It's possible to dislike Bitcoin for its waste of its energy, centralization one step removed or economic policy without being "the guy who bought at the top".
citation needed
> If my goal is X, then this what my goal is
does this not strike you as circular? :)
one of my goals is to visit nepal. tell me how is that objective?
It is the most outlandishly, ridiculously wasteful that humanity has ever produced. There is nothing in the history of mankind that comes even close to this level of utterly deranged waste.
Actually it's even less than that in practice. It really is that shit.
As it exists, it does not work beyond the toy levels of usage it is seeing today.
Routing in the Lightning network is an open problem in computer science, one that nobody know how to solve. Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries. And how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through.
if you're trying to say that routing in lightning is an instance of traveling salesman, you're not only wrong - routing is actually shortest path problem, but even if you were right, your statement that TSP somehow makes the system unworkable is simply false in light of the fact that businesses like USPS and DHL and countless more delivery companies exist and are profitable.
> Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries
by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries.
> how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through
yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.
if you say something is impossible to figure out - you need to back up that claim with something, anything.
what if i told you, you were lied to by skeptics and scammers, trying to sell their shitcoins, and you need to put away your biases for just a minute and invest a little time to see, if what they were saying is actually true?
I am not. I am saying we don't have the map that we need to solved the shortest path problem, and we have no way to get that map.
> by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries
And we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.
> yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.
No, there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.
of course we do, connectivity graph and updates to it are gossiped all the time and each node has imperfect representation of it.
> we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.
we do, lightning nodes do that all the time right now.
> there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.
again, you're making a statement without backing it up by anything.
your entire argument boils down to: if a node can't have perfect information about connectivity graph, then it can't perfectly route payments.
and you're right, that statement is true, but it is irrelevant because imperfect routing through imperfect connectivity graph is fine and works great.
Yes, that is exactly the part that does not scale beyond a toy network, and for which there is no solution.
maintaining imperfect and incomplete connectivity graph - much less hard.
be careful, maybe you're invested into something that becomes irrelevant if LN works, in which case you might want to be less rigid in your thinking and follow the developments more closely to pull out or risk losing your investment. because LN already works: tens of thousands of nodes and channels, millions of dollars in the network and growing at healthy rates.
Thus, it doesn't scale.
you're wrong for two reasons:
- hubs do exist (big and small) and can exchange connectivity information more efficiently (and take fees for that service), so the network isn't growing like a full mesh (that is indeed very hard to maintain connectivity graph of) but rather as a collection of interconnected smaller meshes
- payments can be split up into smaller chunks that follow different paths and are executed atomically (either all or none), and if some chunks fail you can retry them within the same payment context
right, there will definitely be huge hubs. what you didn't even try to demonstrate is why can't there be smaller hubs?
> it just progressively works worse and worse. Doing multiple routes atomically just gives you more reasons a single payment can fail.
no, exactly the opposite is true. in case with single payment for X satoshi you need to re-try it multiple times until you find a route that has X capacity on every hop. with atomic multipath payments you need to find N routes that support X/N capacity (much easier) and if any number of those fail you can retry only those failed parts, so after 2-3 iterations your entire payment succeeds.
Maybe you are right that I do not know enough about the Lightning network, because I was not aware there was a vulnerability that big and easy to exploit built into it.
p.s. i'm sure you can google about DoS attacks on lightning and how to deal with them yourself