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Comment by dreamcompiler | Hacker News Reader

It's stupid because blockchains don't scale. In most other respects they're quite clever.

In theory a L2 network coukd solve the scaling problem, but every time I've looked at L2 solutions theve had terrible UX.

L2 networks achieve scale by... Not being blockchain. And by not offering the double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains.

So this statement is "you can scale blockchain tech by using another tech in its place that doesn't offer the same guarantees".

With the Lightning network, L2 is basically a database between only 2 parties that are required to be online during the transaction. It's not possible to double spend in that situation.

There's the possibility of double spending by committing to the bitcoin blockchain an old version of your "database", but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

More details here: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/67141/how-is-a-d...

> but then you would face the penalty of having your entire balance confiscated by the other party.

Only if the other party notices in time that you did this. You are reliant on active monitoring of the blockchain to know that your transactions actually happened. And the more you want to scale (i.e. the more transactions you do on a single Lightning channel without settling it on the BTC blockchain), the bigger the risk becomes.

Yes, but as long as you monitor, double spending is not possible. And it's possible to use tools to do that somewhat passively.

There are conditions on every payment system. With bitcoin you also have something to do to prevent double spending: wait for some number of confirmations (and making sure you're on the right chain).

And "double-spend protection guarantees of blockchains" is very dependent on the cost of doing a 51% attack, so it's not strong by itself. It's very strong in bitcoin only because the quantity of hashrate/money required to do one is astronomical. It's not so strong on small blockchains.

And I fail to see how the risk increases with more transactions on a single lightning channel.

My point is that Lightning has additional failure modes that BTC does not, and Lightning in itself does not offer the guarantees that Bitcoin does. It of course also suffers from all of BTC's failure points - if someone successfully does a 51% attack on BTC, they can implicitly also steal any Lightning funds as well. If you close a Lightning channel and then don't wait for enough confirmations, or you broadcast your cheating transaction and don't wait for enough confirmations, you can clearly lose your money.

The risk doesn't increase with the number of transactions on a channel, that was a wrong statement from my side. What I was thinking of is that the risk increases the more your transact through Lightning instead of regular BTC. Basically, the more of your BTC is caught up in Lightning channels, the higher the value of attacking you with a double spend attempt.

If monitoring really is a problem isn't simple automation the solution?

This is automated, no one is proposing to manually look at BTC blocks to see if you are getting cheated. The problem is that you need to explicitly run code constantly to check if this happens - which means that if your monitoring agent goes offline for any reason (which an attacker could perhaps force), your BTC that you received in a Lightning channel may be stolen.

Okay, so it's an attack vector but one that can be mitigated against by implementing redundancy.

I would argue that Lightning's biggest security issue is having to store your private keys on an Internet connected device. I don't know if further improvements can be made in this area, for example allowing for some kind of 2FA, like multi-sig on the base layer.

I thought it was interesting that BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos.

This seemed like an amazing innovation to me, made even more amazing by the fact that it was, by all accounts, the original protocol.

You could do some pretty amazing stuff with it, for example store a SPA on chain and then store individual posts on chain, and have the SPA read the app.

Unfortunately, the ecosystem was completely greed focused, and nobody is interested in technological advancement in the slightest.

>BSV seemed to scale just fine, and you could also store entire files on it, including JSON, HTML or even music or videos

This doesn't pass the sniff test. Everyone must store the full blockchain in order to verify it. So to run a full node you would have to store everyone's JSON, HTML, music, videos. Full mirroring for every node in a distributed system is about as close as you can get to the definition of doesn't scale.

I should note, the scaling I was referring to was transaction processing. Data storage is a little different.

The architecture which I heard described or hypothesized was more akin to Amazon deep storage. More frequently accessed data would be more accessible on "hot" nodes.

Full nodes would effectively, under this paradigm, become cloud storage providers. As a bonus, the problem of how to charge for access is basically already solved, and does not require a complex corporate payment scheme.

Indeed. Bitcoin's blockchain grows with a laughable 3kB/s, yet is an unwieldy 700 GB.

A blockchain that allowed you store one song per second would be hundreds of TB before long. There are other architectures for that sort of thing for a reason.

Looks like BSV is about 7TB and grows at about 4GB a day. I have no clue what those guys are up to these days. This may be unweildy for a home PC but really is still pretty trivial for a data center.

500 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube per minute which is... If my napkin math is right, about a petabyte a day.

how many transactions a second could/can it manage though?

Looks like the max they've done is something like 22k TPS. No idea how accurate this is, I don't follow the ecosystem. There's a lot of different numbers like "maximum theoretical potential" that probably ly mean nothing.

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