Hacker News Reader

Comment by marcinjachymiak | Hacker News Reader

Lightning does work. I've used it myself as have many others. You should really work on explaining what it is you actually mean by that statement instead.

Apparently they are using Lightning and a service LN Strike that recently launched.

https://twitter.com/starkness/status/1402635954653904902?s=2...

View on HN

LN requires an on-chain transaction for both opening and closing a channel and requires the node stays online 24/7 to receive payments. That's garbage.

Because Visa and other payment processors don't require opening an account? (e.g. a credit card, which is a much more involved process than opening a channel). Or 24 hour servers?

It's for sure a step backwards from regular cryptocurrency where ownership of private keys is enough to receive or spend. No servers, no "opening accounts" etc.

You can compete with Visa and other payment processors AND not have these arbitrary requirements through on-chain scaling and larger block sizes.

Lightning is not decentralised. You have up keep your node online 24/7 to prevent theft. Most people can't do that. So they will end up keeping their coins in the custody of nodes that run 24/7. Leading to centralisation. Lightning is just like a MySQL database extra steps.

You don't have to be on exactly 24/7. The default delay for spending coins from a commitment txn is 144 blocks in some clients and is usually scaled with channel size. Most clients let you configure it manually too.

That means you'd have to be online once within 24 hours of your counterparty trying to steal your channel balance to stop them. IMO this is pretty reasonable for a cellphone user.

It doesn't follow that this would lead to centralization of custody either. If you want to pay for better liveness you could pay someone to run a watchtower to watch your channels. Basically, it watches the blockchain for bad channel closes and posts the justice txn with the correct settlement for you in case it sees it. I'd be surprised if a service like LN_Strike didn't start using these.

https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/docs/wat...

According to Bitcoin maximalists 2mb blocks are too much for our infrastructure, and will hinder everyone from running their own node. But apparently keeping a node online 24 hours is not a big deal.

So all anyone one needs to do to steal your money is DDoS you?

I read that you put a "bounty" in your transaction so that if your node is offline, another node will have an incentive to prevent the theft for you.

Are there any videos of Lightning in action in the real world (I.e. not abstract explainers)? Genuine question, I don’t know enough about it and would love to learn.

3 transactions a second is 100m transactions per year. So everybody on the planet gets one transaction per 70 years. So everybody gets one transaction in their lifetime to open a channel to a lightning network provider and that's it.

You can do far more than 3 tx per second in mainchain. Look into channel factories. 100s of trustless lightning network channels in 1 onchain transaction. Layer approach is the only viable scaling solution.

With Lightning channel factories:

- 2 people can make 10,000,000 transactions between each other in seconds

- 10,000,000 people can make 2 transactions between each other in 46 days

Channel factories are not a solution to the user scaling problem.

How does it work? Don’t you still need O(n) bytes for the payload?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com