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Comment by fighterpilot | Hacker News Reader

Do we know why they're not doing it off-chain, similar to the way a crypto exchange will transfer crypto from one user to another off-chain?

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Lightning network is "off-chain". Basically a network of 2-of-2 locked bitcoins called _channels_ that exchange valid Bitcoin transactions to update the balances within these channels, but only need to settle them by broadcasting them to the Bitcoin network in case of disputes.

I don’t know the specifics of this, but:

Because they don’t need to. My guess is that you just associate a lightning address with your username, and all Twitter does is present that to a wallet. This way twitter doesn’t need to do KYC, or ever hold any funds. They’re just the phone book.

I'm guessing they also don't want to. If they took custody of the Bitcoin, I believe that would make them a MSB, and hence get to do all of the "fun" associated with that. Also, the additional security and financial implications of holding money for their users.

LN doesn't have addresses, it has invoices that can't be reused.

Exactly. LN is like opening a "tab" in a bar. You ultimately settle on the chain, just like how you settle the final tab on your credit card.

LN is an unnecessary solution to a made up problem. Other cryptos have proved that much much more transactions can be easily processed by merely increasing the blocksize.

Increasing the blocksize makes running a node much more expensive (due to storage, mainly) which in turn makes the network less decentralised. Bitcoin (rightly) selects for decentralisation over transaction speed, hence LN as an L2...

Bitcoin blockchain size: 350 gb

12tb harddrive: $199.

Bitcoin blockchain is increasing at less than 100gb per year. The storage cost of 100gb is about $1.6

I'm sure people running nodes can spend more than 1.6 a year to store a bigger chain.

Thank you for doing the math.

As someone who runs a full node, this is not accurate at all. Space is cheap, bandwidth is expensive. I frequently upload > 1TB a month via my full node, if blocks were twice as big and full, then I would be uploading > 2TB a month. How many people in the world have an internet connection which can handle that? Then you have to process each block, the bigger they are, the most computation needs to be done. Everything is a trade off, Bitcoin has chosen decentralization over throughput, other chains have chosen differently.

I don't run a node but I imagine if you're conscious about bandwidth you can choose not to upload anything (or very little) and still have the opportunity to maintain an up-to-date copy of the blockchain.

In India there are MOBILE plans that allow you 2GB everyday for $2 per month! My broadband is unlimited data at 30 mbps for our $10 per month. Do quit this bullshit argument.

100 Mbps internet connections are really common nowadays. 1 TB of bandwidth in a month is really nothing. I use more than that just for Netflix and torrents.

He is talking about uploading though. Synchronous 100 Mbps connections are sadly not so common.

Ah, okay. I'll admit that it's been quite a few years since I've used lightning.

(I used it back when it was in beta to buy something from blockstream, but that was it. Back then it was an extremely complex process.)

they're doing it via lightning, which is off-chain until payment channels are settled.

But you still have to make a transaction to open a channel.

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