Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 43. (Read 32053 times)

That strengthens in my belief that Lightning Network adoption is more of a UI/UX, and a business development problem, than a tech problem. I believe Lightning Labs should hire a good consultant, and start talking to exchanges to actually start using Lightning.

https://starblocks.acinq.co/
Just found this awesome live shop free to use to have a first hand experience of the Lightning Network (testnet). I showed it to a few friends (skeptical about Bitcoin in general and LN in particular) and they were gobsmacked at the end.
Could it make sense to add it to OP for those who want to test it without getting hurt?

Yes, but since it's triggered hourly it's not THAT big a risk.

I actually just did another look around ant people have written / added some auto backup functionality to some of them. But nothing that I found is a nice neat auto backup with a pretty front end which is what I think a lot of people who are using nodes in a box want. Click this box, add this info, and poof you channel info is backed up every time there is a change.

-Dave

Aren't you worried that your VM backup might not reflect the latest state of some channel? Keep in mind that channels are updated not only when you send/receive transactions but also when you route payments.

By the way, the fee of the latest commitment transaction is periodically updated. I have two channels which have never been used. The first one was updated 19 times and the other one 31 times. I am not sure what would happen if I launched my node with an old backup of my channel database. Would a different fee be enough to trigger an uncooperative channel close?

I looked a while ago, but did not find any of the "nodes in a box" that did automated offside backup.
Have to check again. They might have added it, but since I am doing regular VM replications it's not up there on my list of things to check.
But for those people who are using physical ones it would probably be very useful.

-Dave

I would like to point out a very important thing for node operators. In this post, I talked about what could possibly happen if you lost your channel database and decided to use a Static Channel Backup (SCB). Long story short, you should close channels which are offline for extended periods of time. Otherwise, you might not be able to get your coins back if your node's hardware ever failed.


I originally planned to use c-lightning, but I really liked how well LND integrates with Zap. I can easily spend coins from my node and open new channels without using a command line. Spark Wallet supports c-lightning, but it looks less appealing to me. I have used both LND and c-lightning before and I had a very similar (good) experience.

I'd argue that the majority of those topics are more about "development" (except for this first one) and fall under this boards scope.


This is probably the single biggest reason why we're not seeing more Liquid transactions, more than the fact (idea?) that Liquid Federation is a closed membership entity. And L-BTC is something that can be positively called an altcoin.

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*Provided that you design the HLTCs for the altcoin in question yourself

LN is officially just a bunch of HLTCs, which itself is just a bunch of scripts - the rest of the parts like routing were never standardized in a white paper and are just different peoples' implementation AFAIK - so its hard to make a claim of it being an entire network.

Wonder how many of them are people who did it from scratch and how many used one of the "lightning in a box" implementations.

Not that it matters that much, but all the pre-done ones that I know of are running LND so over time C-lightning could wind up being a much smaller player.
I like the C-lightning plugins idea, but LND seems to be more widely used.

-Dave

I would add a situation to your list. If your channel at one point had inbound capacity, and you currently have zero, or very little inbound capacity. The cost of a peer to attempt to get an old channel state confirmed is zero. In some cases, the cost to broadcast the "penalty" transaction may be higher than the amount being stolen from your channel, if transaction fees are persistently high.

You could also set up watchtowers that are controlled by you but are separate from your LN node.

I am not going to tolerate any direct insults in this topic. That's why I deleted your reply. Most of the replies that I have deleted so far were some copy/paste garbage or advertisements. I don't mind having some off-topic conversation here since everyone treats this topic as a place to post any Lightning related content rather than suggestions of changes to the first post. As long as it doesn't turn out to be another "Is Lightning good or bad" discussion for more than 2 pages with arguments that already have been addressed then I am fine with anything. Feel free to respond to my reply in some other thread if you have any further comments.

Edit: If anyone is curious, we have managed to sort everything out via PM.

What the heck?  There are several reports for your post for offtopic/trolling and I'm inclined to agree.  But in the off chance that you are actually just profoundly ignorant:

Lightning is just a technique of using Bitcoin smart contracts to compress multiple Bitcoin transactions into one transaction.   After some setup, I can make a payment to you but not immediately post it to the blockchain, keeping it available to be revised as funds move back and forth. At any time either one of us can post the latest transaction to close it it. Moreover, it's possible to securely and atomically update multiple of these not-yet-final transactions, which makes it possible to pay someone you don't directly have a channel with by updating the balances of a collection of channels.

That's it-- the rest is just implementation.

Through this we can make thousands of payments but only post two transactions to the chain, and as a side benefit these benefits enjoy instant reversibility and improved privacy because they only require the interaction of the participants rather than the global network.  The tradeoff is that the participants need to be online and the underlying wallet software required more engineering effort.

Payment channel support has been built into the transaction format and consensus rules of Bitcoin since day one.  The only transactions involved in lightning are Bitcoin transactions, so it has nothing to do with altcoins.  Your post is extremely similar to saying that posts involving multisig ought to belong in an altcoin subforum.    Guess what: Not everyone uses bitcoin exactly like you do.

Lightning doesn't have anything to do with Bitcoin core,  ... at least today there is no lightning support in Bitcoin Core.  If this subforum were only about Bitcoin core, then I suppose there wouldn't be any lightning stuff in it... but it isn't.

The fact that lightning has its own complexity means that there are plenty of technical things to discuss about it.

As far as I remember, at least three such threads were created. This one is the latest one.


That's what I initially wanted to mention in my post earlier today. Most of the documentation determines Liquid Network as a solution targeted at the trading market rather than individual users.

I also received a glib PM (which was probably sent out to a few more users than just us two I would imagine.  My response was intended to be fairly glib and lo and behold!  I got a glib reply.

I just had a look for the thread asking for a LN sub forum to be created, but I just can't find it at the moment.  It would save the hassle of responding to dense questions for people who have no intentions of using the Lightning Network at all.

I am not sure if this Timelord response post can be used as an example.  

The original question raised by OGNasty seems to have been whether posts/threads related to LN should be in the bitcoin section or maybe they should be in the altcoin section (which has already been responded to).  

Regarding the evolution of LN, merely because lighting network wallets interact with bitcoin would not cause them to become bitcoin, even if they may be evolving into something more and more intertwined into bitcoin... but surely, from a user's perspective, they might NOT be able to tell whether they are using lightning or bitcoin, and they might not give any shits about what they are using, as long as from their perspective, the service works to transfer value and does not steal/lose any of their money along the way.

Further to Rath's excellent post, I'd imagine it's largely due to who the users of Liquid primarily are.  The average person is unlikely to engage with Liquid directly.  It seems to be oriented more towards businesses.  If the companies you frequently deal with are relying on FAQs on an Internet forum, I'd have some concerns.  They should already know what they're doing.

I suppose such a topic might conceivably be useful for someone looking to start a business, as everyone needs to begin somewhere, but the guide would basically consist of "go to this gatekeeper and follow their instructions".  There's not much more information most of us here can provide unless any of us happen to be involved with one of the companies that use it.

Liquid Network is fundamentally different from the Lightning Network.

Liquid Network cannot work without third-party. You can exchange BTC to L-BTC on your own, but you won't be able to convert it back without Liquid Federation member's help. Liquid Network transactions are not instantaneous. Every minute, a new block is generated by one of the Functionaries and signed by the majority of other Functionaries. Functionaries are selected among the members of the Liquid Federation.
 
The Lightning Network on the other hand, does not suffer from many of the Liquid Network's problems. All you need to open and close a channel is a simple on-chain transaction. Funds are held in a 2-of-2 multisig address unlike Liquid Network where funds are stored in a 11-of-15 multisig address controlled by Liquid Network's Watchmen. The number of required confirmations before a channel becomes active is fully customizable while Liquid Network requires 102 confirmations before L-BTC is credited.

As for the Lightning transactions, HTLCs are used for trustless payment settlement. Every time a balance of the channel is updated, a new commitment transaction is signed to ensure that the current channel balance can be enforced on-chain. When that happens, sub-satoshi values are rounded down and outputs below the dust limit are added to the transaction fee. As of right now, subsatoshis are negligible values, which in my opinion can be discarded. It won't be a problem anymore if some day there is a hard-fork changing the maximum number of decimal places.

I think there are only two situations when some trust is involved. The first one is when you have milisatoshis and you really care about them. As long as the channel is open, you can spend them. The other one is when your node goes offline for some reason which means that the other party can broadcast an old commitment transaction. You can freely set the amount of time which the other party must wait before the transaction can be included in a block after it was broadcast. Most nodes will accept timelocks up to 2046 blocks (~2 weeks), so it shouldn't be really a problem. I could mention watchtowers here, but they are obviously a third-party.

Having said all of that, I believe that the Lightning Network cannot be called a third-party off-chain system, especially if you compare it to Liquid Network.


I don't recall ever seeing such a thread. That could be one of the reasons why it is not in this section. A separate board for second layer software would be probably the best solution.

No comment, i don't know much technical detail of Liquid Network.


If Coinbase gives access to the user's bitcoin private keys and open-sourcing their software or share full protocol specification, i don't mind such topic.
For example, how Coinbase make batch transaction and implement queue user's outoing transaction might be interesting discussion.


Someone might answer such question. But if you actually mean "Should " (rather than "Will"), it depends whether the question also can be applied to Bitcoin on LN.

Besides, there are many thread which mainly not about Bitcoin, but still on "Development & Technical Discussion" board. Some examples from current first page,

• How to create your own Cryptocurrency?
• Ways to accelerate 256-bit arithmetic with 64-bit ops?
• Is there secp25k1 for the cuda api on C ++?
• Playing cards with ECDSA and HD wallets
• How many of you check the code of open source software?
• PSA: Coders making ad hoc “random” schemes are like kids playing with matches.

Looks like term "third party" have different meaning to us.

I don't think that Lightning Network for Bitcoin should be in altcoins section but maybe we need to have new section for this and not use Development & Technical Discussion .

Anyway, did anyone noticed that number of active Bitcoin Lightning Nodes jumped over 10,400 and that is almost double than in same time last year, and I think it's just getting started.


https://bitcoinvisuals.com/ln-nodes

If people abandoned Core Wallets in favour of other forms of wallets for their bitcoins (such as gee, I dunno... a Lightning Wallet for example) then would that mean consensus has been reached and the LN is actually how bitcoin evolved?

Core is not the only type of bitcoin wallet out there.

Then what in your opinion is the difference
between Lightning Network and Liquid Network?

Why is the Liquid network FAQ topic not included?

Plus if Coinbase gives access to the user's bitcoin private keys, does that not invalidate your argument about control over bitcoin,
and thusly now elevate Coinbase offchain system to a required topic in this forum.

Will questions regarding Litecoin/LN now also be answered in these topics, since LN also supports litecoin?

LN & Liquid may use segwit / locking features of bitcoin program code, but their own code development is separate ,
therefore, I have no choice but to consider them 3rd party.



Sorry, all I got from your posts , were you are not an expert.

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To avoid derailing this topic, I will make no further posts about this,
I am looking forward to ETFBitcoin response to the above questions.
JayJuanGee , if you have more blah, don't waste it on a post, just pm me and we'll see if communication is even possible.
Although blah is not a language , I am fluent in.