered some larger USB portable drives from Amazon to make moving some of the VHDs around easier. Might delay me getting the c-lightning up until the end of the week but it will make doing other stuff easier.
Sounds good, but an UPS would be an overkill for the amount of BTC that I want to lock up on the LN.
right, I'm using a UPS because bitcoind can't handle power-cuts without revalidating some blocks afterwards. I'm trying to make my Pi node as low-maintenance as possible
From the been there done that part of life unless it's a good high end server room UPS check it every 6 months or so. I have had the consumer line of ALL UPS brands (APC, Tripplite, CyberPower) not give any indication that the battery was dead until it just flat out did not work.
-Dave
Sounds good, but an UPS would be an overkill for the amount of BTC that I want to lock up on the LN.
right, I'm using a UPS because bitcoind can't handle power-cuts without revalidating some blocks afterwards. I'm trying to make my Pi node as low-maintenance as possible
If you want to peer and keep a channel open in general I just made an on chain TX to my main node running LND @ 15 sat /b so it should clear overnight you can peer to it at
0345e4b0a36a5dc56450421637555bf7dc3025b59db78501609b78a7c187d8b346@bajjf27ngq6266p7ol6a36yziuajxedm434z3b4r54aybabqlqofkead.onion:9735
0345e4b0a36a5dc56450421637555bf7dc3025b59db78501609b78a7c187d8b346@bajjf27ngq6266p7ol6a36yziuajxedm434z3b4r54aybabqlqofkead.onion:9735
I have just connected to your node. My new node should be reachable at 0273da0a525390c36857841e208f1d289275c76ebfa7ecfde697c6cbf4f235b4f5@fjpmf23cd2c6sqp7e4wzexa6ixkttl3jabivldakwq733tw634ymjbid.onion:9735 . I am about to fund its wallet and start reopening my channels.
Agree with Carlton but if you want to test anyway, let me know and I'll spin up one of nodes running c-lightning and get it updated. Might take a day or 2 since I have not been using them for a while.
Thanks Dave! The mempool is slowly clearing up, so I would appreciate if you could do it in your spare time. By the way, are you going to open any more channels in the near future? I would like to maintain channels with a few forum members but it would nice to improve my node's connectivity this way.
We are in the process of moving out of our data-centers to one central one AND at the same time moving office space, so the only machines I can run my lightning stuff on are my own server and workstation. For the C-lightning node that I have I need to spin down some VMs and copy them elsewhere to make RAM & CPU available for it.
If you want to peer and keep a channel open in general I just made an on chain TX to my main node running LND @ 15 sat /b so it should clear overnight you can peer to it at
0345e4b0a36a5dc56450421637555bf7dc3025b59db78501609b78a7c187d8b346@bajjf27ngq6266p7ol6a36yziuajxedm434z3b4r54aybabqlqofkead.onion:9735
Once I have the other node updated and synced I'll let you know.
-Dave
with a fully-fledged server, you can run multiple lightning instances anyway.
I am aware of that. I am already running a bunch of virtual machines on that server so I would rather not waste any resources, especially RAM.
Maybe keep the Pi as a local watchtower, powered (also the internet router) with a UPS? Or at some other location, of course.
Sounds good, but an UPS would be an overkill for the amount of BTC that I want to lock up on the LN.
wait till version 0.10.1, or compile/run master branch, the spec for dual fund has slightly changed.
I compiled c-lightning yesterday on my own without specifying the target version, so I guess that I am running a fairly recent version of the master branch. lightning-cli getinfo returns version: v0.10.0-162-g33736b8
Agree with Carlton but if you want to test anyway, let me know and I'll spin up one of nodes running c-lightning and get it updated. Might take a day or 2 since I have not been using them for a while.
Thanks Dave! The mempool is slowly clearing up, so I would appreciate if you could do it in your spare time. By the way, are you going to open any more channels in the near future? I would like to maintain channels with a few forum members but it would nice to improve my node's connectivity this way.
...
c-lightning uses minimal RAM and CPU, because it's written in C, where the programmer must directly control almost everything the app does (with golang, a bunch of Google-written magic does the job for you)
...
c-lightning uses minimal RAM and CPU, because it's written in C, where the programmer must directly control almost everything the app does (with golang, a bunch of Google-written magic does the job for you)
...
Having used C since I was in high-school in the mid 80s I can say that it has it's own set of debugging issues when it comes to CPU / RAM problems.
that's just saying what I said, slightly differently
the C language lets you control resources. Golang mostly does not.
c-lightning is written well enough that it uses resources efficiently. LND consistently has issues. That's OK is you're running it on an expensive server, and you only want to run one lightning node on the server.
...
c-lightning uses minimal RAM and CPU, because it's written in C, where the programmer must directly control almost everything the app does (with golang, a bunch of Google-written magic does the job for you)
...
c-lightning uses minimal RAM and CPU, because it's written in C, where the programmer must directly control almost everything the app does (with golang, a bunch of Google-written magic does the job for you)
...
Having used C since I was in high-school in the mid 80s I can say that it has it's own set of debugging issues when it comes to CPU / RAM problems.
It's becoming more clear this will be necessary as Lightning gets more actual use; I'm running c-lightning on an rPi 3, and when the network is quiet, all is well with system resources (I've got 2GB swap space on an SSD to ameliorate the low RAM). But when there are big storms of transactions, the gossip updates push the CPUs to ~ 50%. There will be even more bigger surges in future, I expect
I like RPis, I use them everywhere. BUT $100 machines like this are all over: https://www.ebay.com/itm/144041689234 just swap the spinning drive for a SSD if you want and you are way ahead of running a RPi3 A programmer I use in India has been getting the above machine with a 128GB SSD (yes I know you can't run a node on it) for under 5000 Rupees at a local shop so it's not just a US thing.
IMO you should be on a RPi4 with more ram anyway when running a node and anything else on it.
Would there anyone here be interested in testing out dual-funding once the transaction fees have gone down?
wait till version 0.10.1, or compile/run master branch, the spec for dual fund has slightly changed. I'm hoping that the clboss plugin will seek out nodes to dual fund with automatically once the spec is finalized.
Agree with Carlton but if you want to test anyway, let me know and I'll spin up one of nodes running c-lightning and get it updated. Might take a day or 2 since I have not been using them for a while.
-Dave
I have recently decided to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a normal server. Since LND does not recommend reusing the channel database between different architectures, I had to close all of my channels. I was thinking about using a different implementation this time. You sold me on c-lightning.
with a fully-fledged server, you can run multiple lightning instances anyway. Maybe running 1 or 2 LND's will prove useful for different reasons, I'm not currently in your position where I have a decent enough machine to try.
Maybe keep the Pi as a local watchtower, powered (also the internet router) with a UPS? Or at some other location, of course.
Try the clboss plugin for Lightning, you can dial down/switch off some of the features if you want to: https://github.com/ZmnSCPxj/clboss
Would there anyone here be interested in testing out dual-funding once the transaction fees have gone down?
wait till version 0.10.1, or compile/run master branch, the spec for dual fund has slightly changed. I'm hoping that the clboss plugin will seek out nodes to dual fund with automatically once the spec is finalized.
-snip
Thanks Carlton for your write-up! I have recently decided to switch from a Raspberry Pi to a normal server. Since LND does not recommend reusing the channel database between different architectures, I had to close all of my channels. I was thinking about using a different implementation this time. You sold me on c-lightning. I am going to miss Zap Wallet, though. Spark Wallet isn't nearly as good.
Would there anyone here be interested in testing out dual-funding once the transaction fees have gone down?
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