Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No, your understanding is incorrect - please do your homework and learn about lightning - you will be amazed. Lightning is zero-trust just as bitcoin is, there is no central instance. There is no "publishing" either. You can chose to not run your own lightning node (custodial vs. self-custodial wallets), then this becomes true. But that is the same as not running your own bitcoin wallet but using Exchanges, Banks etc. to hold your Bitcoin for you.

Lightning uses so called hashed time locked contract (HTLC) between nodes backed by bitcoin 2-of-2 wallets, with punishment options baked into the transaction script if people try to unilateraly reallocate funds from the channel. The channels between nodes form a payment network, where each node forwards funds (in return for a small fee).

To use a metaphor: bitcoin is the gold, lightning are green dollar notes with a guarantee to exchange those notes for gold anytime - just as our monetary system was before 1971 when Nixon broke that promise. Lightning is built in a way that it is decentralized and that promise can never be broken. And you can send those notes via the internet in sub-seconds.

Thanks, I accept that it requires less trust than using a central ledger, still it cannot provide the level of trustlessness bitcon can, if it could why use btc? I totally agree with your analogy, but in my view that just underlines that BTC is not useable as a currency, just as gold is not.

> if it could why use btc?

You still don't grasp lightning fully, and I totally understand because it a complex concept. It is not its own crypto, it is not a token, and lightning does not even use a blockchain. It is a layer 2 network, meaning it builds upon BTC and requires BTC node to run (to monitor the new blocks and publish transactions). So lightning cannot replace bitcoin, it augments it.

Thank you. It's a good point, but what I am trying to say is that lightning cannot provide the level of security BTC does, hence the need to constantly return to the safety of the block-chain. There is no free lunch: Security in the lightning network must break down/i.e. require more trust as the number of node-jumps in a transaction increases, and perhaps as the number of transactions in the channel increases as well. If not, then lightning solves the distributed double spend problem in its own (efficient) way, that we should just use instead of BTC.

Would you agree with me that lightning 'stretches' each BTC transaction by using clever tricks ala. aggregation, checksums, hashing, etc.? I buy that this scales the number of transactions dramatically, especially between a limited number of parties. It might be that this is stretches far enough be make BTC useful as a currency, but I remain very doubtful of that. If that is indeed the case, it seems that BTC has managed to fail as a currency for other reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com