Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 45. (Read 33677 times)

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.  

You seem to be arguing the exact opposite of what you are proclaiming to want to achieve in your labelling the decision regarding what is separate from bitcoin and what is connected to bitcoin as politics rather than logic.

In that respect, to cause separate sections for bitcoin related projects by proclaiming them NOT sufficiently connected to bitcoin (on chain blah blah blah) would seem to be a political decision rather than a logical one.. for some of the reasons that have already been asserted in responses from ETFbitcoin and mine.

Because this thread actually about LN for Bitcoin (although LN support many cryptocurrency) and some parts of LN directly involve Bitcoin network (such as HTLC script used to open and close channel).


While Lightning Network is off-chain system, IMO it can't be categorized as 3rd party since it's possible user have control over their Bitcoin.

Just for a laugh I sent 500,000 sats via LN from my Eclair (mobile phone) wallet to the Phoenix (Tablet) wallet in one TX costing 51 sats.  The original 1,000,000 on chain TX cost ~7,250 sats so it's a stark contrast in TX fees for on-chain Vs off chain.  (I haven't tweeked any TX request fees on either device).

As we supposed, a new channel was created in under two minutes with an outbound figure of 499,000 sats (1,000 sat fee to open a new channel) and an inbound component of ~ 239,000 sats.

So...

I have 1,501,000 sats OUTBOUND capacity in my Phoenix Wallet with three channels open and ~ 455,000 sats INBOUND capacity combined.

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Now all I have to do is find venues around Brisbane that accept BTC either on or off chain and test out transactions in a real world setting which is something I've been meaning to do for quite a long time now.

You have a valid point, any discussions related to 3rd party offchain systems should be in a separate topic.

Lightning Network & Liquid, and any other offchain systems should not be considered as bitcoin, IMO.
Just as any Exchange's separate offchain database is excluded from discussion here , so too should other 3rd party offchain networks.
They should have their own separate topics to avoid confusion,
but as you mentioned earlier, Politics does seem to be determining the outcomes here instead of logic.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert in terms of what is a shitcoin and what is not (and even worse when it comes to overviewing what topics go in which sections of the forum), but on the idea of whether lightning network is a shitcoin, that seems so 2017/2018 or perhaps there might have been some recent valid assertions that did not get significantly and sufficiently rebutted in recent times.

Anyhow, it seems to me that even if there are some implementation difficulties with lightning over the past few years, through lightning network, there is no attempt to print some kind of token separate from bitcoin.. so merely attempting to improve bitcoin's liquidity through second-layer solutions, such as lightning network does not even seem close to what various shitcoins (I think that you were referring to them as alts) are doing and have been doing..  

Shitcoins, such as ethereum and its various scam projects such as ICOs and DEFI (and cannot forget about the shitty NFT scams), the various bcashes and/or other shitcoins with their own blocks are not generally building on bitcoin but attempting to build their own ecosystem that is separate from bitcoin but rides off of bitcoins security, good will and good name to scam or deceive people, even if some of them might some day either get absorbed into bitcoin or have some kind of useful complement to bitcoin that might end up serving on as a second layer.  

I cannot think of any shitcoin whether we are referring to any of the bcashes or their related projects or Ethereum or any shit built in connection with it whether ICOs, or the current shits of the day that are called DEFI and/or NFTs, that currently is even close to having some bitcoin complements that would thereby allow them to NOT be put in the alt coin section..

but I hardly even know what various altcoin (shitcoin) threads on the forum are because I generally avoid those kinds of various non-bitcoin topics on the forum (because I do not want to fill my head up with distracting bullshit and more nonsense than my head is already tending to be filled with) except I don't really mind bashing various shitcoins and non-bitcoin related projects, scams and issues when they come up in various bitcoin related threads and present themselves as if they are either similar to bitcoin or better than bitcoin or used as a vehicle to naysay bitcoin (suggesting that they cure some assumed bitcoin defects.. blah blah blah), when I am in the mood or have time for such bashenings towards such non-bitcoin projects that bleed into bitcoin threads on a fairly regular basis...  

Why isn't this thread in the altcoin section?  Can anyone make a shitcoin fork and tie it to Bitcoin's blockchain and be able to post wherever they want on the forum or is this something reserved only for the Core development team?

I'm just curious at the politics that are behind the lightning network getting an altcoin pass while it's supporters call other projects shitcoins...  What about this shitcoin has some Bitcoin supporters so willing to look the other way?  I'm genuinely curious. 

No. Any site I've seen uses the same exchange rate for on-chain Bitcoin and LN Bitcoin. Only fees are different, and that might include an additional cost for on-chain consolidation (I've seen a payment processor add 0.0002 BTC to the on-chain Bitcoin amount for this).