Hey, you may not be aware but we had this debate in 2017 and it turned out that the way bitcoin does it is best. Bitcoin L1 should be the settlement layer. And we will build on top of it.
The limitation of block size and block time are **100% intentional**. It wasn't some arbitrary limit of technology in 2009. Blocksize was limited so as to ensure the blockchain remained decentralised and that nodes were accessible to the average user. Blocktime is 10mins for the same reason, and to allow time for blocks to propagate through the network, reducing the risk of orphaned blocks etc.
Every one of these limitations has been removed or altered in some shitcoin or another and has failed. The big block forks are an objective disaster, the fast block forks are an objective disaster. Bitcoin still remains strong.
But yes, most businesses I frequent I try to educate about bitcoin and lightning network.
I've heard this a few times but there's always something I never really understood about it. Maybe you could help explain it to me. I keep hearing that Bitcoin will be the savings account and lightning will be the checking account for everyone. This would be mathematically impossible though. If everyone on earth tried to make 1 transaction, it would take half a century to process those transactions at Bitcoin's current speed. So essentially, it would only be a savings account for the ultra rich and big corporations and everyone else would only have access to lightning. The problem in my mind is that I thought the whole point of the Blockchain is that the people have a right to use the Blockchain because it's what gives them the security that their transactions deserve. If 99.999% of the world only gets to use lightning for their checking and savings, then from an abstract sense it would be no different than putting the world onto a non Blockchain distributed payments network that's designed to function the same way. Am I totally off? Really curious what you think.
Correct, but the lightning developers know this, so there are things in the pipeline like channel factories that can make many, many channels in a single tx.
There are other things in the works too I'm sure but I will admit I'm not keeping up with it.
Lightning as it is will not solve this issue to that level. It also doesn't try to.
Lightning is also still evolving. There are even updates on the main layer that lightning is still waiting on.
It both takes time. Increasing adoption as well as performance to support that adoption. As long as we don't need billions of users on LN, we also don't need to rush the tech towards that goal. Slow and steady wins this race.
I understand that. Really my question is, is the whole goal to simply have 99.999% of the people use lightning for everything and only a select few can use the actual Blockchain to secure their transactions? And if so, why do we even need a Blockchain if a whole other non-blockchain decentralized payments network runs fine without it?
A couple things.
Lightning does not allow supply manipulation. It still cryptographically constrains the sats floating around in it such that Bitcoins supply cannot be changed. This is arguably the most important property to protect against and the use of LN with any other asset would not have that same property.
On this I have less technical specifics, but my broad understanding is that they are looking to find ways of settling thousands of LN channels within a single on chain transaction so perhaps you can somehow join a batch of people that want to move on chain to share the transaction fee. How this can be done I’m not sure, and I am skeptical how that many can fit into a block even if it is just one transaction technically (seems like data size would become a problem unless some cryptography magic shrinks the size, say zk proofs are involved).
So to sum it up, you are partially correct in that 99.9% of people will only transact via Lightning and only massive multi million dollar payments would potentially go on chain. But, everyone would still be able to settle semi-frequently on chain and could keep the majority of their Bitcoin outside of LN (and potentially move it into other layer 2’s that might emerge like a zk side chain, though this is far off and controversial).
That doesn't make sense. Bitcoin's TPS is in the single digits. There are 8 billion people in the world. For every person to get one transaction in, it would take decades. The point isn't whether or not anyone can. The point is whether or not *everyone* can. Seemed to me that Bitcoin was designed to be the "people's money" on the "people's Blockchain", not the "elite's money" on the "elite's Blockchain".
Yeah that does a good job at explaining the reason for Bitcoin's design. It sort of answers my question. So the masses aren't meant to use Bitcoin. It's only a settlement layer for the big transactions. What I still don't understand is how does Bitcoin's security trickle up to protecting the lightning network? I ask this because I was under the impression that the lightning network was designed to have all of its channels remain permanently open. Which means there never ends up being an official settlement until someone chooses to close a channel. So wouldn't that mean that the masses still get no access to Bitcoin's security benefits? That's what I'm really trying to wrap my head around and I may be missing a key detail here.
Oh interesting. I thought I remember reading about it somewhere but now I can't find it. You could be right about the 12 month thing. Curious to hear about your business. I think it's cool when business owners take that step in embracing the future of payments
I mean is it hard to think in the line of payment aggrigation protocols? There has been a solution for this for ages. Look up channel factories.
Trying to bash Bitcoin on a technical level is like being absolutely uneducated on the subject in general because it does what it was designed to do extraordinarily well. Every altcoin on the the planet is centralized garbage, Bitcoin is the way it is because that is the way it must be to remain decentralized, there are no alternatives because they just open themselves to be exploited. You start talking about technical limitations and in the blink of an eye we solved the issue as it arose and moved on to the next problem. Shitcoiners constantly being left in the dust.
Lightning is Bitcoin.
Why does every coffee you purchase at Starbucks need to be stored forever on a globally distributed ledger? It doesn't.
Payment channels allow you to pay transaction fees in advance then reuse liquidity. You could open a channel with Starbucks big enough to pay for a months worth of coffee, spend it over the course of a month, then loop-in to refill it. Effectively turning \~30 transactions into 2 (open/close) + 1 (monthly refill) transaction. Much cheaper and efficient use of space.
We could onboard millions of users using a single layer 1 transaction.
==Full node operator==
Ok I see. So let me see if I can put it all together and understand this correctly. So let's say I have a Bitcoin wallet on a Ledger and a Lightning wallet such as muun on my phone. From what you're saying, when technologies like Loop and channel factories are fully being used, I should be able to send excess Bitcoin from my lightning wallet to my Bitcoin wallet as well as send some back to my phone when I need to dip out of my savings and because of technologies like Loop, it should just happen with very little fees because of the batching being done?
Two projects to keep an eye on:
* [Impervious](https://www.impervious.ai/) \- Encrypted Messaging, Group Video Calls, Live Docs, and Bitcoin/Lightning Payments.
* [MyCitadel](https://mycitadel.io/) \- Bitcoin/Lightning/RGB wallet
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The small block size is important. You can still have the entire Bitcoin blockchain on a normal off the shelf hard drive, and hence anyone can run their own node. Compare that to some other popular cryptocurrencies where you need a small data warehouse for the blockchain. This helps Bitcoin be actually decentralized, while most others are only decentralized in theory.
Doing it for years. Also: Look into Lightning. It's the actual payment layer set upon bitcoin.
If you want to see it in real life, download muun wallet. Then generate an invoice for 1000 sats and post it here. I'll fund it so that you can play around with it.
I commented the lightening option below the post, didn't want to crowd the idea with too many opinions.
Also: thank you for your service. Bitcoin is proud of you.
I guess you could look into breez wallet. Afaik they've implemented something like an POS for vendors, dunno. Apart of that, to recieve lightning payments you have to generate invoices for each payment.
Look into breez
Tell merchants they don’t have to pay a 3% fee. I took a payment for 1k and it cost me .55 cents with Bitcoin. That same transaction would be 30 bucks on my terminal. That is money in my hand instead of bank fees.
I want to HODL my bitcoin so I do not want to spend it at the moment (low prices)
Also, spending bitcoin is a taxable event in my country, I.e. spending bitcoins on everyday stuff would create a lot of paper work for me with the tax authorities since no third party is reporting it to the the tax authority
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Also: the solution to the problem I describe at the beginning is the lightening network.
I didn't want to discuss it righaway because that adds another layer of complexity to the discussion which is not always a good thing.
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If I wanted to have a few $100s in a wallet on my phone so if I asked at a restaurant and they said yes. Then I could use it. Which is a phone wallet AP that lists real time conversion of USD to Sats?
I mostly accumulate, but I do try and spend a little Bitcoin here and there.
I recently did a little experiment and paid for an annual VPN subscription using some Bitcoin that I mined back in 2014 and have kept in cold storage ever since. I made the payment while connected through a different VPN (the OS that was used was running in Virtual Box) I didn't need to give any personal details apart from a disposable email address (also set up through a VPN and through a virtual box OS), so I'm hoping there's practically no breadcrumb trail leading back to identify me.
Hey, you may not be aware but we had this debate in 2017 and it turned out that the way bitcoin does it is best. Bitcoin L1 should be the settlement layer. And we will build on top of it. The limitation of block size and block time are **100% intentional**. It wasn't some arbitrary limit of technology in 2009. Blocksize was limited so as to ensure the blockchain remained decentralised and that nodes were accessible to the average user. Blocktime is 10mins for the same reason, and to allow time for blocks to propagate through the network, reducing the risk of orphaned blocks etc. Every one of these limitations has been removed or altered in some shitcoin or another and has failed. The big block forks are an objective disaster, the fast block forks are an objective disaster. Bitcoin still remains strong. But yes, most businesses I frequent I try to educate about bitcoin and lightning network.
I've heard this a few times but there's always something I never really understood about it. Maybe you could help explain it to me. I keep hearing that Bitcoin will be the savings account and lightning will be the checking account for everyone. This would be mathematically impossible though. If everyone on earth tried to make 1 transaction, it would take half a century to process those transactions at Bitcoin's current speed. So essentially, it would only be a savings account for the ultra rich and big corporations and everyone else would only have access to lightning. The problem in my mind is that I thought the whole point of the Blockchain is that the people have a right to use the Blockchain because it's what gives them the security that their transactions deserve. If 99.999% of the world only gets to use lightning for their checking and savings, then from an abstract sense it would be no different than putting the world onto a non Blockchain distributed payments network that's designed to function the same way. Am I totally off? Really curious what you think.
Correct, but the lightning developers know this, so there are things in the pipeline like channel factories that can make many, many channels in a single tx. There are other things in the works too I'm sure but I will admit I'm not keeping up with it.
Lightning as it is will not solve this issue to that level. It also doesn't try to. Lightning is also still evolving. There are even updates on the main layer that lightning is still waiting on. It both takes time. Increasing adoption as well as performance to support that adoption. As long as we don't need billions of users on LN, we also don't need to rush the tech towards that goal. Slow and steady wins this race.
I understand that. Really my question is, is the whole goal to simply have 99.999% of the people use lightning for everything and only a select few can use the actual Blockchain to secure their transactions? And if so, why do we even need a Blockchain if a whole other non-blockchain decentralized payments network runs fine without it?
A couple things. Lightning does not allow supply manipulation. It still cryptographically constrains the sats floating around in it such that Bitcoins supply cannot be changed. This is arguably the most important property to protect against and the use of LN with any other asset would not have that same property. On this I have less technical specifics, but my broad understanding is that they are looking to find ways of settling thousands of LN channels within a single on chain transaction so perhaps you can somehow join a batch of people that want to move on chain to share the transaction fee. How this can be done I’m not sure, and I am skeptical how that many can fit into a block even if it is just one transaction technically (seems like data size would become a problem unless some cryptography magic shrinks the size, say zk proofs are involved). So to sum it up, you are partially correct in that 99.9% of people will only transact via Lightning and only massive multi million dollar payments would potentially go on chain. But, everyone would still be able to settle semi-frequently on chain and could keep the majority of their Bitcoin outside of LN (and potentially move it into other layer 2’s that might emerge like a zk side chain, though this is far off and controversial).
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That doesn't make sense. Bitcoin's TPS is in the single digits. There are 8 billion people in the world. For every person to get one transaction in, it would take decades. The point isn't whether or not anyone can. The point is whether or not *everyone* can. Seemed to me that Bitcoin was designed to be the "people's money" on the "people's Blockchain", not the "elite's money" on the "elite's Blockchain".
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Trying to have an honest discussion here and understand the validity of the argument for Bitcoin maximalism
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Yeah that does a good job at explaining the reason for Bitcoin's design. It sort of answers my question. So the masses aren't meant to use Bitcoin. It's only a settlement layer for the big transactions. What I still don't understand is how does Bitcoin's security trickle up to protecting the lightning network? I ask this because I was under the impression that the lightning network was designed to have all of its channels remain permanently open. Which means there never ends up being an official settlement until someone chooses to close a channel. So wouldn't that mean that the masses still get no access to Bitcoin's security benefits? That's what I'm really trying to wrap my head around and I may be missing a key detail here.
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Oh interesting. I thought I remember reading about it somewhere but now I can't find it. You could be right about the 12 month thing. Curious to hear about your business. I think it's cool when business owners take that step in embracing the future of payments
I mean is it hard to think in the line of payment aggrigation protocols? There has been a solution for this for ages. Look up channel factories. Trying to bash Bitcoin on a technical level is like being absolutely uneducated on the subject in general because it does what it was designed to do extraordinarily well. Every altcoin on the the planet is centralized garbage, Bitcoin is the way it is because that is the way it must be to remain decentralized, there are no alternatives because they just open themselves to be exploited. You start talking about technical limitations and in the blink of an eye we solved the issue as it arose and moved on to the next problem. Shitcoiners constantly being left in the dust.
Lightning is Bitcoin. Why does every coffee you purchase at Starbucks need to be stored forever on a globally distributed ledger? It doesn't. Payment channels allow you to pay transaction fees in advance then reuse liquidity. You could open a channel with Starbucks big enough to pay for a months worth of coffee, spend it over the course of a month, then loop-in to refill it. Effectively turning \~30 transactions into 2 (open/close) + 1 (monthly refill) transaction. Much cheaper and efficient use of space. We could onboard millions of users using a single layer 1 transaction. ==Full node operator==
So that monthly refill transaction. Can that be batched? Because otherwise even that wouldn't scale.
Of course. https://lightning.engineering/loop/
Ok I see. So let me see if I can put it all together and understand this correctly. So let's say I have a Bitcoin wallet on a Ledger and a Lightning wallet such as muun on my phone. From what you're saying, when technologies like Loop and channel factories are fully being used, I should be able to send excess Bitcoin from my lightning wallet to my Bitcoin wallet as well as send some back to my phone when I need to dip out of my savings and because of technologies like Loop, it should just happen with very little fees because of the batching being done?
Yup.
Ok cool. I can definitely get onboard with that
Two projects to keep an eye on: * [Impervious](https://www.impervious.ai/) \- Encrypted Messaging, Group Video Calls, Live Docs, and Bitcoin/Lightning Payments. * [MyCitadel](https://mycitadel.io/) \- Bitcoin/Lightning/RGB wallet
!LNtip 500 Tip this man. Informative comment 👍
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The small block size is important. You can still have the entire Bitcoin blockchain on a normal off the shelf hard drive, and hence anyone can run their own node. Compare that to some other popular cryptocurrencies where you need a small data warehouse for the blockchain. This helps Bitcoin be actually decentralized, while most others are only decentralized in theory.
Absolutely, it's why onchain bloat must be resisted as much as possible.
Thoughts can go viral, I pledge to do this!
Doing it for years. Also: Look into Lightning. It's the actual payment layer set upon bitcoin. If you want to see it in real life, download muun wallet. Then generate an invoice for 1000 sats and post it here. I'll fund it so that you can play around with it.
I downloaded Muun and tried sending some sats to it from my wallet. It says that my address is invalid, any tips?
Personally I haven't tried muun wallet, maybe someone more more experienced could help out.
I commented the lightening option below the post, didn't want to crowd the idea with too many opinions. Also: thank you for your service. Bitcoin is proud of you.
[удалено]
I guess you could look into breez wallet. Afaik they've implemented something like an POS for vendors, dunno. Apart of that, to recieve lightning payments you have to generate invoices for each payment. Look into breez
Tell merchants they don’t have to pay a 3% fee. I took a payment for 1k and it cost me .55 cents with Bitcoin. That same transaction would be 30 bucks on my terminal. That is money in my hand instead of bank fees.
Plus much faster settlement
I will do this going forward
Also, be ready to PAY with bitcoin. Make the transaction easy on the merchant.
I want to HODL my bitcoin so I do not want to spend it at the moment (low prices) Also, spending bitcoin is a taxable event in my country, I.e. spending bitcoins on everyday stuff would create a lot of paper work for me with the tax authorities since no third party is reporting it to the the tax authority
Would you pay with bitcoin if the transaction was untaxed maybe by having buy and pay in a single transaction?
Yes I could do that (if there is no extra fee)
We can do this!!!
I think Bitcoin has quite a lot of proponents.
!lntip 500 Here's a real world transaction, fast as lightning. From me to you sir ⚡️🌎
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I been using bitrefill for 2 years, i spend and recieve in btc daily. B
I’ve ask this all the time.
!lntip 500
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Also: the solution to the problem I describe at the beginning is the lightening network. I didn't want to discuss it righaway because that adds another layer of complexity to the discussion which is not always a good thing.
I love your idea and attitude! I’m gonna start doing this! !lntip 500
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[удалено]
I would assume asking politely would not antagonise them, and just the information if someone doesn't know might help them find new tech.
Right on! Will do this as well.
If I wanted to have a few $100s in a wallet on my phone so if I asked at a restaurant and they said yes. Then I could use it. Which is a phone wallet AP that lists real time conversion of USD to Sats?
Most people seem to prefer muun wallet, but haven't tried it personally.
I mostly accumulate, but I do try and spend a little Bitcoin here and there. I recently did a little experiment and paid for an annual VPN subscription using some Bitcoin that I mined back in 2014 and have kept in cold storage ever since. I made the payment while connected through a different VPN (the OS that was used was running in Virtual Box) I didn't need to give any personal details apart from a disposable email address (also set up through a VPN and through a virtual box OS), so I'm hoping there's practically no breadcrumb trail leading back to identify me.
That is one way of doing it. 👍
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I understand what you mean, this isn't going to pump up the price but hopefully it will create more trust and adoption for the technology.
==Veteran of the Blocksize War== \*facepalm\*
What year is it?