codexon

Nope there is no contradiction. Again you haven't really thought about how this works. You are guaranteed to know who sent you your HTLC because the payment is settled through the channel. You cannot cloak this in any way.

You only need to ddos the lightning network so it won't record their HTLC when it expires. There is no need to ddos them, though I would argue it would be equally easy to do. And so while the other party will eventually see the secret on the block chain, they can't get their HTLC unlocked on the network before it expires.

And the lightning network has already been easily ddosed! We will see it happen more often if the lightning network ever gets bigger. This isn't some hypothetical situation.

But you haven't proven that 1 ETH 15 second block is equal or even in the same ballpark in security to a 10 minute BTC block.

You can unlock your HTLC without telling the other party the secret. You just close the channel by yourself and tell everyone else the secret and then ddosing so the other party can't redeem his HTLC before his HTLC expires.

Nope, you are just echoing the basic understanding of the tech that is on every bitcoin propaganda outlet.

Each node can still steal money from the node next to them by turning hostile such as not passing the secret and closing out their channel and getting time locks to expire, which is many magnitudes easier than cracking encryption or stealing a private key. The network has already been DDoSed. Now imagine the incentive to do it when it handles millions of dollars.

As far as I can tell, GHOST is only used to mitigate high hash power loss when confirmation times are lowered to 15 seconds.

Orphaned blocks are very rare in Bitcoin.

https://www.blockchain.com/btc/orphaned-blocks?offset=0

Even if you somehow saved all this wasted hash power, you would only maybe increase hash power by less than 1%!!!

Read my comment here for more details.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550997

Um no.

I show you this to prove to you that 1 eth confirmation isn't equal to 1 bitcoin confirmation. If it was anywhere equal in security, there would not be a >10X difference. And also multiplying confirmations by average block time and seeing that it is lower than bitcoin doesn't mean coinbase thinks it is more secure. It can also mean that the value of the average eth transaction on Coinbase is lower.

A 51% attacker will be able to churn out 100x the number of confirmations if confirmations were made 100x smaller. It doesn't matter how fast you make them or how many tricks like GHOST you add.

These are some helpful websites/articles on understanding confirmation security.

https://medium.com/@nic__carter/its-the-settlement-assurance...

https://howmanyconfs.com/

There is a trust chain. If there was 0 trust involved then you could pick random nodes instead of needing to find a specific path. Sure there's cryptographic trickery involved so it is harder to steal the money, but it can still happen.

Large centralized lightning nodes will form and they will act like banks and be able to stop payments to arbitrary entities like Paypal, and even make the payment get stuck for days or weeks depending on how long the timeout is.

From the paper itself.

"the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network"

What is my point exactly? I feel like this should be obvious to anyone that doesn't have a bias towards crypto because they are gambling a lot of money on it.

Making confirmations faster usually just tends to make them weaker. The security of each confirmation is based on the work down (or cpu hours). By making confirmations take half the amount of time, this only makes confirmations half as secure, because the amount of CPU hours spent is the same. You can also make confirmations faster by shrinking the amount of work done per block. This means that while confirmations are faster, it will also take longer for your transaction to get into a block in the first place.

Take a look at this and notice how coinbase requires over 10x more confirmations for ethereum than bitcoin.

https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/593...

So what happens if you aren't linked even indirectly?

What if the trust chain is 20 users long?

Who's going to spend the resources to find this chain? And has it been tested to scale, or is it just like Bitcoin in the early days where people said it would scale and never tested it?

People are going to gravitate to putting all their money into a large exchange like Coinbase to avoid these problems.

Even if the block time can be lower, ethereum supports a comically low amount of transactions per second.

https://ethstats.net/

9943589 (gas limit) / 21000 (minimum price of a ethereum transaction) / 14.57 (average block time) = 32.5 transactions per second.

A lot of merchants ask for 3+ confirmations, and sometimes 1 confirmation can even take 20 minutes. Paypal and credit cards take seconds.

And $20 for a wire transfer pales in comparison to the fees people charge for converting bitcoin to cash https://localbitcoins.com/

Yes transferring large sums of money internationally is useful, but it is a niche, and bitcoin doesn't even do it that cheaply.

That is how exchanges have always worked, but the lightning network encourages people to use centralized exchanges that already have lightning network channels between all other exchanges and sellers so they don't have to waste time committing unknown amounts of bitcoins between 100+ vendors.

Um no, you deposit all your bitcoin into Coinbase's bitcoin wallet so there's no crypto enforcement that you own the bitcoin anymore. That's the only way Coinbase can safely use your bitcoin on their lightning network connections.

They need to commit regular bitcoin into a lightning network channel on the main blockchain before they can spend it.

Ethereum is still on proof of work, so it has the same problem as bitcoin. If they made confirmations take 1 minute instead of 10 minutes, that just means their confirmations are 1/10th as reliable as Bitcoin's confirmations. Nothing was solved there.

And PoS has been "not so far away for a couple years now" because they keep finding problems with it.

In order to use the lightning network, you are making a smart contract on the normal slow bitcoin ledger with another party. You need to insert a pre-determined amount of money into this system to be able to spend it.

Most consumers will not want to do this because they don't know who they will be buying from and don't know how much they are going to spend. If they decide they want to buy from random website Z one day, making a lightning network connection between themselves and that website will be useless because establishing a lightning network connection needs to go on the regular slow block chain, so it'll take as long as a regular payment.

The only way it works is if a major exchange like Coinbase sets up lightning network agreements between other major exchanges. Then the user puts bitcoin into Coinbase and uses the Coinbase website to make lightning network payments on your behalf. This means you will probably put all your money into an exchange like Coinbase who can then run off with your money.

Bitcoin (and all other cryptocoins) are just not usable for mass transactions. Buying anything with bitcoin takes over 10 minutes, often times over an hour for shops that are paranoid and require 3+ confirmations. During the peak bubble time, I remember buying something with bitcoin taking 2 hours!!

This technical problem has not been solved and the "lightning network" just turns exchanges like Coinbase into a bank or Paypal that can be shut down or run away with your money, which basically ruins the entire point of using Bitcoin.

Until Bitcoin can scale without "lightning network", I don't see people using it outside illegal activities. And from what I can see, the core concept of Bitcoin (and other cryptocoins) is fundamentally at odds with fast transactions. If you make confirmations 2x faster, then it just becomes 2x easier to fake a transaction. So paranoid merchants will just require double the confirmations.

I don't know but I would imagine it would be as annoying as getting everyone to switch from ipv4 to ipv6 in 1 or 2 years.

> because there's no good reason that these robocalls can't be treated like a DoS attack

The problem here is that the origin can be spoofed.

You are imagining a system where a telco like T-Mobile connects the caller directly to you. That's not how it works. The connection chain could look like this.

bad caller 111-1111 -> A -> B -> C -> T-Mobile -> you 999-9999

All T-Mobile knows is that 111-1111 is calling 999-9999 and that the call was routed from C, it does not know about A, B, or the true identity of the bad caller.

That's also why spoofed attacks are also a problem on the Internet. These systems were not made with spoofing in mind, and it will cost a lot of money to get these companies to switch over to a new system seamlessly that can detect spoofing.

They may have only done so because they saw Soros betting so much on it.

It makes me wonder if he would have been successful if he wasn't able to short 10 billion. As the article said, Norman Lamont was planning to defend the sterling with 15 billion.

You can buy a single ip but it won't be routable on the internet. All major routers on the internet drop any routes smaller than a /24.

That's because all the malicious actors have started doing that now so we routinely block ips from all common cloud providers.

Governments can force CAs to give them certs. HTTPS only stops non-government attackers.

Cold potato is not necessarily better, actually its often times worse than hot potato and usually used to lower costs so you don't have to pay other people for transit.

For example, a cold potato network may have a link from Dallas to Chicago to New York, while a hot potato network could have a direct link from Dallas to New York.

Cogent uses cold potato and is frequently worse than other transit providers.

Valve was not the first to invent "internet multiplay of local coop only games), Gamespy predates it by like 6 years.

Valve was not the first to invent digital distribution either https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_distribution_of_video_...

> Epic is doing what?

Reducing the cut from 30% to 12% is huge, offering a world class engine that used to cost millions to license free to anyone to use with 5% royalty is also huge accomplishment.

If Fortnite is a clone of Dayz, then Half-Life is a clone of Quake. Since HL, all the successful games Valve "made" were made by developers they bought out with the exception of Artifact which was a complete flop and Dota Underlords which is also failing.

Are you really going to complain about Fornite's "LOL" business model when Dota 2, CS:GO, and TF2 also uses the "LOL" business model AND has gambling loot boxes on top of that? Yes I would say Fortnite is much more inventive than making clones like Artifact and Underlords that flopped hard.

> 30% to a company doing things for you? Or Epic who is charging you less but building a catalog of competitors for you as well

I am not a publisher, so a bigger catalog will only benefit me.

And if you think Valve doesn't want a large "catalog of competitors" as much as Epic, then I have a bridge to sell you.

China owns less than half of Epic.

> Yeah, no. I'm not going to install another launcher that wastes RAM, bandwidth etc. and begs for my attention. Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too.

Funny you mention this. Right now on my computer, Steam is using up over 450 mb ram while the Epic game store uses up 10 mb. Both of them being minimized.

https://imgur.com/a/wZBnGZ1

> Having games spread across multiple launchers is horrible UX too. The Steam monopoly is a good thing for customers. What's bad is that it's private property and run for profit rather than to be useful.

Yeah and so is having software being spread across multiple OSes "horrible UX" too, so you are basically suggesting that the Windows monopoly is a good thing for customers in that same vein.

We don't live in lala-land where things like this get made as non-profit. The only solution is competition.

Valve has gotten lazy and incompetent from their rent seeking on the Steam monopoly. I will try to list some of the reasons.

The service goes down for 15-30 minutes every single Tuesday during peak hours. Can you imagine if your internet, TV, or cellphone did this?

There is also an absurd amount of unplanned downtime as well https://twitter.com/steamstatus there's a major outage every 2 months on average where you cannot even open Steam. The trading system is down A LOT. I don't know of any website like steamstatus that logs it, but it seems like it is down every other week. I also can't seem to trade more than 15 items at a time or the page will just hang, and this system is at least 6 years old already.

Before EA released Origin, there were no refunds on Steam.

I've emailed Valve exploits and they don't respond, not a single reply after years when 10 years ago they would have at least replied maybe 2-3 months later. They took HALF A YEAR to even acknowledge my exploit on hackerone.com and did not even fix it yet.

Their password system is also a huge sign of incompetence. They use RSA encryption on your plaintext password instead of just hashing the password. If someone hacked Valve, they will have your plaintext password. And if you're going to argue that someone can middleman an https server, I'm going to tell you the attacker could just serve up javascript to make the user send the plaintext password.

They also killed 3rd party servers in TF2 by putting them in a button at the bottom of the screen. It is similar to Apple putting all 3rd party apps in a link at the bottom of the app store. They also killed 3rd party servers in CS:GO by banning servers that were giving people default items and then being too lazy to ban servers that gave people items from their online store.

30% is standard? Why is it a standard and why can't it be lowered to 12% if Epic Games can do it? Why does Valve get to use the same standard as brick and mortar retailers when digital stores are way cheaper to maintain and more profitable because of forced online DRM and no reselling?

This is about all I care to ramble off right now, but there's more.

It is time for Valve to get a rude awakening from their comfortable monopoly. The Epic store is a good thing that will result in better service for consumers. And the only price you pay is to install another launcher that costs you nothing.

Photopea is a free online clone of photoshop. Doesn't have every feature but has a large majority of them.

That is certainly one of my pet peeves about that site. It is also a behavior frequently seen on IRC as well.

I got a good amount of points by answering the actual questions.

Since hitting moderator status based on the number of points many years ago I've stopped using it though. It gets tiring fighting against people like this who often have >50-100k points.

Occasionally I'll land on the website again after googling a question, but it seems like Quora is starting to weaken Stack Overflow's google rankings.

They don't even have to be cut off or estranged.

I've known people who had rich 300k+ parents that were the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" kind of people who were able to pay for private college with a high school job back in the day. They feel that they were teaching their kid a valuable lesson.

They didn't get any help for college and were disqualified from all financial aid.