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Comment by gaetanrickter | Hacker News Reader

Good and hopefully they'll be cleaned out so we can have decent investments in quality cryptocurrency startups.

Smash cut to a barren wasteland with no one and nothing left. Maybe cryptocurrency has a bright future, but I’m skeptical that any of the extent ones fit that bill. PoW is obscene, Lightning impractical, and it may just be that the whole thing is fatally flawed.

How is Lightning impractical? I encourage you to try it out on testnet right now, it works great. It also solves your PoW concerns.

...By requiring you to keep your computer up 24/7, no?

And keys in memory, which increases the attack surface - especially noteworthy with the intel bugs.

Not really true. You can offload monitoring blockchain to "watchers" (privately), and if you have a pay-only wallet you don't have to watch for anything anyway.

On top of that LN is very practical for heaviest blockchain users, that do run full node 24/7 anyway.

That sounds like a semantic distinction; a computer working for you has to watch the network 24/7. Besides, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Hiring a watcher sounds tricky if you want it to be really trustless, it sounds cumbersome, and frankly I can’t find any good info on how it works.

Sounds like a bank or venmo type service...

AFAIK it can be done anonymously, for a tiny price and a bit bigger bounty (if found). Since the state of the channel is private, watcher has no information about anything anyway. On top of it - it's only a secondary defense. Your wallet still can do the monitoring by themselves and other party can't know that you dissapeared from the internet and won't appear in next 24 hours in advance. Other party risks reputation and their own funds if they get caught by you or your watcher(s). Because of that attacks like that are very infeasible.

> How is Lightning impractical?

Like any crypto currency, the numbers in computers are worth whatever people believe they’re worth. So when enough people believe said numbers are worth zero, then the currency will be worth 0. Some may say the same is true for fiat, however the difference with fiat is most national currencies are backed by the might of military force to convince or coerce people into believing the value is > 0.

https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/mathematical-proof-that-...

http://www.coppolacomment.com/2018/01/probability-for-geeks....

http://www.coppolacomment.com/2018/01/lightning-and-fat-cont...

Your first link has refuting or critical comments from such notables as Vitalik Buterin and Brahm Cohen. In case anyone wanted a tl;dr to actually reading and evaluating that 15 minute logical fallacy of a read. And the other ones just reference the first link.

Care to explain the fallacy to people not well versed with those names you've thrown around?

Your appeal to celebrity icons does nothing to address the inherent problems with the lightening networks design.

Maybe you can explain the solution to the problems highlighted?

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