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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

> And you DO transfer bitcoin.

No, Layer-2 systems only transfer cryptographically signed IOUs between nodes.

Settlement only happens when these IOUs are cashed out, and to cash out you need a transaction in the blockchain layer, so the point about latency still stands.

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It is as much an IOU as the US Dollar was pre-1971. That is a pretty good image for Lightning/Bitcoins relationship. Lightning is the dollar with a guarantee that you can convert it to gold anytime you like by presenting it at the central bank. Very few people ever converted their USD to the underlying gold as a settlement transaction. The difference with lightning is, the government can't just rug-pull you and stop exchanging those paper bill IOUs - it is cryptograhpically secured that you can always convert to bitcoin. Since no one would consider exchaging dollars as settling in gold, lightning settlement is not tied to on-chain transactions.

Payment channels are possible on other networks as well. Once again, there is no inherent advantage to Bitcoin here. I know because I worked on one (https://raiden.network/). I also dealt with many of its failure modes:

  - insufficient liquidity on intemediate nodes
  - network partitions
  - uncooperative nodes
  - nodes that were liquidity sinks and forced other participants to bear the costs of deposits
  - insufficient market makers

But more than anything: people do not want to use crypto for payments. It gives them no significant advantage over traditional credit/debit cards, it has no built-in solution for appeals or reversals and it forces them to learn a bunch of stuff to be minimally safe...

> Payment channels are possible on other networks as well

you are moving the goalpost in the discussion of this thread. User KaierPro said bitcoin would not be suitable because transactions takes to long, to which is responded lightning solves that. Now claiming that other cryptos can have layers-2 is correct, but adds nothing to the discussion or my initial point. Yes other chains have faster settlement times, and can have their respective payment channels - no one argued against that.

> which is responded lightning solves that

Theoretically.

In practice, it has shown that it is only viable if adoption by number of nodes and TVL grew by orders of magnitude, and both are very unlikely to happen because - like I said - spenders have nothing to gain from it and no matter how much of the UX friction is solved, it will never be as easy as paying with credit card.

The only people who want to use Lightning are the ones who are invested in Bitcoin. Everyone else just want simple/safe access to a payment network.

You are just moving the goalpost again, without adding to the discussion. If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same. Nothing to do with my initial point which was comparing lightning/bitcoin to monero.

> If spenders have nothing to gain because they prefer creditcards, then this argument applies to bitcoin/lightning, monero and all other cryptos all the same.

Most spenders will prefer credit cards, but there is a non-zero group where absolute privacy is important and monero is the better choice, therefore more valuable to them.

You are the one trying to make some false equivalency by saying that "bitcoin/lightning is good enough for most cases, therefore there is no need for monero".

The problem is that you are starting with the conclusion that you want (i.e, "Bitcoin is the best") and you are working backwards from this conclusion to make all sorts of rationalizations. Try going from the use case first and then let's see where the reasoning takes you. You will see that for pretty much ANY use-case, Bitcoin is not the answer.

It is splitting words. There is a settlement layer in lightning, which is presenting the preimage and unpeeling the onion HLTCs in reverse order. This happens at the latency of the network path, so usually less than a second. Bitcoin settling is usually tied to confirmation in the block, which lasts ~10minutes. Lightning might be IOUs, but ones that are fungible themselves and not tied to a specific debtor. Actual lightning-to-bitcoin cashout would probably not happen for everyday use, or at least not more often than you change bankaccounts in todays terms.

That's intellectually dishonest. It's like saying wire transfers or card payments are only valid after interbank settlements are finalized.

Bitcoin Lightning is cryptographically designed to be valid even if it's not yet settled on the main layer. It provides cryptographically sound mechanisms to overrule anyone that tries to "cheat". There is no mathematical way to cancel or double spend it, just like your dollars are valid when the transaction is committed in your bank's database although the money still technically hasn't left the other bank.

There are plenty of failure modes where you can lose your funds even if your wallet keys are not compromised. Try running a lightning node, make transactions worth more than a few hundred dollars and then leave your node offline for a few days. Or even more simply: ask yourself what happens to your funds if the disk on your lightning node goes bust and you don't have a recent backup.

THis is the issue, until its settled in the chain, then you are down to trusting the 2nd layer.

Anything offchain has a whole bunch of issues that are either naively or deliberately obscured by the fact that it _eventually_ writes to the blockchain. The exchanges that offer instant settlement are circumventing trust by doing the settlement for you. You get speed, but not security that they have done what they have said they have.

Well, to be fair to OP: small business and retailers are also not getting "real" money when they accept payment via credit cards from Visa/MasterCard.

To be honest I think the issue here is not due to speed of settlement, but layer-2 is not an acceptable substitute because it does not allow reversability. For the merchants it's good that they are getting the money right away, but most consumers will not dare to pay anything via layer-2 networks simply because they won't have any recourse in case they want to undo the transaction.

You can implement reverseability with a credit system, such as Visa/Mastercard. It should not be implemented in base layer or layer-2. It is basically an escrow system.

So now you are proposing to build yet-another piece to an already complex system just so we can justify the existence of your beloved blockchain in the first place.

How long it's going to take you to realize that even if we built everything you are asking for, we are STILL going to end up with a system that is not as capital-efficient as the status quo?

This is just untrue. If someone cheats in lightning, and you demonstrate they cheated as you describe, then you get all of the locked BTC as a reward. This is on layer 1. Essentially you can easily prove your nonce was signed more recently.

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