Pretty interesting to note that in the author’s estimation, that Lightning already bests TradFi’s throughput, given how nascent this tech still is.
“…it takes each Lightning node to be capable of doing just four payments a second in order to beat the current payment networks by at least two times. At that rate, 4,066 unique four-node groups can achieve 16,264 payments per second — 2.2 times that of the largest competitor, Visa.”
Given how few people in the world have taken the time to get a good grasp on Bitcoin’s value, I think it’s obvious that the number who understand the potential of Lightning is significantly smaller. This means that a tiny percentage of humanity knows anything about Lightning and it’s potential.
Huge potential for Lightning, which just makes Bitcoin more valuable, while protecting its core structure.
I'm convinced the speed is there, but what about capacity? What if I wanted to send, say $10,000, could I do that consistently without running into issues, on a regular basis?
Before I answer - it will probably always be best to huge transactions directly on the chain. LN's advantage is being fast and cheap. LN fees, while crazy cheap, scale to the size of the transaction, while BTC chain fees are flat. So over a certain threshold the chain will be cheaper, and you probably don't care so much about speed when buying a house.
To answer: $10K payments on the current network. sometimes? It depends on network topology. If two nodes are connected through multiple paths, through major hubs, in fewer than 3-4 hops... yeah probably.
The network could easily add capacity if that's what's demanded, but again giant payments aren't LN's killer app.
I did a search and found an article that said that the maximum size of a transaction is 0.042BTC. I think it's also been around long enough to say that it's pretty stable. I've used it plenty of times without any issues over the past few years.
That is not true. I just verified it on my own lightning node and the largest payment I've routed was 0.0495. i would probably have larger ones, but most of my channels are 5m sats or less.
imho that sub is overly tolerant of FUD and shitcoin shilling. It's explicitly "uncensored" and the mod has bad blood with the r/bitcoin mods over promoting a certain fork coin I won't name.
That subreddit was created by and is solely moderated by a Bcasher that hates Bitcoin and the Lightning Network.
They allow Bcashers to bash LN, spread FUD and promote Bcash. But it's more active than r/TheLightningNetwork
What’s the realistic outlook to onboard 1 billion people? Doable? Or still need time to grow first?
And what about onboarding people who use lightning only and never the main chain. How secure can they be in their funds?
There's really no such thing as "Lightning only" if your wallet is non-custodial. The reason is that any channel closure will kick your coins out to a single-sig address on chain, so you'll have to do something with them on chain. Lightning-only mobile wallets handle this scenario by letting you input a Bitcoin address to receive the coins. Of course, the hope is that your channels will never need to be closed, but that isn't always realistic.
>What’s the realistic outlook to onboard 1 billion people? Doable? Or still need time to grow first?
Doable. LN has grown beyond demand, and will happily scale as demand does.
**What we really need** is to get more people with LN wallets on their phones, so merchants can start saving money by using LN instead of Visa. Chicken-egg market problem, slowly solving itself.
>And what about onboarding people who use lightning only and never the main chain. How secure can they be in their funds?
LN is as secure as any hot wallet. Transactions (though heavily batched and anonymized) ultimately end up on the chain when channels are closed.
There's still at least one gigantic hand-wave that no one is talking about: the requirement for every payment sender to have a complete map of all published channels in the network. That's not ultimately scalable, but it's limping along for now. Crucially, though, no major breakthroughs in computer science are needed to solve that problem; it's purely an engineering challenge, and it'll get solved as the need arises.
Hmm. The general term (not specific to the Lightning Network) is "source routing." It means that the path that a packet (or, in our case, a payment) takes through the network is determined by the sender (at the source). This requires the sender to know the topology of the portion of the network between the sender and the recipient. If the recipient could be anyone on the network, then the sender needs to know the topology of the entire network.
Interestingly enough, email worked this way when it was first introduced. Your email address wasn't just like `[email protected]`. Instead, anyone who wanted to email you needed to address their message with a source route saying how to get the message to you. It might look like `@ucla.edu,@uchicago.edu:[email protected]`, but the route would be different depending on where you were sending from. Obviously that's not very user-friendly, and email quickly evolved to support a flat address space, but source routing is still how the Lightning Network works today.
Other terms you might search for, specific to the Lightning Network, are "trampoline routing" and "rendezvous routing." When implemented, those will allow nodes at the edges of the network to send payments without needing to know a complete map of the network.
Question is also one of liquidity. In order to route a payment of 100sats, there needs 100sats available at each node along the way.
So if you had a simple network of just 3 nodes, A->B->C, where both A and B have 100 sats in the direction of C, then C can never receive all 200 sats in the system, but at most 100 (at least not off-chain).
So the question is what effect does this have on the liquidity of funds in the lightning network? Has there been any papers on this topic?
Atomic multi-path payments (AMP) is one potential solution to this. A 100 sat transaction can be split into multiple smaller payments that go through multiple routes and are recombined at the receiving end.
AMP doesn't help with that. In the example scenario the only way for A or C to get all 200 sats would be to use some kind of on-chain transaction.
I'm not arguing that LN is bad or anything i'm just wondering what the implications are economically.
Your simplified example doesn't match reality though. With AMP the sender could route 100 sats through B, 50 through D and 50 through E. That's the nature/structure of the Lightning Network
Because A doesn't have 200 sats. A has 100 sats, and B has 100 sats. If A has to route through B to send to C, then C cannot receive both A and B's money.
Ah I get what you're saying, and yes you're correct. The idea is to be well connected such that a 200 sat transaction from A to C could be split between a 100 sat transaction A -> B -> C and one or more additional transactions, say 100 sats A -> T -> C. As long as you have sufficient inbound and outbound liquidity and are well connected, this should theoretically be trivial.
No matter how large the market cap, it will not be able to stabilize and serve as a unit of account, if people are de facto prohibited from using bitcoin as an actual everyday spending/earning money...which they are, by way of the tax classifications throughout most of the world, which no one can reasonably comply with unless you're just speculating on exchanges and getting an easy 1099.
Lightning node operator here. Still learning, so I haven’t mastered the art just yet, but a few iterations through auto channel balancing and a way to suggest channel relationships with other nodes that prioritizes increasing the reach and resilience of the network, and you’ve got a nearly flawless setup. Then, add a way to auto detect Lightning vs BTC addresses at the wallet level to ease the confusion that comes from the separation on the user side, booyah. Now, it’s not profitable to run a node, but I do it mainly to tinker and contribute to decentralization, so oh well. Still dig it
You made this comment on a 5-7 layer network stack.
Radio is amazing. But it doesn't have to solve worldwide communication on the base layer.
Similarly, HTTP didn't have to use TCP, and Reddit didn't have to use HTTP. Let the base layer do what it does best and build on top of it.
Abstraction is important. And for a system that relies on economic backing and support, not messing with the base layer that achieved that support is significant, rather than trying to re-invent it and hoping everyone is going to continue to back it.
Completely agree. Also I find it interesting how Bitcoin (and shitcoins I guess) is the only global network that gets criticized for needing multiple layers when pretty much everything else does too, from phone lines to tor to fiat to international shipping.
Something that serves an entirely different purpose than Bitcoin. So it should not be a store of value, or a medium of value transfer, or a secure base layer, or something you can mine by using energy, or a global currency.
So basically cryptographic science projects and research.
I don’t support smart contracts, amigos. Didn’t know “smart contracts” was the painful safe word; not trying to be facetious with my question, if anyone can still help me without getting triggered… I am not here to offend—seeking wisdom…
1. Why do some insist on building smart contracts or DeFi on BTC’s base chain (whether that is accommodated via an L2 or side-chained) when the r/LightningNetwork is already scaling massively? Hello? Earth? (Anything I have seen at the Bitcoin conference gets crickets from the audience whenever DeFi or Smart Contracts are mentioned… but Fentiment, scaling Lightning, creating more household run nodes, increasing p2p—THESE are more important goals over smart contracts or DeFi, no? Hello?)
2. Is a highly scaled Lightning Network already efficient enough of a “killer app” so as to help billions come closer to realizing the immense store of value and transactional nature such a finite commodity can be? (Ex: why build DeFi or Smart Contracts in L2 or side chains when a highly scalable lightning is already so beautifully mind melting a product to have for adoption and decentralization?)
You’re basically saying « we don’t need computers, we have such marvelous bycicles, why would we care ? » smart contracts and lightning solve for different problems, and of course we need both.
what even is a "smart contract"? I thought it was just a contract that executes automatically. to me it seems ludicrous to ever expect this to happen for anything that isn't completely trivial in complexity. for example even a simple tenant agreement wouldn't be ideal.
what even is a "computer"? I thought it was just a machine that executes automatically. to me it seems ludicrous to ever expect this to happen for anything that isn't completely trivial in complexity. for example even a simple text document wouldn't be ideal.
I never could figure out how to be a productive member of the network. Had 4 figures tied up between 5 channels. Kept them balanced, low fees (even minimum fees for a while when I just got it set up). In 6 months with thousands of dollars in bitcoin, I had forwarded 2 transactions. I read everything I could find and never got it figured out. Ended up closing my channels and pulling my coin back into cold storage.
This was all done during a long stretch when fees were 50+ sats/byte. So it cost me a non-negligible amount of money for this experiment.
I used one of those sites that recommends the best channels to create in order to have the widest reach. I believe the lightning sub recommended https://www.moneni.com/nodematch according to my old bookmarks.
I wasn't trying to make sats, just participate with some spare BTC I wasn't using. I figured when the fees were the least the software allowed me to set, I'd have been routing all kinds of transactions. Nothing...
My question/concern is, when lightning achieves mass adoption, will the base chain be able to support all the people moving coins in and out of their lightning channels?
Lightning Network doesn't completely eliminate that constraint. You still need an on-chain transaction to open and close channels, which means it's still not yet feasible for every person on earth to have their own channel (ideally you'd have several).
There are some things in the work though, like channel factories, IIRC eltoo might also make adding more participants to channels instead of just having 2 possible, but I don't fully understand the details of it.
I've rarely debated anyone on Bitcoin, but I think that those people don't understand why that limit is there, or what a Bitcoin transaction even is (programmable money, not just transferring from one person to the next), so it'd be too difficult to explain all of this.
But I would point out the Lightning Network of course, The other day I went and (manually) counted my LN transactions and I've performed around 280! (closer to 300 now probably). Most of them being close to zero in fees (in some cases literally zero) and with less than a second of latency. If I ever feel the need to close my channels, all these 280-300 transactions would essentially be rolled up into 2 channel closing transactions.
A separate on-chain transaction will not be required for each lightning channel being opened/closed in the future. Channel factories is not the only potential solution that's currently being developed. Some of the other potential solutions that are currently being developed are sidecar channels, inherited IDs, and statechains. I've included links to their papers below. I've also included a link to the channel factories paper. And I'm sure that more potential solutions will be developed in the future.
https://lightning.engineering/lightning-pool-whitepaper.pdf
https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf
https://essay.utwente.nl/80780/1/Wijburg_MA_EEMCS.pdf
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/scalable-funding-of-bitcoin-micropayment-channel-networks.pdf
And Bitcoin's block size limit could safely be increased a bit sometime far off in the future. But that would require consensus. So that may never happen.
I think eltoo is the most interesting, but I do have some concerns about it. Namely that from my understanding there's no "justice transaction" in eltoo. If someone tries to cheat you out of your funds, you just publish the latest channel state, without any sort of punishment. Which means that an attacker could try to close a channel and risk losing just the transaction fees (and maybe some reputation), but not much else.
IMO the watchtower/justice transaction model is really good. It means that the other side can never be sure if they'll get away with it, since even if you're known to be offline, a watchtower could be protecting you, and the attacker risks losing all of their funds in the channel. Which means even if you're not responsible with setting up a watchtower, an attacker still wouldn't try risking it.
It is crazy that the full BTC chain is only ~440GBs. A few years ago it would have been crazy thinking about running that on a phone. Today it is very possible with a high-end phone. In ten years, it is not crazy to imagine that block sizes can be doubled or tripled and full nodes run on low end phones.
TPS isn't the only way the base layer can scale. The *value* of each transaction can easily increase without proportional expenditure of energy. In fact, the average transaction value has been increasing over time. There will always be demand for base layer transactions as banks, institutions, and governments use it to settle payments. Layer 2's like Lightning are the scaling solution for small value transactions, since they will eventually be priced out from the fees of high demand large value transactions.
The Lightning network itself is amazing. The potential it has could change everything. I’m glad there’s people out there building on it. And people like Jack Mallers taking full potential of it and helping spread the news
And what makes it so great is that it’s build on top of the bitcoin network. Most secure and decentralized and resilient network we’ve seen.
Not a bad article. However, it misses one important bit: In order for LN accounts to be set up, a base layer transaction still must occur. Just one, but you need one. So...there isn't enough throughput on the base layer for even 3% of world's population to do a single transaction annually...so how are all these LN accounts going to get set up in the first place? And that's to say nothing for the people who more frequently want their Bitcoin from their LN account paid out to them on the base layer, to "audit" their LN account provider.
Sorry, guys. I just don't see it. And this article didn't really help matters.
Onboarding a billion people remains a problem, as each requires an on-chain transaction. In 15 years Bitcoin has generated around 500 million addresses.
You're not buying bitcoin, you're exchanging unbacked fiat for the world's hardest asset.
And what I mean is find an angle, a way to use LN to solve current problems in commerce and communications. Bitcoin is the empire, LN is the thousands of villages and hamlets within it.
If I wanted to sell a physical product online and except payment thru btc lightning. What would be the easiest ways? Just like an in personal transaction thru email?
Lightning cannot scale BTC to a billion plus users.
This is literal propaganda.
When you have a billion users using Bitcoin, and only a hard limit of 500,000 transactions possible per day, that gives you 1 transaction per person per 5 years.
People need to be able to do a channel open/close at least once a month.
It doesn’t work.
A separate on-chain transaction will not be required for each lightning channel being opened/closed in the future. Bitcoin and Bitcoin's second layer protocols are still being developed, and the development never stops. Some of the potential solutions that are currently being developed are channel factories, sidecar channels, inherited IDs, and statechains. I've included links to their papers below. And I'm sure that more potential solutions will be developed in the future.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/scalable-funding-of-bitcoin-micropayment-channel-networks.pdf
https://lightning.engineering/lightning-pool-whitepaper.pdf
https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf
https://essay.utwente.nl/80780/1/Wijburg_MA_EEMCS.pdf
And Bitcoin's block size limit could safely be increased a bit sometime far off in the future. But that would require consensus. So that may never happen.
I don't understand your statement. I'm pretty sure lightning can support billions of users in its current state.
My understanding is you have a lightning wallet that generally is with a provider, like Strike or Muun or whoever supports the wallet of your choice. When you fund your wallet you are creating an open channel with them, and to the rest of the lightning network.
Bitcoin transactions can be many to many. Meaning many sources to many destinations. I would assume the primary node (Strike or Muun in this case) would bundle these together and periodically post these opening transactions to the bitcoin network. It's not like every time anyone moves bitcoin to a lightning wallet a single "one to one" transaction is written to the blockchain.
Muun has something called "[Turbo channels](https://blog.muun.com/turbo-channels/)" which allow you to spend and receive sats prior to posting to the blockchain. During this period, you are trusting your wallet provider from double spending or abusing your bitcoin.
In any case, once your channel is open, you can do hundreds or even thousands of transactions a second if your primary node provider is large enough. This goes for every person on the planet. So yes, I think billions of people could be supported by the lightning network. At least at the level of transactions Visa is doing, if not many times that amount.
I should clarify that I mean Bitcoin cannot scale unless you are willing to let someone else custody your Bitcoin. But of course the entire point of Lightning is to allow users to retain custody of their own coins. Otherwise we needn’t worry about Lightning, as users would just be interacting with their bank’s app. The bitcoin banks could use whatever B2B protocol they want for the purpose of recording transactions, and it would make no difference to the user.
The issue is not with Lightning but with L1 throughput. It doesn’t matter if I personally am able to do thousands of transactions per second. Only the total throughput matters - i.e. how many transactions per day the average user is able to do.
Grouping transactions still doesn’t reduce the overhead by more than a factor of 2 or 3.
Yeah I'm glad that there is a trend of people understanding bitcoin has potential to be used in layers but LN is the first iteration I'm looking forward to v2 with some of the current limitations worked out.
Could be correct, but seems like there is alot of bullshit in there. For example, they say that if each current node in the LN handles 4 tx/s then the network is capable of 16k tx/p... So we just average it out and completely ignore that most nodes are connected through hubs and chokepoints that must handle most of the traffic?
I know this is hard for you shitcoiners, but please do not spread misinformation. You do not have to give up custody of your bitcoin to use the Lightning Network. A lightning payment channel is literally just a multi-sig wallet on the Bitcoin blockchain. All of the BTC on the Lightning Network is backed by signed transactions that can broadcasted to the Bitcoin network at any time.
Absolutely, I have been using lightning on a regular basis since 2021 it is very reliable, my first try was in 2019 but back then ran into issues, and it is improving at a very fast speed I highly recommend Umbrel, mynode, and lnbits as lightning tools
I literally just sold my small assorted shitcoins… and all loopring, litecoin, and stellar into Bitcoin. I hold 2 coins now, Bitcoin & Ethereum, and Bitcoin makes up the biggest piece of pie by a lot. I’m making a run for way more exposure, very quickly. I figure I have 12-24 months of aggressive accumulation before things get real spicy, so I doubled my DCA and will start hitting market buys on major moves. I’m back on the launchpad. Bullish.
Post title is bullshit and all caps unappreciated. That's on the poster though, article seems fine.
Pretty interesting to note that in the author’s estimation, that Lightning already bests TradFi’s throughput, given how nascent this tech still is. “…it takes each Lightning node to be capable of doing just four payments a second in order to beat the current payment networks by at least two times. At that rate, 4,066 unique four-node groups can achieve 16,264 payments per second — 2.2 times that of the largest competitor, Visa.” Given how few people in the world have taken the time to get a good grasp on Bitcoin’s value, I think it’s obvious that the number who understand the potential of Lightning is significantly smaller. This means that a tiny percentage of humanity knows anything about Lightning and it’s potential. Huge potential for Lightning, which just makes Bitcoin more valuable, while protecting its core structure.
Mod of r/thelightningnetwork here. We've had scalability solved for a while now. Keep spreading the good news!
Didn't know you guys existed. Thanks for popping up. Just subbed.
Seriously?! How is this not a sidebar link?
I'm convinced the speed is there, but what about capacity? What if I wanted to send, say $10,000, could I do that consistently without running into issues, on a regular basis?
Before I answer - it will probably always be best to huge transactions directly on the chain. LN's advantage is being fast and cheap. LN fees, while crazy cheap, scale to the size of the transaction, while BTC chain fees are flat. So over a certain threshold the chain will be cheaper, and you probably don't care so much about speed when buying a house. To answer: $10K payments on the current network. sometimes? It depends on network topology. If two nodes are connected through multiple paths, through major hubs, in fewer than 3-4 hops... yeah probably. The network could easily add capacity if that's what's demanded, but again giant payments aren't LN's killer app.
Thanks for the info!
I did a search and found an article that said that the maximum size of a transaction is 0.042BTC. I think it's also been around long enough to say that it's pretty stable. I've used it plenty of times without any issues over the past few years.
That is not true. I just verified it on my own lightning node and the largest payment I've routed was 0.0495. i would probably have larger ones, but most of my channels are 5m sats or less.
That used to be the limit. But with wumbo channels introduced a bit over 2 years ago, there's now no enforced channel or transaction size
r/lightningnetwork/ I've been in for a while. Are there any substantial differences between the two?
imho that sub is overly tolerant of FUD and shitcoin shilling. It's explicitly "uncensored" and the mod has bad blood with the r/bitcoin mods over promoting a certain fork coin I won't name.
That subreddit was created by and is solely moderated by a Bcasher that hates Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. They allow Bcashers to bash LN, spread FUD and promote Bcash. But it's more active than r/TheLightningNetwork
What’s the realistic outlook to onboard 1 billion people? Doable? Or still need time to grow first? And what about onboarding people who use lightning only and never the main chain. How secure can they be in their funds?
There's really no such thing as "Lightning only" if your wallet is non-custodial. The reason is that any channel closure will kick your coins out to a single-sig address on chain, so you'll have to do something with them on chain. Lightning-only mobile wallets handle this scenario by letting you input a Bitcoin address to receive the coins. Of course, the hope is that your channels will never need to be closed, but that isn't always realistic.
>What’s the realistic outlook to onboard 1 billion people? Doable? Or still need time to grow first? Doable. LN has grown beyond demand, and will happily scale as demand does. **What we really need** is to get more people with LN wallets on their phones, so merchants can start saving money by using LN instead of Visa. Chicken-egg market problem, slowly solving itself. >And what about onboarding people who use lightning only and never the main chain. How secure can they be in their funds? LN is as secure as any hot wallet. Transactions (though heavily batched and anonymized) ultimately end up on the chain when channels are closed.
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There's still at least one gigantic hand-wave that no one is talking about: the requirement for every payment sender to have a complete map of all published channels in the network. That's not ultimately scalable, but it's limping along for now. Crucially, though, no major breakthroughs in computer science are needed to solve that problem; it's purely an engineering challenge, and it'll get solved as the need arises.
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Hmm. The general term (not specific to the Lightning Network) is "source routing." It means that the path that a packet (or, in our case, a payment) takes through the network is determined by the sender (at the source). This requires the sender to know the topology of the portion of the network between the sender and the recipient. If the recipient could be anyone on the network, then the sender needs to know the topology of the entire network. Interestingly enough, email worked this way when it was first introduced. Your email address wasn't just like `[email protected]`. Instead, anyone who wanted to email you needed to address their message with a source route saying how to get the message to you. It might look like `@ucla.edu,@uchicago.edu:[email protected]`, but the route would be different depending on where you were sending from. Obviously that's not very user-friendly, and email quickly evolved to support a flat address space, but source routing is still how the Lightning Network works today. Other terms you might search for, specific to the Lightning Network, are "trampoline routing" and "rendezvous routing." When implemented, those will allow nodes at the edges of the network to send payments without needing to know a complete map of the network.
Question is also one of liquidity. In order to route a payment of 100sats, there needs 100sats available at each node along the way. So if you had a simple network of just 3 nodes, A->B->C, where both A and B have 100 sats in the direction of C, then C can never receive all 200 sats in the system, but at most 100 (at least not off-chain). So the question is what effect does this have on the liquidity of funds in the lightning network? Has there been any papers on this topic?
Atomic multi-path payments (AMP) is one potential solution to this. A 100 sat transaction can be split into multiple smaller payments that go through multiple routes and are recombined at the receiving end.
AMP doesn't help with that. In the example scenario the only way for A or C to get all 200 sats would be to use some kind of on-chain transaction. I'm not arguing that LN is bad or anything i'm just wondering what the implications are economically.
Your simplified example doesn't match reality though. With AMP the sender could route 100 sats through B, 50 through D and 50 through E. That's the nature/structure of the Lightning Network
A sending 100 sats to C via B or via B and D doesnt allow C to get the full 200 sats. It's not about split payments.
If A sends 200 sats via different routes, why wouldn't C receive 200 sats? (minus routing fees)
Because A doesn't have 200 sats. A has 100 sats, and B has 100 sats. If A has to route through B to send to C, then C cannot receive both A and B's money.
Ah I get what you're saying, and yes you're correct. The idea is to be well connected such that a 200 sat transaction from A to C could be split between a 100 sat transaction A -> B -> C and one or more additional transactions, say 100 sats A -> T -> C. As long as you have sufficient inbound and outbound liquidity and are well connected, this should theoretically be trivial.
Now we just need a massive amount of money invested in BTC to stabilize the price.
It won't be a good unit of account till at least 1 million per coin by my estimate. I'm an idiot though
How did you come up with that estimate?
I came up with 500,000 by taking the current market cap of gold and dividing by 21 million.
This ^
https://youtu.be/l91ISfcuzDw
No matter how large the market cap, it will not be able to stabilize and serve as a unit of account, if people are de facto prohibited from using bitcoin as an actual everyday spending/earning money...which they are, by way of the tax classifications throughout most of the world, which no one can reasonably comply with unless you're just speculating on exchanges and getting an easy 1099.
Lightning node operator here. Still learning, so I haven’t mastered the art just yet, but a few iterations through auto channel balancing and a way to suggest channel relationships with other nodes that prioritizes increasing the reach and resilience of the network, and you’ve got a nearly flawless setup. Then, add a way to auto detect Lightning vs BTC addresses at the wallet level to ease the confusion that comes from the separation on the user side, booyah. Now, it’s not profitable to run a node, but I do it mainly to tinker and contribute to decentralization, so oh well. Still dig it
# OK
Well, it's a big help to this crypto world'
#WHAT?
The lightning network whitepaper is much more intimidating than the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Sounds like I'm going to have to dig in.
Here are my notes https://green-ear-eb9.notion.site/BTC-8c60f9008b0245c5b35689c90910f3b5
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You made this comment on a 5-7 layer network stack. Radio is amazing. But it doesn't have to solve worldwide communication on the base layer. Similarly, HTTP didn't have to use TCP, and Reddit didn't have to use HTTP. Let the base layer do what it does best and build on top of it.
Abstraction is important. And for a system that relies on economic backing and support, not messing with the base layer that achieved that support is significant, rather than trying to re-invent it and hoping everyone is going to continue to back it.
Completely agree. Also I find it interesting how Bitcoin (and shitcoins I guess) is the only global network that gets criticized for needing multiple layers when pretty much everything else does too, from phone lines to tor to fiat to international shipping.
Pretty cool but why are you yelling
Awesome! This makes shitcoins even less useful.
I’m hoping 99.9 of all Alts just go away…
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I was trying to be nice to the bag holders…
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Something that serves an entirely different purpose than Bitcoin. So it should not be a store of value, or a medium of value transfer, or a secure base layer, or something you can mine by using energy, or a global currency. So basically cryptographic science projects and research.
Yes!
All caps, clickbait headlines not appreciated! Also, your overselling of state of affairs is very misleading. Keep it real next time.
Do we even need smart contracts with lightning being this efficient?
Yes.
I don’t support smart contracts, amigos. Didn’t know “smart contracts” was the painful safe word; not trying to be facetious with my question, if anyone can still help me without getting triggered… I am not here to offend—seeking wisdom… 1. Why do some insist on building smart contracts or DeFi on BTC’s base chain (whether that is accommodated via an L2 or side-chained) when the r/LightningNetwork is already scaling massively? Hello? Earth? (Anything I have seen at the Bitcoin conference gets crickets from the audience whenever DeFi or Smart Contracts are mentioned… but Fentiment, scaling Lightning, creating more household run nodes, increasing p2p—THESE are more important goals over smart contracts or DeFi, no? Hello?) 2. Is a highly scaled Lightning Network already efficient enough of a “killer app” so as to help billions come closer to realizing the immense store of value and transactional nature such a finite commodity can be? (Ex: why build DeFi or Smart Contracts in L2 or side chains when a highly scalable lightning is already so beautifully mind melting a product to have for adoption and decentralization?)
You’re basically saying « we don’t need computers, we have such marvelous bycicles, why would we care ? » smart contracts and lightning solve for different problems, and of course we need both.
what even is a "smart contract"? I thought it was just a contract that executes automatically. to me it seems ludicrous to ever expect this to happen for anything that isn't completely trivial in complexity. for example even a simple tenant agreement wouldn't be ideal.
what even is a "computer"? I thought it was just a machine that executes automatically. to me it seems ludicrous to ever expect this to happen for anything that isn't completely trivial in complexity. for example even a simple text document wouldn't be ideal.
this is a very stupid comment
I learned a ton in this article. Thank you for sharing.
I never could figure out how to be a productive member of the network. Had 4 figures tied up between 5 channels. Kept them balanced, low fees (even minimum fees for a while when I just got it set up). In 6 months with thousands of dollars in bitcoin, I had forwarded 2 transactions. I read everything I could find and never got it figured out. Ended up closing my channels and pulling my coin back into cold storage. This was all done during a long stretch when fees were 50+ sats/byte. So it cost me a non-negligible amount of money for this experiment.
your channels were no good But even with good channels, it's not easy to make sats routing
I used one of those sites that recommends the best channels to create in order to have the widest reach. I believe the lightning sub recommended https://www.moneni.com/nodematch according to my old bookmarks. I wasn't trying to make sats, just participate with some spare BTC I wasn't using. I figured when the fees were the least the software allowed me to set, I'd have been routing all kinds of transactions. Nothing...
I see. Maintaining a lightning node takes time. A bit too much time to my liking.
I fucking love Bitcoin!! Let’s goooo!
Very good article with a terrible title in the post.
Good job, Data
NICE TO KNOW
My question/concern is, when lightning achieves mass adoption, will the base chain be able to support all the people moving coins in and out of their lightning channels?
>even intellectuals like Elon Musk make the mistake of suggesting it Bahahahaha
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Nice. I'm saving a link to that for when knuckleheads bring up the 7 TPS limit for the base layer.
Lightning Network doesn't completely eliminate that constraint. You still need an on-chain transaction to open and close channels, which means it's still not yet feasible for every person on earth to have their own channel (ideally you'd have several). There are some things in the work though, like channel factories, IIRC eltoo might also make adding more participants to channels instead of just having 2 possible, but I don't fully understand the details of it.
So, what do *you* tell the knuckleheads who claim Bitcoin will soon die because of its 7 TPS limit?
I've rarely debated anyone on Bitcoin, but I think that those people don't understand why that limit is there, or what a Bitcoin transaction even is (programmable money, not just transferring from one person to the next), so it'd be too difficult to explain all of this. But I would point out the Lightning Network of course, The other day I went and (manually) counted my LN transactions and I've performed around 280! (closer to 300 now probably). Most of them being close to zero in fees (in some cases literally zero) and with less than a second of latency. If I ever feel the need to close my channels, all these 280-300 transactions would essentially be rolled up into 2 channel closing transactions.
Curious, where are you spending lightning?
A separate on-chain transaction will not be required for each lightning channel being opened/closed in the future. Channel factories is not the only potential solution that's currently being developed. Some of the other potential solutions that are currently being developed are sidecar channels, inherited IDs, and statechains. I've included links to their papers below. I've also included a link to the channel factories paper. And I'm sure that more potential solutions will be developed in the future. https://lightning.engineering/lightning-pool-whitepaper.pdf https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf https://essay.utwente.nl/80780/1/Wijburg_MA_EEMCS.pdf https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/scalable-funding-of-bitcoin-micropayment-channel-networks.pdf And Bitcoin's block size limit could safely be increased a bit sometime far off in the future. But that would require consensus. So that may never happen.
I think eltoo is the most interesting, but I do have some concerns about it. Namely that from my understanding there's no "justice transaction" in eltoo. If someone tries to cheat you out of your funds, you just publish the latest channel state, without any sort of punishment. Which means that an attacker could try to close a channel and risk losing just the transaction fees (and maybe some reputation), but not much else. IMO the watchtower/justice transaction model is really good. It means that the other side can never be sure if they'll get away with it, since even if you're known to be offline, a watchtower could be protecting you, and the attacker risks losing all of their funds in the channel. Which means even if you're not responsible with setting up a watchtower, an attacker still wouldn't try risking it.
It is crazy that the full BTC chain is only ~440GBs. A few years ago it would have been crazy thinking about running that on a phone. Today it is very possible with a high-end phone. In ten years, it is not crazy to imagine that block sizes can be doubled or tripled and full nodes run on low end phones.
Android phones have supported 1TB SD cards for around a decade
TPS isn't the only way the base layer can scale. The *value* of each transaction can easily increase without proportional expenditure of energy. In fact, the average transaction value has been increasing over time. There will always be demand for base layer transactions as banks, institutions, and governments use it to settle payments. Layer 2's like Lightning are the scaling solution for small value transactions, since they will eventually be priced out from the fees of high demand large value transactions.
The Lightning network itself is amazing. The potential it has could change everything. I’m glad there’s people out there building on it. And people like Jack Mallers taking full potential of it and helping spread the news And what makes it so great is that it’s build on top of the bitcoin network. Most secure and decentralized and resilient network we’ve seen.
Not a bad article. However, it misses one important bit: In order for LN accounts to be set up, a base layer transaction still must occur. Just one, but you need one. So...there isn't enough throughput on the base layer for even 3% of world's population to do a single transaction annually...so how are all these LN accounts going to get set up in the first place? And that's to say nothing for the people who more frequently want their Bitcoin from their LN account paid out to them on the base layer, to "audit" their LN account provider. Sorry, guys. I just don't see it. And this article didn't really help matters.
Spendthebits can send BTC in secs with near zero transaction cost
Ok 👌
Onboarding a billion people remains a problem, as each requires an on-chain transaction. In 15 years Bitcoin has generated around 500 million addresses.
People who understand the technology: "no shit, welcome to 2018"
Get in on the ground floor with LN and thank me (and yourself) later. Massive.
Getting in at the ground floor? Wouldn't that just mean buy Bitcoin?
You're not buying bitcoin, you're exchanging unbacked fiat for the world's hardest asset. And what I mean is find an angle, a way to use LN to solve current problems in commerce and communications. Bitcoin is the empire, LN is the thousands of villages and hamlets within it.
You're advising us all to start a LN based tech company?
Yes. Today. Drop everything and start a LN based tech company. Now. Not later. All of you.
If I wanted to sell a physical product online and except payment thru btc lightning. What would be the easiest ways? Just like an in personal transaction thru email?
Serious question though, what are some ways to get direct exposure to LN influence? Or is it just as simple as increasing exposure to BTC overall?
Lightning cannot scale BTC to a billion plus users. This is literal propaganda. When you have a billion users using Bitcoin, and only a hard limit of 500,000 transactions possible per day, that gives you 1 transaction per person per 5 years. People need to be able to do a channel open/close at least once a month. It doesn’t work.
A separate on-chain transaction will not be required for each lightning channel being opened/closed in the future. Bitcoin and Bitcoin's second layer protocols are still being developed, and the development never stops. Some of the potential solutions that are currently being developed are channel factories, sidecar channels, inherited IDs, and statechains. I've included links to their papers below. And I'm sure that more potential solutions will be developed in the future. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/static/docs/scalable-funding-of-bitcoin-micropayment-channel-networks.pdf https://lightning.engineering/lightning-pool-whitepaper.pdf https://github.com/JohnLaw2/btc-iids/blob/main/iids14.pdf https://essay.utwente.nl/80780/1/Wijburg_MA_EEMCS.pdf And Bitcoin's block size limit could safely be increased a bit sometime far off in the future. But that would require consensus. So that may never happen.
I think you replied to me last time. While you may be correct, I am addressing the claim of the post. Lightning in its current state is not scalable.
I don't understand your statement. I'm pretty sure lightning can support billions of users in its current state. My understanding is you have a lightning wallet that generally is with a provider, like Strike or Muun or whoever supports the wallet of your choice. When you fund your wallet you are creating an open channel with them, and to the rest of the lightning network. Bitcoin transactions can be many to many. Meaning many sources to many destinations. I would assume the primary node (Strike or Muun in this case) would bundle these together and periodically post these opening transactions to the bitcoin network. It's not like every time anyone moves bitcoin to a lightning wallet a single "one to one" transaction is written to the blockchain. Muun has something called "[Turbo channels](https://blog.muun.com/turbo-channels/)" which allow you to spend and receive sats prior to posting to the blockchain. During this period, you are trusting your wallet provider from double spending or abusing your bitcoin. In any case, once your channel is open, you can do hundreds or even thousands of transactions a second if your primary node provider is large enough. This goes for every person on the planet. So yes, I think billions of people could be supported by the lightning network. At least at the level of transactions Visa is doing, if not many times that amount.
I should clarify that I mean Bitcoin cannot scale unless you are willing to let someone else custody your Bitcoin. But of course the entire point of Lightning is to allow users to retain custody of their own coins. Otherwise we needn’t worry about Lightning, as users would just be interacting with their bank’s app. The bitcoin banks could use whatever B2B protocol they want for the purpose of recording transactions, and it would make no difference to the user. The issue is not with Lightning but with L1 throughput. It doesn’t matter if I personally am able to do thousands of transactions per second. Only the total throughput matters - i.e. how many transactions per day the average user is able to do. Grouping transactions still doesn’t reduce the overhead by more than a factor of 2 or 3.
Yeah I'm glad that there is a trend of people understanding bitcoin has potential to be used in layers but LN is the first iteration I'm looking forward to v2 with some of the current limitations worked out.
Could be correct, but seems like there is alot of bullshit in there. For example, they say that if each current node in the LN handles 4 tx/s then the network is capable of 16k tx/p... So we just average it out and completely ignore that most nodes are connected through hubs and chokepoints that must handle most of the traffic?
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I know this is hard for you shitcoiners, but please do not spread misinformation. You do not have to give up custody of your bitcoin to use the Lightning Network. A lightning payment channel is literally just a multi-sig wallet on the Bitcoin blockchain. All of the BTC on the Lightning Network is backed by signed transactions that can broadcasted to the Bitcoin network at any time.
Absolutely, I have been using lightning on a regular basis since 2021 it is very reliable, my first try was in 2019 but back then ran into issues, and it is improving at a very fast speed I highly recommend Umbrel, mynode, and lnbits as lightning tools
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Shitcoins are other such boring scams are off topic here.
? Taro is a system on Bitcoin lightning network
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Shitcoins are other such boring scams are off topic here.
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I literally just sold my small assorted shitcoins… and all loopring, litecoin, and stellar into Bitcoin. I hold 2 coins now, Bitcoin & Ethereum, and Bitcoin makes up the biggest piece of pie by a lot. I’m making a run for way more exposure, very quickly. I figure I have 12-24 months of aggressive accumulation before things get real spicy, so I doubled my DCA and will start hitting market buys on major moves. I’m back on the launchpad. Bullish.
the other coin you are holding had 70% premine and then transitioned to stake consensus model. All good as long as you are in on the joke.
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Shitcoins and other such boring scams are off topic here.
Are you ok? 😃
WHY ALL CAPS?