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Comment by ozmbie | Hacker News Reader

>1. It cannot meet demand, so folks are recreating existing point to point financial networks and then using the chain in the event of reconciliation. These define a new topology as surely as credit card companies redefined the topology of modern digital economies.

Are you talking about the Lightning Network?

While it has a different topology and its own limitations, I wouldn't call it a replication of existing systems. It's an extension of the blockchain transaction concept more than anything.

Users can still make trustless payments without relying on a third party. The routing nodes do not require trust due to the hash time locked contract system.

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> Users can still make trustless payments without relying on a third party.

You need to establish each tunnel on chain, as I read it, this requires a commit to the block. So any time you want to open a payment to a 3rd party you need a btc chain transaction. I'm happy to be wrong here, but that's how I read it, and if so then that's not really gonna fix the problem at all; it's just going to make more not-actually-decentralized services.

Maybe it's an okay thing to imagine a world where there is a primary chain for major institutions and then brokers on this chain using lightning. But I gotta confess I was sorta signing up for something more revolutionary than "disrupting visa with a new visa."

Lightning network payments can be routed through other users/nodes. So you only need one "on chain" transaction to then be able to send those funds back and forth to any other user in the network.

eg: Alice opens a channel with Bob. Charlie opens a channel with Bob. Alice can send payments to Charlie by having them routed through Bob (in a trustless way using Hashed Timelock Contracts).

There are valid concerns around what the topology looks like and how efficient it is to find optimal routes through a large network. These are the problems the developers are working on though.

"Just put your life savings on chain and we'll solve the traveling salesman problem?"

Or am I misunderstanding?

Haha. Well that's why the amounts of money people are putting in the network right now are very small. It's certainly not something anyone recommends using for large payments, at least yet.

I think many people envision it something like an account balance you top up as you need to.

None of this should have much of anything to do with investments. I don't "invest" in crypto in the same way that I don't "invest" in the Euro, or even in the US dollar.

I put the vast majority of my money in the stock market. And I have some money in other currencies, centralized services like venmo/paypal/ect, and yes, a bit in crypto. Currencies which I then use to spend on things.

The point of a currency, yes even cryptocurrencies, is to SPEND it, not hold it.

completely agree re your argument that the point of cryptocurrencies is to SPEND it. all the hodling isn't making cryptocurrency adoption easy. but also def a lot of work needed for solving scalability issues and making cryptocurrency spending more end-user friendly.

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