It's very annoying the Lightning Network conmen are trying to pretend LN while bitcoin has empty blocks vs bitcoin with full blocks that are uneconomical to use would look anything remotely similar to one another. It's a testnet and they're launching spam channels everywhere that have pocket change in each one and try to pretend each 'line' represents 'decentralization'. In the real world, the way it's designed incentivizes you to put all your money in a single channel connected directly to a well-connected bank, so the exact opposite of how they try to trick people and portray it as.
The testnet lines are meaningless, only incentives matter. Empty channels that nothing flows through is not a valid measurement of anything, just a visual trick. The real measurement of LN decentralization is basically what % of a user's net worth is all in the same channel and how few channels would actually be moving all the volume in the real world. For example, do you think someone is going to have 20% of their net worth in a channel connected to the grocery store then 5% to the pet store, yada yada? Hell no. They're not going to pay money to open all these channels and then for no reason split all their money up into non-fungible pools that can't be combined to spend on larger purchases.
How the fuck would you mobilize your cash to invest in anything if you constantly have to keep it in 100 different channels too? It's not feasible for savers, spenders, for anyone really. The only way it works at all in a non-clown car manner is having all your money in a single channel connected directly to a bank. So in other words, LN is completely worthless and is identical to the current banking system.
Roach, despite distracting and less than admirable personal qualities, you get some things right.
When I first looked into Lightning Network, I was thoroughly underwhelmed. Nothing has happened to change my mind.
LN is a kludge.
Yea, I don't really understand how claims by the Lightning Network have fooled so many people thus far. It's not possible for it to function in the real world as anything except the hub and spoke model abomination that I described above identical to the current banking system. Anyone who's been around bitcoin for a while and actually talks to all the players in the scene would remember back in LN's formative stage, people were actually using phrases like "yea, we're going to attempt to scale bitcoin in a manner similar to the way current banks scale". Well, congratulations, you have created....an exact replica of existing banks.
I'm not even joking. The people working on it were using that exact terminology. So why would it be surprising the end result is awful with all the same negatives? Each LN hub/node would be required by law to do AML/KYC on transactions too, and each one would have giant blacklists of people they refuse to process transactions for which cannot be overcome with non-fungible tokens. The whole thing is a nightmare. The same people that ban your Twitter account for making a pro-Trump post will just literally turn off your money with blacklists so it can't be spent. All money will flow through the same small amount of mega-hubs run by the banks too.
A lot of people are anti-Mike Hearn. I don't know anything about him personally to make a call one way or another, but he was probably the first noteworthy person anyone knows about to make a case that if bitcoin relies on LN to scale, it will be a failure due to only being able to function in a hub and spoke configuration. Regardless of whether you like him or not, I would say he's correct. So where do people go from here? If on-chain scaling is useless, and LN is useless, how is bitcoin useful for anything if all it is and has the capacity for is a centralized, intrabank settlement system inferior to gold as Hal Finney predicted would be it's only use case or fate.
