Topic: Will the Lightning Network Solve ALL Scalability Issues? - page 3. (Read 1308 times)

Guess ppl  dont like be be 'forced' out of Bitcoin as the best thing ever happend to electronic payments and cash. Further proven is that Bitcoin cannot be altered in legal and tech terms or it is sth different ( see copyright and just legal prospecting of financial products ...)

LN in terms of netting systems are already here, no need to change Bitcoin's basic protocol for. Ryan X Charls and Clemens Ley mad LN work on BTC - way before Segwit or any other rubbish was sold to the herd. Capacity is no issue in e world, and the fake talk with decentraliziation already debunked

theres actually alot.
but it comes under many many buzzwords.
elthree
factories
hubs
gateways
custodian services

in most cases you got to imagine it as you depositing funds into a manager and the manager just sets up a non-broadcastable channel set under them
(current buzzwords 'micropayment channel' as oppose to 'payment channel' (micro denominated in msat))

which requires the manager to control if/when//why users should be allowed to completely exit LN and retrieve some real bitcoin utxo via a separate commitment in control of the manager

bitcoins structure is simple. you get paid when its confirmed. anything else should not be treated as a payment until confirmed and immutable. thats the security and the whole beauty of what makes bitcoin and blockchains and crypto such a unique and trusted system

however
inside LN
"get the right to settle in the blockchain" = commitment..
these commitments however have conditions(if statements) thus not the same as legacy/native bitcoin system

but so many obsess about commitments and pretend its like a guarantee. and a security that people will always get paid..
with the fluff that these yet unconfirmed commitments are as secure as a confirmed bitcoin transaction

reality is people are not guaranteed. and there is no security of always getting paid.
definitely not while unconfirmed and in many cases not even after confirmation(IF conditions attached)

there are many many bugs and flaws that break the ability to claim whats owed.

note: commitments are separate from the HTLC/invoice messages in ln
its like a commitment is a signed cheque of ajoint bank account. and an HTLC/invoice is a post-it note IOU between users in LN.. handed around the routes of users

i know people are going to obsess and want to distract people with the commitments and avoid with their very harsh insults that people should only think and discuss commitments.. but,. take a breath and start thinking about the real inside LN stuff.. beyond the commitments

commitments are sent onchain to settle
HTLC'offers'/'invoices' (the inside LN messages looping around the network) are not sent onchain

there is alot of stuff happening between commitment updates. there are also alot of issues around the bugs and flaws of not getting the "secret" of a hash160(secret) commitment outputs 'if condition'.

so even if someone was to form a commitment and broadcast it. they are not able to claim all thats owed unless they have the "secret" and they only get the secret AFTER all the inside LN flimsy htlc/invoice stuff is complete

many users AND DEVS have lost funds this way. many malicious users playing around outside the flimsy non audited rules, abuse the system to ensure they get an advantage

..
if alice-bob-charlie-dave-eric were on a route

and alice wanted to pay eric. where alice has NO COMMITMENT with eric.
its not a system where alice only talks to bob. via commitments
alice sends messages to eric and eric provides messages back to alice with a millisats  value and hash(hash160(secret) accepting the offer
alice then and only then talks to bob. and starts the gossip/path finding through the channels to get through charlie dave  to get to eric where then and only then the commitments are created with the hash160 added output 'IF condition'

but in all this part described above. has bob charlie or dave got the secret?? NO.
 and alot can go wrong
however bob-charle-dave have locked value toward their own outbound counterparty unable to be spend on other things..  and also dont have the secret to spend the promised inbound funds
thus unable to spend it themselves and the other party unable to claim it

again lots can go wrong here
even broadcasting the current commitment wont help as they dont have the secret to claim

its a known fact that lots can go wrong here. its not just the low success rate of "payment success" issues

these locks are not measured in milliseconds. but have lengthy timeouts.
these lengthy timeouts are to allow users to accept and help out or reject

during these lengthy timeouts of initial offer...  alice can reject/abstain/not respond to the bob-charlie-dave route to eric

and instead use zoe-yenson-xena to get to eric and leave bob-charlie-dave waiting with locked value they cant spend of their own commitment forward(outbound) nor claim funds owed/promised to them(inbound)

because they are left waiting for the other LN messages that are not commitments.

so please understand there is alot more happening in LN then just the commitments. and alot that can break/delay/make unclaimable those commitments.
so please understand the other "layers" of LN outside the over promised and utopian dreams of commitment guarantee

THIS is exciting. Do you have any documentation you can share?

One of the biggest issues I have found with LN is the issue with locking funds up in a channel. I always thought this would be the main issue for many users. I am glad to see the LN devs are looking to improve on this model!!

While it's true that the on-chain transaction has lots of advantages over LN, I simply don't understand why some people hate LN so fervously, being the alternative a completely centralized payment processor (e.g. Bitcoin prepaid card issuers, custodial wallets), who can always run away with your money. There may be protections in certain countries if the centralized operator has a bank license, but this does't apply to many of the jurisdictions where most of the unbanked live, who could enormously benefit from BTC.

The new counterparties that are added in LN do have this advantage only in very specific circumstances, mostly if the blockchain is too full and the malicious actors got connected to too many channels. The other risks (cyberattacks etc.) are also present in the no-LN structure with centralized payment processors.

It is simply terribly inefficient and not necessary if you store all transactions in a ledger shared by _all_ full nodes.

For medium to large payments however I like the sidechain structure (as I wrote above), just because it shares some of the advantages of on-chain transactions. But there seem to be big challenges regarding the two-way-peg. Maybe however an one-way peg (via proof-of-burn) could do the trick too. The challenge however here seems to be to guarantee enough security and demand to maintain the peg.

@franky1: The HTLCs being formatted in millisats may be implementation details, the important thing however is that you always get the right (by the off-chain transactions sent to you by your counterparties) to settle on the blockchain with the correct value rounded to satoshi, with a pure Bitcoin transaction. If that's not the case, then please provide me further proof.

The lightning network may not solve the scalability problem faced in the Bitcoin network entirely but it will further help to solve high liquidity. If the lightning network is fully implemented, then Bitcoin will become a full flesh currency rather than just being a store of value as many have speculated bitcoin to be.

Even knowing that op started this thread to shill a centralized random shitcoin (xrp), which definitely will NOT solve all scalability issues, I feel almost forced to clear some things up.


Lightning is NOT a solution for big payments
Bitcoin is already able to handle this. You can send Bitcoins worth millions for a very small fee already, so there is no need to find another solution. Lightning fees are measured by the amount you send and not the tx size. Most big payments will be cheaper on the btc mainchain. Discussions about how big payments can be send over lightning are a non issue.


Lightning is a solution for small payments
You can buy a coffee and a piece of cake with lightning and pay a very low fee. You can tip people a few satoshis and pay a very low fee. That's what lightning is good at.

There is NO need for everybody to open channels
You can use a lightning wallet like Breez for example, which gives you inbound liquidity up to 0.04 BTC (4 million satoshis) and you can accept lightning payments instantly without caring about opening channels. You can use @lntxbot on Telegram to send and receive satoshis to/from everybody else on telegram. No need to open channels for this. There are more solutions like that. Find out for yourself

Payments within the lightning network are not countable from the outside
There is no open ledger, which counts the payments made on lightning. Only node operators can count how many paments they are routing on their own node. They don't know what's exactly happening on other nodes. This makes lightning payments practically anonymous, which is a nice side effect. When people start to crunch numbers on how many payments the lightning network is able to handle, forget about them. They don't know because they can't!

Buddy, transactions included into blocks can't handle the entire world for global adoption whether they extended the block size or not. (Even if the block generation happened every 10 seconds with size > 10GB, which has other downsides)

You have to tackle the problem from its root and it's been solved with LN; it makes Bitcoin operate more practically. Think about it. If I wanted to make purchases, buy coffee/food, electronic goods, other services etc, I'd have to make multiple transactions whereas they should be included into thousands of computers' disk. But, with LN the thing changes completely. We no longer broadcast our debts; we agree upon a final balance on our own ledger and once we're out of capacity we can send it to be confirmed in the main ledger. (And then we can increase our capacity and repeat again)

And the best part: The system works and my money aren't controlled by a third party! I have 100% ownership of my funds. It's genius.

LN devs crippled bitcoins onchain capacity/utility to promote users to move over to LN before LN was a proper beta working project

EG at the moment a blocks can only hold so many open and close sessions
so imagine people having 4 channels and locks for about 1 month(standard predictable spending plan)
4 close previous sessions 4 open new session. that 8 transactions per user per month.
(1.6kb)
so for now thats call that 1000 users per block
well over 4032 blocks(a month) thats only 4million users efectively able to open and close sessions per month.
but here is the thing
it only works as upto 4 million users of LN if:
no other transactions are allowed(no legacy transactions. no exchange reserves rebatching)
everyone timed their close-reopen sessions precisely not to bottleneck with others
they intend to spend more times within LN than 8 times onchain

EG if your an ebayer that only uses paypal 2 times a month. where your offered paypal to ebay fee's of 1c
but it costs you $16 just to get to use paypal membership each month just to get the privilege of 1c fee.
but you could just buy something on ebay direct with your bank card for $2 each($4 total)
it then makes using paypal less of an incentive

LN is not a solution for everyone its a niche market separate network for spammer(multiple spenders)

the bitcoin devs made onchain transaction fee's increase. removed any rational fee formulae mechanism of fairness and just promoted everyone should use LN even if they are not a frequent user. and even when using LN there is a silly ignorance// because not all channels/route will work all the time.

its like they tried to run before they could even get out the womb

the IN LN payments are not using bitcoin scripts. your talking about the latter end session commitments. not the in channel payments known as HTLC

HTLC are measured in millisats and not formatted to be broadcast/accepted by the bitcoin network

its these very same HTLC that are not bitcoin formats that allow for custodials(elthree) to 'print' their own channel balance and manage customers. as its the manager/custodian that then when end sessions are needed aggregate the HTLC's into a commitment they sign to then allow onchain withdrawals. otherwise users could also just request the aggregated funds held within the custodian be reused to open new sessions without needing to touch the blockchain

once you separate the idea of the open/close onchain transactions. from the inside LN htlc payments. you start to see how millisats are not actually bitcoin

oh and one last tip...
lightning is not subservient, not solely functional to bitcoin. many LN apps alow utility with many other altcoins too.

in short LN is nor forced to play by bitcoin rules. because htlc's are not network wide audited

I am not sure what you would exactly expect from an Electrum-like Lightning wallet, but actually, Electrum has introduced support for the Lightning Network in the 4.x update. I even wrote a step-by-step guide. In short, a user can easily open a channel with any Lightning Network node. The only caveat is that the user has to either set up a watchtower or launch their wallet every few days to check if the other party did not broadcast an outdated state of the channel.

There are even more user-friendly wallets out there but most of them are custodial, for example, BlueWallet which takes care of the channel management so that users don't have to worry about incoming/outbound liquidity.

Bits.  Even illiterate peasants understand 2 bits.  Been saying for 8 or 9 years it’s going to bits.  :/

---

BSV thread got deleted?  Wow.  Anyway, dude, you’re over 1000 merits now and still not legendary.  Odd. 


[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

I agree the whole millisat thing is unnecessarily complicating.

I'll tell you what would really be handy is an Electrum-type wallet for Lightning. You can't expect everybody who wants to participate to run their own node. I'd also be more inclined to use Liquid if exchanges other than Bitfinex supported it. Liquid and Lightning support - along with feeless conversions - should be standard for all major BTC exchanges.


Megaupload is quite centralized. You must have him confused with the Pirate Bay people. But then again your bar for decentralization is quite low, so maybe not.

Kim dot Con - the man of decentralized content - against all rules. Sure he knows his shit / tech -to make it run big

but wont get adopted AGAINST the bigger consensus of regulation

https://twitter.com/KimDotcom/status/1408576877216681986

And Satoshi made pure Bitcoin - that scales onchain (not crippled BTC or BCH)

and yes - there was no block / capacity limit from the very beginning. Satoshi got talked into by first Bitcoin-FUD ever

https://twitter.com/wisewizzz/status/1409243183888932866

In BitCoin you can send P2P trx via simple bitcoin layer having only group of miners your counterparty, nearly not visible, no care as long fees are lowest (don't care) and miners have game theory = economic driver to process your trx. Makes BitCoin cash and a bearer instrument

LN is just totally different. Another layer (design, hardware, software, interface, cyber risk...), new counterparty structure, different economics/ game theo, and legal structure as a true payment processor that needs licensing- and its not P2P cash. Selling such as Bitcoin - the P2P electronic cash system sold by the White Paper of Satoshi is just consumer fraud imo

Debunking of such might just ve started here  https://decrypt.co/73845/el-salvadors-u-s-bitcoin-partner-lacks-key-licenses

Perhaps you are thinking of the "Silver Certificates" as the "Gold Certificates" were no longer pegged to gold in the 1930's (and, as it happens, the Silver Certificates were not issued after the late 1950's as the modern smaller size notes were introduced circa 1963).

Both Gold and Silver certificates were issued from 1863 on-wards.

LN (or better: payment channels) is a mechanism to bundle several (potentially thousands of) Bitcoin transactions together. If something goes wrong while you're transacting offchain, you can always settle on-chain. And you're always using Bitcoin Script contracts, the pure Bitcoin protocol.

Liquid is very different from LN, as it requires trust in a federation. Once you use the sidechain buying the token, you can't rely on the protocol exclusively to be sure to get back your coins. In LN, in contrast, you can - as long as you observe your channels to be ready to close them (or let them observe by watchtowers).

So you're mixing apples and oranges.

The only issue I agree a little bit with you is that I am a bit concerned about the probabilistic methods that are planned to subdivide satoshis into millisats. The decision to use millisats is based on a megalomaniac conception of Bitcoin's future -- as if the satoshi could be worth 1$ eventually or so (the maximum Bitcoin price I can imagine is the equivalent of around 1 million USD, this would result in a 1 cent satoshi), or if it could make sense to do nanotransactions worth 0.001 cent (why, why would you use Bitcoin for that? And for what purpose?). This part of the design is making LN sort of "impure", because obviously millisat differences can't be represented adequately on-chain. But as long as you transact only values measured in satoshi, you're using pure Bitcoin, only bundled together.

And it should be possible without problems to build an implementation of LN that doesn't support millisat.

I would say that Lightning Network is one good solution to deal with the scalability issues, but it does not seem that all scalability issues can be taken care of by the lightning network.

1900-1970 bank notes were not actually gold. but paper pegged to gold
alternate networks like liquid and LN are not bitcoin. they are tokens pegged to bitcoin

a millisat htlc on LN is not a bitcoin transaction that can be broadcast.
bitcoin does not understand 12 decimals.
bitcoin is measuured in satoshi's which are multplied by 100m to make the basket term btc
millisats are 12 decimals of a btc. thus they are not convertable at raw transaction value level

so LN is not increasing bitcoin capacity.
its getting people to vault up their gold so they can play around with bank notes.
once you make the distinction of the different tokens (sats vs millisats)
and you understand bitcoin has know understanding of millisats. it becomes clear. that its not scaling bitcoin.
but converting bitcoiners to another token

LN is not even a feature unique to bitcoin, solely for bitcoin. and created to only wiork with bitcoin.
LN cant even use the same pegged token unit as bitcoin.

LN is a separate gateway for multiple coins to utilise.
meaning what will play out is bitcoin locked into factory.. users play with millisats. then "atomic swap" to a cheaper fee altcoin like LTC, giving the atomic swapper the bitcoin unlock ability.
or
people will vault up the btc into factories. and never exit LN unless through a exchage that converts to dollar. meaning the factory again keeps the btc

its how banks done it in the last century.. with the pretend 'bank notes are gold so no need to convert back' lie

I don't know in how far the lighting network itself can scale or whether it has to be improved over time as well. Is it able to infinitely scale for all kinds of micro transactions? Right now there are a couple of networks that do an amazing job at transaction throughput and very low fees. I am not sure if it is a given that the lightning network will outcompete all of those no questions asked.

Does somebody know where the technical limits of the lightning network are? I know it is a centralized mechanism, making it more dangerous to be used for larger transactions, but purely from a scalability perspective, does it scale infinitely?