Topic: The Lightning Network FAQ - page 75. (Read 33287 times)

Many people keep their Bitcoin on exchanges. Top 100 Richest Bitcoin Addresses shows a few billion dollars worth of Bitcoin in cold storage owned by exchanges.
Once LN becomes mainstream, I can imagine the people who store their funds on exchanges, won't have any problem using the same exchange to make their payments. Currently thats not a viable option because withdrawal fees are much higher compared to using your own wallet.
I imagine a future in which exchanges keep a couple million dollar worth of Bitcoin in their LN hot wallet, and many people use the exchange to make their small payments without ever needing to fund a LN channel on their own.
Say: paying from exchange to VPS provider, paying from exchange to buy a coffee, or paying from exchange to fund a balance on website x. The exchange, VPS provider, and website x will run their own LN-node. The coffee bar will most likely use a large payment processor that runs their own LN-node.

There are already custodial LN wallets, but they still need to earn their trust. If a large exchange would provide their own convenient (mobile) wallet, I'd love to use it!

As long as it's optional, I'm totally fine with that! I want to be able to use Bitcoin for small transactions, and for small amounts I don't mind trusting someone.

Is it really Bitcoin in which you and only you are in full control of your private keys? No.
Do I care for small amounts as long as I can make small payments without paying several dollars in fees? Hell no!

Hahaha. That would be their greatest development as a Bitcoin service. But have you used Bitpay? It now markets for Bitcoin Cash. But in a subtle/naughty way.

Plus criticizing Lightning is OK, but saying gift cards are more superior is the dumbest way to criticize it.

You are confused between direct payment channels and the actual Lightning Network. Having such a network is the whole point of solving the direct payment channels issue you pointed out. You can learn more about the Lightning Network here.

To answer the question : using the Lightning network is viable if you expect to do more than 2 payments using it. You will in practice have to pay some additional on-chain transactions to reload your channels.

I think the OP means actual gift cards, like the ones you can buy at convenience stores, for Amazon, iTunes, etc.

Businesses selling those online are actually getting a lot of value from using LN because they can just send the card right away instead of having to wait for X confirmations.

There's no centralized entity since the funds are coming from an outsider to the company.

It's easy for a centralized entity to allow zero-fee transactions between users. Most online casinos and some exchanges allow customers to "tip" each other. They all have their own system, and it only works within their own website. That's great, assuming you trust the site.
But it's not what LN is about.

In most cases, they are instant and cost way less than on-chain transactions. However, there are many disadvantages such as not being able to receive payments right after opening a channel, payment routing failures and having to be online in order to prevent the other party from cheating. Don't expect to earn a lot of money on running a Lightning Network node right now.


BitPay does not accept Lightning Network payments. Introducing SegWit addresses and fixing their QR codes will be huge milestones for them.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbdPWjvnsOMyyce4oxRZWo2fmV9Dhg42p
Here's a channel worth subscribing to. @shinobi plans to push out quite a few more podcasts in the next ~week, covering lots of aspects of lightning now and way off in to the future.

I'm confused till after greeting multiple response till as fewer look like not accurate!! which is very much irritating for the small invest.   
If possible from anyone of you please clerify me with iconic point of Lightning Network payments.

And confirm me please is it accept BitPay?

I proposed it about 3 months ago and nothing has happened since then. A board dedicated to second layer solutions might help us not to abuse this topic and divide information into separate threads without having to worry that they will end up on the 20th page of this section. If you want to discuss it further, please reply in the previously mentioned topic.

I would be interested in a separate board for LN if possible (but as I saw somewhere there will be no separate board unless there will be enough activity in LN related threads, but there will not be enough activity until the LN topics are easy to find, so this is a bit like catch-22...)
I know there's a search function in the forum and there's google search, but a separate board is just really different...

I don't mind if someone posts anything LN related here from time to time. However, I might create a separate thread for that or you can do it yourself since this thread should be focused more on questions.


It would be possible. LND seems to have LookupInvoice command which returns a lot of information, including the requested value. You can also try this invoice decoder.

I would say "no, Dev & Tech is the wrong board". But I'm not moderating this thread



that makes zero sense

It would make sense if you were to compare Litecoin's LN with Bitcoin's LN. Litecoin's LN is smaller. That would make sense.

Can I use this thread to post an actual service that accepts LN as payment? I funded my LN-wallet again just to support this initiative: a $1 VPS server (HDD))! It's small and no doubt slow, and I LOVE that they accept LN. Contrary to on-chain Bitcoin, LN is designed for this.

If there are more real services that accept LN payment, I'd like to see them posted here. BitCryptex, are you okay with that?

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I still have high hopes for LN: despite it being very small compared to many altcoins, there are already a couple dozen different wallets. My guess is they all want to be one of the first, so they have early adopter advantage once LN gets really big.

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@BitCryptex: you mentioned running a node before, so I got an idea: would it be possible to use Linux command line to check payment requests before paying? I'd like to set up a promotional node that pays all LN requests posted anywhere on Bitcointalk as long as they're under a certain (low) value. I already scrape the posts, so I can get all requests within seconds. If I can pull this off with a node, I think I can get all requests paid within 10 seconds after posting.

I believe the only reason why hackers haven't started looking for vulnerabilities in Lightning is because the rewards might be too small for the effort.

Its success, if it becomes a success with billions passing around in the network, will also make it a target in my opinion.

Lol
The fact that the loss of funds "could happen" but hasn't happened yet is more surprising

Yesterday, Andreas Antonopoulos announced on his YouTube account that "Mastering the Lightning Network" is going to be released next year! It will be possible to contribute on Github to the book and proofread it before it is released. The work on it will start in the middle of September.

correct, except making the lightning/bitcoin daemon more favorable is not what you want to keep the raspi stable

Isn't it exactly the opposite? I looked up this command on a few websites and they said that setting it to -20 makes the process the most favorable. Thanks for your suggestion. I have already contacted Zand_ and we might give it a shot along with neutrino.

Thank you guys, that was really helpful!
Now I'll start reading about the changes in LND and I'll try to upgrade my Raspberry to the latest release
(Or I'll start from scratch, maybe it's better)
So at first I don't mind if it will slow down from time to time but if it will happen frequently I know now where to find a nice solution for the problem

try giving bitcoind (and your lightning daemon) a positive nice number, e.g.


this tells the linux kernel to de-prioritize CPU cycles that would otherwise be scheduled for a given process. All userland processes have an implicit nice value of zero, which means there's a FIFO style dynamic in the way they are served by the CPU. The range of valid nice values is from 19 (maximally nice) to -20 (not at all nice). htop tells you what nice value is assigned, possibly top will too

this should help to smooth out resource usage on a raspi


another angle is to boot directly from an SSD (and put your swapfile on the SSD also). This might only work on rasPi 3's, cannot remember specifically. The /boot partition can stay on your microSD, as it's not performance contingent, and likely read-only too. You just need to tell the config files in /boot to start the init process from /dev/sda (or whatever device your SSD system disk is)