
First Lightning mainnet release - edf13
https://blog.lightning.engineering/announcement/2018/03/15/lnd-beta.html?1
======
__blockcipher__
Serious question, why does HN seemt o be in favor of lightning over BCH’s
approach of not neutering the block size?

LN has so many drawbacks. Have to always be online, need to hold hot walkets,
need liquidity provided at both ends (kyc/aml)...

~~~
jgeerts
If we ever want Bitcoin to evolve from a store of value to an actual payment
method we have to come up with something that does at least better than VISA's
8000tx/s and that's just not solved with going from 7tx/s to Bitcoin Cash's
~62tx/s. We have to be able to compete with every payment method out there and
we should be able to handle peak throughput during sales period.

Another important factor is the 10 minutes confirmation time, nobody wants to
wait for 10 minutes at the counter before they trust you walking out. We need
something with instant verification and low fees and increasing the blocksize
will never do that.

~~~
brendanw
It exists. It is called nano: no fees and instant transactions through the
block lattice.
[https://nano.org/en/whitepaper](https://nano.org/en/whitepaper)

I am surprised more folks on HN are not familiar with nano considering it is
one of the few teams in crypto with endorsements from familiar faces: Zack
Shapiro on the core team (ex-Product Hunt), Garry Tan (YC, angel investor in
Coinbase), and Charlie Lee (former director of engineering @ Coinbase).

~~~
nosuchthing
Nano / Raiblocks is a scam in the sense it is created for free, and old users
need new users to dump their nano at a profit to new bag holders.

    
    
      The initial distribution of XRB was performed through 
      "manual mining" limited via a captcha. 
      The distribution rate was 
      17 XRB (Raiblocks) per hour per ip4.
    
    

This method was easy to automate, and easy to bypass with the plethora of VPNs
and users who own hundreds of IP4/IP6 addresses. Presumably the dev team has
the vast majority, millions of Rai/Nano.

[https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captch...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=raiblock+captcha)

[https://github.com/nanocurrency/raiblocks/wiki/Design-
featur...](https://github.com/nanocurrency/raiblocks/wiki/Design-features)

These users need new people to buy their Raiblocks / Nano in order to profit
off this scam.

~~~
tobik999
You are describing the problem of all currencies, ie also dollar. If no one
accepts your dollar you are screwed.

~~~
nosuchthing
Riiight... well everyone accepts the USD.

Not even the darknet vendors accept Nano / Raiblocks.

Do you know any places where Nano XRP Raiblocks are being accepted?

You might want to read these:

[http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/...](http://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/1464096684955433613)

[https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-
support](https://stripe.com/blog/ending-bitcoin-support)

tl;dr cryptocurrencies don't really work for the real world.

~~~
brendanw
Why do you have such a strong emotionally negative response to
cryptocurrencies? It is pretty clear you are communicating disingenuously. The
reasons for ending BTC support for many merchants and platforms were high fees
and long tx confirmation times, which is what many altcoins have focused on
addressing (eg Ether, Stellar, Litecoin, Nano)

~~~
nosuchthing
Because most of the cryptocoin projects are designed as way to scam other
users.

Why doesn't Nano Raiblocks allow more users to generate new Nano/Raiblocks?
Would that hurt your investment if every user had equal access to the
production of the supply?

Why are you so emotionally invested in trying to sell these beanie babies to
other people? Is it because you need to profit off other buying into your
scam?

Still no list of businesses accepting Nano/Raiblocks?

~~~
brendanw
I am excited about the technology. I had taken a light look at the space 4-5
years ago and did not form a strong impression. I didn't take a look at the
technology again until last September.

One of the topics I enjoyed deep diving on the most was the lightning network.
The two pain points I observed for lightning were: (1) It takes a non-trivial
amount of energy to understand hashed time lock contracts well enough to be
able to prove the concept to yourself. Not having as easy mastery of a topic
off the bat leads to feeling less secure about one's ability to reason about
security. (2) The specter of rising on-chain fees for commitment transactions
to open payment channels.

With regard to Nano, I was happy to see a different approach to the same
problem that was more intuitive. I run a small business and am waiting for the
desktop and mobile wallets to come out of beta before I offer the ability to
pay with Nano.

I'd be happy if something came along that was better than Nano. I have it on
my todo list to look into Byteball Bytes. I am optimistic about larger scale
benefits that society will enjoy from the cryptocurrency space if certain
projects are successful (eg improved ease of financial auditing, information-
sharing platforms with strongly reduced odds of astroturfing, disappearance of
credit card fees, increased financial transparency, reduced exchange fees when
traveling, banking for the unbanked, etc). Since I am optimistic about the
societal benefits from the space as a whole, I want to see more developers
interested in getting involved.

~~~
nosuchthing
Thanks for explaining where you're coming from.

It's a weird space. I see the general concept behind cryptocurrencies as
bringing the same benefits you've outlined and from a technology and software
perspective these projects are fascinating.

My contention with most of these projects and users is that in these specific
implementations nearly every single one of the cryptocoin projects are
designed to enable oligarchical wealth extraction from downstream investors -
especially in the case of uninformed users/speculators who join the network
later.

The question becomes of sustainability - if there's no underlying value to the
asset and it relies on speculation and the supply is heavily centralized among
a small pool of early adopters than there will likely be a point where buy
pressure runs dry and most of the late adopters will be unable to exchange the
same amount of wealth they traded into the system.

------
serg_chernata
This is so incredibly exciting for bitcoin. I know this is only a beta and
it's been in the works for a while, but many people didn't believe we'd see
anything at all this soon.

~~~
colordrops
You're kidding right? We were supposed to be seeing this over a year ago.
They've been consistently behind on their promises.

~~~
nosuchthing
LN Dev: "We're 6 months away." _Dec 14th, 2015_

[https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/6765995708984197...](https://mobile.twitter.com/starkness/status/676599570898419712)

Something seems off with what LN claims is a p2p network, as the claim is
they've created something better than BGP yet there's going to be many many
race conditions if the network is ever actually used at scale and the only
solution to those race conditions will be broadcasting updates to inform other
nodes the route is inaccessible.. which will raise the bandwidth demand for
anyone running nodes needing those updates.

[https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=635](https://youtu.be/Ug8NH67_EfE?t=635)

For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is
going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. What's the point
than? Why not use venmo / stripe / square where there's less risk of scam for
both consumer and retailer? Running a LN node will require a hot wallet with
keys in memory, so if a Spectre/Meltdown style attack hits your node your key
and funds are at greater risk of being stolen.

LN also opens up the ease of money laundering, so will all LN nodes need to
keep KYC/AML logs for future audits?

~~~
__blockcipher__
LN will have all the problems of BGP, fused with all the problems of
KYC/AML/legacy financial institutions.

It's truly a beautiful monstrosity. It'd be hard to come up with a more
objectively inferior solution if you really tried.

No longer can a new user just send a transaction and have that magical user
experience, instead they have to be given permission to transact by monolithic
liquidity hubs, who of course must take their own fee. In fact as a rational
lightning hub owner, I would want a rate of return similar to stocks but times
some multiple to account for the very high risk of my hot wallet getting
hacked and losing all my money.

Full disclosure: I'm a BCH/XMR supporter although I no longer own either since
I've been sitting out of the scene for the last few months while waiting for
all this idiocy to blow over

~~~
hahainternet
I noticed you've posted the same thing in many different posts with increasing
inaccuracy.

> instead they have to be given permission to transact by monolithic liquidity
> hubs

Completely false

> who of course must take their own fee

May, and routes aren't prescribed so they may take a fee on a payment that may
be routed through them.

> I would want a rate of return similar to stocks but times some multiple to
> account for the very high risk of my hot wallet getting hacked and losing
> all my money.

What. This is completely disconnected from Lightning's functionality.

Please stop spreading FUD.

~~~
nosuchthing
blockcipher is refering to a new type of attack LN enables, which would be a
(large) node/hub having the ability to ignore/drop transactions. It's roughly
similar to how pool operators can create custom tools to suppress activity
passing though their part of the network.

[https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-
manipulates-u...](https://steemit.com/ethereum/@dhumphrey/f2pool-manipulates-
usd1-2-million-on-the-ethereum-blockchain-during-the-status-im-ico)

The latter comment is in regards to the risk of providing liquidity in the
more concerning design caveat of exposing keys in memory on an internet
connected computer. The attack surface for theft of a LN node is now
significantly higher than a normal bitcoin wallet.

~~~
hahainternet
The link you've posted

a) Does not work b) Seems to be specific to Ethereum c) According to a mirror,
has its information sourced from an unverified Reddit post.

Is there anything but FUD here?

~~~
nosuchthing
Ah yes the cultish rhetoric of shouting "FUD", pathetic.

Feel free to ignore the prior mentioned methods denial of service within
blockchain networks as It appears your comment has rendered all reality moot.

------
raise_throw
Some commenters here appear to be asking why one should favour LN over raising
the block size.

The answer to that is that it's not a dichotomy.

There's not a decision to be made _between_ 'LN' and 'Raise block size'.
They're two independent things. The LN is an opt-in system on top of bitcoin.

If we're lucky, LN works out well.

If it doesn't - I'd be in favour of keeping the blocksize low anyway and I
think a lot of technical folk would too. The reason why I don't think is
difficult to understand, rather it's difficult to accept.

Raising the block size beyond some value is problematic. A small increase is
likely safe, but we really don't know what. This is both in order for full
nodes to be usable on reasonable hardware, and also to ensure fee pressure (in
a low/zero fee environment, inflation will likely have to be introduced to
ensure enough mining happens for security).

A good analogy might be with cars and cities. Imagine we lived in a world
where public transport simply couldn't exist - for whatever reason it's just
impossible. Would it be prudent then to bulldoze the streets of London, Paris,
wherever else, to build more roads for capacity? I would argue not - you
simply have a situation in which there's a limit on capacity and that's that.

In addition, in the world where pub transport _does_ exist, investing in
trains does not necessarily mean completely stopping work on roads entirely.
They're different things.

------
foepys
Did the Lightning Network solve the routing problem now or are they still
emulating banks by requiring permanent online super nodes?

~~~
knocte
You know what? All the hops where your TCP/IP connection has gone to allow you
to write that message, were provided by devices that had to be online in order
to provide you the services. EOM

~~~
foepys
Yes, but routers aren't responsible for keeping my money safe. If you don't
constantly monitor all your LN channels, the other party can just steal your
money by issuing fraudulent messages to the network.

~~~
Klathmon
Someone can setup "watchdog" services that you can give your revocation
transactions to and they can watch the blockchain for any attempts to "steal"
your money and if any are found they can instantly broadcast the revocation.

Doing it this way you don't give the "watchdog" service any control of your
BTC, just the ability to broadcast countersignatures, which means there is
still no counterparty risk here. You could even give your revocation
transactions to multiple 3rd parties that can all watch the blockchain for you
if you don't trust any one of them to not backstab you.

~~~
foepys
But what happens if a watchdog has an outage? I need multiple backup watchdogs
then, and no watchdog will work for free. So I'm now paying multiple entities
to securely transact money to other people that themselves also need watchdogs
to watch their channels. This sounds not like it will result in low fees.
Transaction fees, maybe, but overall fees including middlemen will be quite a
bit higher.

~~~
Klathmon
>But what happens if a watchdog has an outage?

Locktimes are currently on the order of days (roughly 3 days IIRC), which
means you have days to react to a fraudulent transaction. A dedicated watchdog
service being out for days at a time is pretty shitty uptime.

Not to mention that this isn't the ONLY way you can watch out for this. Your
laptop, phone, or any other internet connected device can also watch for these
transactions, as long as you connect to the network once every 3 days, you can
handle it yourself.

>...and no watchdog will work for free.

I'm sure you are correct, but we will need to see the exact costs here. I'm
guessing (and it is a complete guess) that the costs here won't be that bad at
all. You could write a service that scans the blockchain for these
transactions that would easily run on a very small server with a VERY large
number of revocation transactions, so it's not like it's a large cost to run a
service like this. Not to mention that the "fee" for these services could be
paid by "penalty" forced onto the person that tried to cheat you when the
revocation transaction is broadcast, incentivizing the watchdog service to
catch the fraudulent transactions (since that's the only way they get paid).

Plus I have a feeling this can easily be a value-added service to many
exchanges and custodial wallets.

~~~
umanwizard
3 days? In contrast, your liability is capped at $500 if you inform your bank
of debit card fraud within 60 days.

~~~
Klathmon
That time is completely configurable between you and the person you are
opening a channel with, 3 days just seems to be the number everyone is
gravitating toward using as a good default since it's long enough that short
times offline won't cause you to be vulnerable to fraudulent transactions, but
not long enough to cause issue if the channel you are working with decides to
close up suddenly (because after the locktime is up you can broadcast a
transaction which gives you all the money in the channel).

And yes, your bank can reimburse your for fraudulent charges (the amount and
timing depends on your location), but that also depends on your bank not
deciding that your fraud isn't actually fraud, it depends on you (as in your
person) constantly checking your accounts for fraud and manually reporting it
to the proper channels when it happens, you are still out the money while they
investigate and reimburse in some cases, they will lock and reissue your card
which often takes days to arrive leaving you without a card in the meantime,
they can deny your account entirely for any number of reasons, they can
control what you are able to buy with your card for any number of reasons, the
cost of a bank account is far from free, they can and will charge you to get
access to your own money quite often, and they can deny you from withdrawing
your own money at any time for just about any reason (including "you are
withdrawing too much money").

Neither option is perfect, nobody says they are, but I really believe that a
system like Bitcoin and LN are a significant improvement over the traditional
banking system in many ways. It is worse in some ways for sure, but I feel the
benefits far outweigh the down sides.

------
apo
For those who may not know the context, this has to do with long-term scaling
of the Bitcoin network.

The very first public response to Satoshi's announcement of Bitcoin was an
expression of doubt about scalability:

 _We very, very much need such a system, but the way I understand your
proposal, it does not seem to scale to the required size.

...

To detect and reject a double spending event in a timely manner, one must have
most past transactions of the coins in the transaction, which, naively
implemented, requires each peer to have most past transactions, or most past
transactions that occurred recently. If hundreds of millions of people are
doing transactions, that is a lot of bandwidth - each must know all, or a
substantial part thereof._

[https://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09...](https://www.mail-
archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09963.html)

And the comment was spot-on. Naively implemented, Bitcoin can only scale
linearly by putting every transaction onto the block chain. Double the
transaction capacity means doubling the size of blocks.

Lightning Network scales the Bitcoin network by offering a secure method for
keeping many, if not most, transactions off the block chain. This is done
through a clever use of Script, Bitcoin's built-in programming language.

Two parties who want to transact at high speed jointly lock up some money with
an on-chain transaction (thereby creating a "payment channel"). Then they send
each other half-signed transactions spending the locked funds. Each
transaction represents a kind of private ledger. Although any of these
transactions can be published at any time, it will usually be mutually
beneficial to avoid doing so and continue passing half-signed transactions
back and forth. When it's time to call it quits, the last transaction is
published.

In other words, the intermediate transactions never need to hit the block
chain. Only the final settlement transaction needs to be published.

Lightning takes this one step further by providing a mechanism whereby a party
can pay another party on behalf of a third party. This means that you can make
Lightning payments without necessarily having an open channel with your
intended payee. You just need an open channel and the network routes your
payment.

Lightning Network has been in development for years. The idea has been
repeatedly disparaged as "vaporware." The first mainnet release is a big deal
because that characterization no longer applies. It also means we're going to
see a real-world test of an idea that up until now hasn't been widely-tested.

The Bitcoin Cash split was due in large part to a group of Bitcoiners
rejecting Lightning as a scaling option. They tend to believe not only that
Bitcoin _can_ scale by increasing block size, but that this is the _best way_.

~~~
XR0CSWV3h3kZWg
This is an excellent high level description.

Lightning network allows for an arbitrary high number of tx, but can only tx
on value that has specifically been locked to do so. Essentially you end up
creating a bidirectional link for each on-chain tx, the weight of each link is
the amount of value that can flow in that direction. Joining a bunch of these
links together potentially allows for just locking up funds with some larger
node in the LN and having near instant and extremely cheap payment to node
that is traversable from your link.

One of the really cool things about this architecture is that as long as two
blockchains offer atomic x-chain txs then the same principal should work for
LN. (e.g. send litecoin down a LN payment channel the business gets bitcoin on
the other end)

Unfortunately this does have security implications, LN's security model relies
on monitoring the blockchain to ensure that the other side of the channel
doesn't attempt to close the channel to their benefit, if they do there is
remediation you can do, but you have to be monitoring the channel. Also an
inability to close the payment channel (tx on the blockchain) within a certain
# of blocks could result in the history of the payment channel getting
cleared.

Basically if the bitcoin network experiences a huge tx backlog like we saw a
couple months ago (tx fees exceeding 15-20 USD) and we see third party routers
with high dependency/volume we could see a double spend attack that would be
cost prohibitive to stop.

~~~
polyomino
There is no added risk of double spend in lightning. The risk in lightning is
that your counterparty can close the channel on an old state that benefits
them. If you, or your watchtower (not yet implemented) is not there to punish
fast enough, they can run away with your bitcoin.

~~~
WJW
What happens if they DDOS you (or your watchtower) at the right moment? Most
peoples' bandwidth is shit enough that forcing them offline is fairly
straightforward.

~~~
Klathmon
Locktimes are about 3 days, they would have to ddos you for the whole time in
order to steal anything. If at any point during those 3 days you are able to
broadcast your transaction in any way, you get all the money in the channel
from both participants.

------
jacob019
Lightning in theory would allow for fast & cheap transactions, so BTC could
really be used for payments instead of the "asset" it has become. Has been
discussed for years with nothing to show. I remain skeptical. But if it works
well, it could be a catalyst for mainstream adoption and increased price
support.

~~~
sidko
>Has been discussed for years with nothing to show

Yes, it's literally an overnight success. I think they started coding this
last night, and it's in beta today /s

On a more serious note, a lot of work has firstly gone into making sure all
the different implementations work well with each other, aka the
standardization problem. That's a big win in and of itself.

The routing problem isn't trivial either. Lightning currently uses an 'onion-
like' routing scheme where, similar to TOR, the nodes have a very limited
information on the origin and destination addresses. This is great news for
privacy.

The lightning network has been running on the testnet successfully for many
months now, and some early adopter merchants even accepted testnet coins for
small purchases. Over a 1000 lightning nodes are currently running.

------
aphextron
So, what can I do with this?

~~~
serg_chernata
Cheap and near-instant transactions.

~~~
M4v3R
I was excited for Lightning until I've learned about Nano (formerly
Raiblocks). It promised and actually delivered totally free AND near-instant
transactions. Worth checking out if you didn't knew about it.

~~~
mbrock
Every comment I see like this makes me less interested in looking into
"Raiblocks" because it sounds exactly like vested interest shilling. Low
content promotion of semi-obscure altcoins repeated in every single
cryptocurrency discussion thread...

~~~
M4v3R
If you browse my history you'll see I'm not a shill for Nano. This is the
first time I ever brought it up in a comment on HN. I genuinely just like the
technology - while it has some small drawbacks, the benefits (free, fast and
no-mining) far outweigh them in my opinion.

------
Cypher
The tech is great and it's still very early but it lacks any community
consensus mechanism regarding important events.

Recently there was a hack and a petition was created to ask the devs to allow
the community to vote on how it should be resolved:

[https://www.change.org/p/colin-lemahieu-lets-ask-the-nano-
de...](https://www.change.org/p/colin-lemahieu-lets-ask-the-nano-devs-to-hold-
a-vote-on-a-fork)

------
atomical
Ideally we just have something that can handle fast transaction volume without
wasting a lot of electricity. Hedera Hashgraph looks like it might be able to
do that. It's still very early, but lightning networks aren't the solution.

~~~
redm
Keep in mind Hashgraph and Blockchain are very different, in that Hadera is a
permissioned network with public access (each round has a known number of
nodes that must participate to exit the round).

~~~
atomical
What do you mean by round?

~~~
redm
"What do you mean by round?"

Because Hashgraph is BFT, a round is a round of voting for confirmation. Its
done virtually but you have to have 2/3rds of nodes agree on the state to
close a round and have a confirmed state. To have 2/3rds you have to have a
fixed and known number of nodes in the round. See BFT for more information.

The point I was trying to make, is that they are very different in benefits
and limitations.

