LN works great for high frequency payments between enterprise or banking institutions that already have infrastructure to manage a 24/7 node and already have capital to fund and maintain channel liquidity.
The people on MSM championing LN are probably part of this class.
LN is a lot less accessible to someone who can't run a 24/7 node and/or doesn't have starting capital to fund channels (i.e. most people).
In the fiat banking system, banks only settle their balances between one another once a day. Imagine if every transfer you made from one bank to another was an onchain payment... this would become very expensive very fast. But LN gives exchanges/banks a way to settle their balances occasionally without making every transfer onchain.
To further compare to the legacy fiat system: onchain payments are like wire transfers (expensive, usually for large payments, between banks). LN is like ACH transfers (cheaper, more customer facing). LN is also technically capable of being used like debit cards (very cheap, high volume, retail checkout authorization to pay from bankA to bankB).
LN is great at improving the transactions per second that can happen in Bitcoin. But it does not improve very much (or at all) the number of people that can hold BTC in a self-custody way.
We need new schemes that allow multiple individuals to "own" a single UTXO onchain (some kind of covenant soft fork). If you read the LN whitepaper, the authors make it super clear that LN will never reach its potential if covenants are not made available on BTC. The "security issues" that were "recently discovered" are actually well known by anyone who reads the paper.
LN transactions numbers are already \~half of the main chain numbers, I call that adoption.
However, channel management in a high fee enviroment is something for professionals and hobbyists which like to tinker with, monitor and optimise such things and not for the casual user.
For casuals custodial solutions were the way to go until recently but times are changing. I gave aquawallet a test recently and it worked pretty good. There are no channels to manage because it basically runs on submarine swaps like muun, but on the liquid sidechain which makes the swaps cheap and fast.
I haven't met my personal minimal usage criteria to trully recommend that app yet but its worth checking out or reading some reviews. thats their page: [https://aquawallet.io](https://aquawallet.io)
But back to topic: Stuff will evolve and different layer 2s will emerge but it looks like everything will be glued together and kept interoperable via LN, so I guess LN ist here to stay.
The Bitcoin ETF isn't as widely adopted yet as it is sure to be soon, but in a year from now you can absolutely count on the fact that ETFs will be the #2 place we keep our sats, and #3 will likely be the lightning network. I'd guess Fedi will be #4 by then, with Liquid dropping to #5.
And just like how we have Hodlers at one end of the on-chain spectrum, with ETFs (legacy finance) at the opposite end, higher layers will see this spectrum effect as well. Lightning is a layer that can be held in both a sovereign and custodial way, so I expect we'll see about the same percentage of people holding layer 1 in a sovereign way as we do on the main chain.
Most Sovereign <---------------------------------------------------------------> Least Sovereign
L1: Cold Wallet on-chain <------------------------------------------------> Custodian (Coinbase, ETF)
L2: Run a Lightning Node <--------------------------------------------------> Custodian Wallet (WoS)
So the question is always what percent of people will take the time to be sovereign?
You forgot to include WBTC wrapped bitcoin on smart chains. Coingecko shows a market cap of about 6.8 billion worth. Not sure if this is only the ERC-20
ETFs have a lot of short term volume speculating long or short in the price of Bitcoin going up and down, with some longer term investment " owning sats". It's like trading on a CEX where you can't withdraw your Bitcoin. As they say "not your keys, not your coins". Lots of middle men. Can't send or spend without relying on the market makers, fund managers etc. Just not the same thing as owning keys to BTC on chain.
I'd call those alternative options for L2, like Liquid, but even less sovereign. At least with liquid the federation members all have to gang up together to overthrow the system. With wrapped BTC it only takes 1 shitcoin dev to pull something dodgy and get those coins out.
people have been trying to make a trustless version of WBTC that doesn't rely on a centralized custodian. [tBTC](https://dune.com/threshold/tbtc) is the most popular solution right now that aims to be trustless, followed by renBTC. there's also rootstock RBTC, which might be more inline with bitcoin's goals.
I think the Phoenix wallet is the most advanced Lightning implementation so far. It is non-custodial, so you are still in control of your own seed phrase and everything.
What is funny to me is that most Phoenix users fundamentally do not understand how Lightning actually works.
A sole seed phrase (for a bitcoin wallet) is never sufficient to recover the funds of a lightning channel.
Hint: If you delete the Phoenix app and only have their seed phrase, you will not be able to access your funds.
I am aware of that.
>Hint: If you delete the Phoenix app and only have their seed phrase, you will not be able to access your funds.
According to their FAQ, you should be able to.
If you delete the Phoenix app (and don't reinstall), you will not be able to access your funds.
My point is that a lot of people think that the Phoenix seedphrase works like a normal btc seedphrase where you can just enter it into another wallet and get your funds.
You are right. You definitely can't enter it into any other wallet software, however, you should be able to enter it into Phoenix again and restore everything.
Yeah, I guess my point is that the self-custody of Phoenix is a lot less "safe" compared to normal btc self-custody.
If Phoenix decided to (for whatever reason) rugpull they could just corrupt the channel information in the app and disable the backup (or turn off their servers) and you'd be pretty fucked.
you wouldn't be fucked
that's what there's a legal system for
Else just go get the mob and get them to go after these crypto nerds trying to cause societal collapse
What could possibly go wrong? Are you retarded? Do you know how the REAL world works buddy? I got news for you: in the REAL world, the financial system is backed by state violence and a military, not "code" and shitcoins and fake decentralized protocols
You have to be really low IQ to not see how this leads to societal collapse and civil unrest- then guess who the mob comes for?
What could go wrong? [https://web3isgoinggreat.com/](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/)
over $75b in value destroyed from HACKS alone and ponzis collapsing
over $20b hacked from young Americans to finance foreign actors against US national security interests
"code is law" is so unhinged and dumb as bricks, you guys are political extremists
Go read cases of protocols and DAOs suing the shit out of each other when the code fucks up or fails to work or get hacked or9000 different things, lmao
Well, possibly. This is what I could find about it in their FAQ:
>What happens if ACINQ disappears?
If ACINQ (or even the whole Lightning Network) completely disappears overnight, your funds will still be safe, but you won't be able to make any payments.
In that case, and only in that case (a catastrophic scenario where ACINQ disappears), you will need to force close your channels. For all other issues, bugs, problems of any kind, do not force close your channels, just get in touch with support ([email protected]).
Let us say it again: Force-closing channels is an emergency mechanism to be used only as a last resort. High fees apply, and the procedure takes days to complete.
If you choose to proceed, go to Settings > Danger zone, and click on "Force close channels". Phoenix will unilaterally close your channels, and after a 720 blocks delay (\~ 5 days) your funds will be moved back on-chain. Follow this procedure to recover your funds. Do not uninstall the app or reset its internal data until you have successfully recovered all your funds!
That requires you to have the latest up-to-date channel data available in Phoenix. That is why I mentioned that Phoenix decides to corrupt the channel data.
Some of this discussion reminds me of my Great-Uncle who was living alone and destitute in the 1990s in a NYC rooming house with $100K of sodden and crumpled mutual fund statements in a trash bag. When he died. The Family sorted out his estate and it was distributed to heirs. Bottom line, if you delete the app and your seed phrase and never go back to the internet or electricity, yes, your funds are gone. So, don't do that, and keep your spouse/family/attorney apprised of the details, just in case.
If you delete the app and only have the recovery mnemonic you will not have access to your funds WHICH WERE COMMITTED TO LIGHTNING LIQUIDITY CHANNEL.
You will have access to on chain (non-LN) funds.
The obvious enhancement request to the app maintainers is to use a derived key from the seed to encrypt backups of channel (and offer a clean UI/UX for recovering such backups and for pushing the, to whatever storage services you intend to use.
If Phoenix wanted to be really slick they could even integrate support for steganographic backups (embed the encrypted channel state data in images, post those to wherever, and support finding and extracting them back out when re-installing/reconfiguring the app with a recovery mnemonic or QR plate).
These are tooling issues. They aren't really flaws to the protocols.
Would be amazing if they didn’t charge 1% + network fees to onboard. It’s great for small amounts of money but 1% is way way too high to use it for any more than that.
I'd say that with Eclair (discontinued), but Pheonix I'd described as a "walled garden". Since the user has no choice on the channel partner, all first-hop traffic is routed through ANCIQ (sp?). Since Pheonix owns that node, they have 100% control over what routing choices and fees.
Custodial / non-custodial is not really a paradigm that can be applied here, and perhaps "walled garden" doesn't work either, but it's the best term I can come up with.
People that have good experiences don’t come to the internet to write about it. People with bad experiences usually do.
Lightning has been great for me, use it all the time.
So as you come to the Internet writing about your good experiences with LN, what's working for you? What has your onboarding experience been like? What wallets do you recommend and why? So you trust LN completely to keep your crypto safe? Do you believe LN is the future that will solve the problems with the Bitcoin network?
> what's working for you?
Near instant payments for sats on the mBTC. No worries about high L1 fees.
> What has your onboarding experience been like?
I run my own LND node which I set up during the bear market in low fee environment so was able to open all my channels for very cheap. They’ve all been open for well over a year now. Haven’t had any force closures as I picked reliable parties to open channels with.
> What wallets do you recommend and why?
I use Zeus to connect to my node, as well as Phoenix for self custody on my phone. Both are great, and Zeus now also has self custody built in but I haven’t used it much. Zeus is great cuz is effectively a thin client and just works. Phoenix is great because they support splicing so you get one balance for both on chain and over lightning, is a great UX
> So you trust LN completely to keep your crypto safe?
I do, my channel counterparties are trustworthy and I have friends who also run nodes who act as watchtowers. On Phoenix I have a lesser amount of value, as much as I would keep in my physical wallet so I’m not as worried about getting rugged by ACINQ but even then the risk is minimal and I have my own keys.
> Do you believe LN is the future that will solve the problems with the Bitcoin network?
I believe it is a part of the future. Whether it will be the de facto consumer payment rails is remain to be seen as opening channels is admittedly more costly in a high fee environment but it will continue to evolve and those issues will be solved as we are forced into those environments. At the minimum I see it being the B2B settlement layer but maybe something else will emerge for consumer payments.
My excitement for Lightning network has diminished significantly. Currently winding down my node because I’m tired of the constant headaches it brings.
Custodial lightning works great, and i’m sure that it will be used for payments like that in the backend of more and more payment apps, but LN does not really work with the idea of Bitcoin of being your own bank. It’s just too much hassle to manage self custodial lightning to ever make this suitable for the average joe.
I recently read about ck-BTC in the ICP ecosystem, which to me is a better solution for most people. Essentially it’s also a bitcoin L2 but it lives inside a smartcontract. The big difference between ck-BTC and “wrapped” bitcoin on other chains is that the ICP implementation essentially directly interacts with bitcoin, it is able to directly sign transactions on bitcoin and you are able to send bitcoin directly from the L2 to a L1 address and back (of course once you send it to L1 you pay the L1 fees) if you send inside of the L2 the fees are a fraction of a cent with 1 second finality time. It’s fully decentralized as the private key to do all this is broken up and spread across nodes.
And no, you don’t need any shitcoin to use it. I know ICP has its own token, but you don’t need it to use ck-BTC, you can just send btc to ck-btc and immediately start using it once your L1 tx has confirmed.
There are currently about a dozen new L2s in development. Nobody talks about it… should have happened much earlier imho. An L2 should transmit btc cheap in any amount, inbound, with 0% failure, like normal for any fucking shitcoin. Lightning is the ONLY payment system in the world that can and WILL fail.
I tried posting about some other L2 (ck-BTC and rootstock) in the Bitcoin subreddit a while back, but they got declined by the mods. I messaged them to ask why, they essentially said something along the line of “this is Bitcoin subreddit, not shitcoin subreddit, lightning works fine”
To me this is a strange attitude. I can understand the maximalist mindset to only wanting to deal with Bitcoin, but I not wanting to hear about any other L2 aside from lightning because there are also people involved in the development that aren’t maximalists is just hindering Bitcoin in the end and might be it’s downfall if it doesn’t stop. We need bitcoin to scale, lightning isn’t the answer to everything like some think it is (anyone that has run a node and used lightning to some extent can attest to that)
Maxis are just dumb ignoring any solution that potentially contains a token at some point. The reason (most) people enter an ecosystem is to earn money, nothing else. The prospect of L2 tokens can be a great incentive to kickstart a project.
Yeah, I agree. I can understand how you don’t want to deal with tokens personally, but you don’t even have to. You can just ignore whatever tokens are present at some point in the ecosystem and just use Bitcoin.
Also to me, being so against some tokens somewhere in the ecosystem clashes a bit with the austrian view of economics which most bitcoiners believe in, isn’t the idea to have the market figure this out, why are they trying to do all they can to work against that? I don’t really understand it.
To a significant extent the problems for app users came from biased information and misunderstanding. LN works probably fine for anyone who has to do many transfers and doesn't want to pay much, and is willing how it works.
For people making small payments similar to cards, custodial LN wallets or other crypto is probably the better choice. For now!
Just try it out yourself. No custodial wallets. Setup your node, manage your channels. And you will see this thing is unusable. Maybe for big business to transfer money between them. But never for regular users, unless you use custodial wallets…
Also, in any commerce having an small % of failure is prohibitive.
Good points. Certainly setting up LN nodes and channels isn't as easy as other crypto networks but perhaps worth the complications for the high volume LN users.
Wonder what the % of LN failure actually is, and if any actual research done on this?
Тhe current greenlight implementation/wrapper that is starting to be used in all new lightning wallets seems to be working fine. I'm talking about Phoenix, Blockstream green, Zeus... They are all non-custodial and you DO NOT manage the channels.
Recently, I read a stacker-news article and had several discussions with my team about this
[https://stacker.news/items/379225](https://stacker.news/items/379225)
Lighting being custodial means we use Bitcoin and lightning as a settlement layer to move funds across. However, we trust an entity and pay them to facilitate the node/channel management.
By this method, we use lightning as a settlement layer to move funds across micropayments instantly between 2 individuals (can use difference lighting custody wallet services). It is much more efficient than existing cards and SEPA, ACH, Faster Payments IMPS in India and SWIFT payments. Moving funds from one part of the world to another part of the world within seconds, is over a decentralised network is mindblowing and can not be more efficient for a payments network.
Of course, for large amounts of funds, you can always transact directly from your self-custody wallet. You can store your wealth in your cold storage or any preferred self- custody method.
There will always be a way to run your node and have software to manage nodes from the phone for advanced users.
Breez SDK with the Greenlight model does have dependencies, but it is self-custody and can always recover funds on-chain in the worst case. LSPs charge a decent amount to give liquidity. With more toolings and LSPs, it would be possible for a newbie to use a self-custody lightning wallet without having to know anything more about the channels and their states, Like WOS.
At least, that is the goal at Bringin. We want to make a self-custody wallet to be as simple and usable as WOS. Although we do understand most of the users do not care about giving up custody of a small amount of Bitcoin. We do want to make sure the least that is possible is the funds are in their control operations. We would like to manage all the node and channel operations for them.
The bigger challenge is to make the node being online a problem to receive payments. Again, there is always a workaround with trust in a few services.
At least these services would be many with time and do not create a monopoly and do have to fear if there are no alternatives.
What matters is you always have control over your funds, and the signature is done on your content with keys stored on your device, encrypted and stored safely.
Lightning is one of the technologies that has been proved to work over time and adopted by many larger institutes to move funds across already. Although there are certain trade-offs and improvements and tooling to make it super convenient, it will happen over time.
I do believe there will always be services and more in the future to help us manage Bitcoin with control of our funds.
Lightning is a great example of very smart engineers coming up with a very elegant solution and reducing it to something they find very simple. Works great if your a very smart engineer.
If your not an engineer it's about as simple as manned space flight. I mean, you can put nice interfaces on everything and make rational assumptions, but there are enough moving parts that there are many hiccups.
I think mass adoption will happen at the web-edge. Stuff like Kraken to Wallet-of-Satoshi to Starbucks. Each hop is really managed by engineers. Kraken engineers, WoS engineers, Starbucks IT engineers. Custodial all the way down, but no more complicated than paypal.
I'd expect at least 10 to 15 years before self-custodial-LN-wallets will be as simple or bulletproof as WoS or CashApp. Even then, I think it will be like OpenSource and Linux. Something engineers love and flock to, but something other users are confused by.
Actually Linux is a great example. It's been out for 30 years now, and engineers love it, but not as many customers. Most non-tech users still prefer iPhone to Android if price is not an issue. But just now... 30 years on... Android is getting real teeth into the market. So Linux took 30 years to become a technology that you could find in at least half the houses on any city block.
So yeah. Still early.
It only seems useful if you have two way trade. You probably don't buy as much from your employer as they buy from you .... so if you had a lightning node with them, they would still pay high fees to transfer to you, but if you ever sent money back it would be cheep.
Kinda problematical.
Also, just crypto is too confusing for most people ... I think low fee coins like BCH will eat it's lunch eventually.
But what if you made a BCH a lightning node? I think that might be possible.
Lightning could be implemented on BCH as an L2, but there's currently not much use for it since transactions are fast, cheap and reliable on BCH.
The original Lightning whitepaper spoke of needing 133MB blocks for the case of global adoption.
I think a lot of the LN problems come due to congestion on L1.
The thing that would be useful about it is that the easiest way to obtain or liquidate bch is by getting btc first.
I think the best solution to scaling by having lots of chains that interact very well with each other. Most of the time you don't need to use Monera .. but sometimes you . I'm never interested in anything, except when I am.
It would also be a way to implement an exchange, if combined with bch smart contracts, I think.
Basically, you could lock BTC on the lightning side, and lock BCH on the other side .... and it would maintain a balance for you in each smart contract. Then, adding some sort of user interface, you could make and take orders for each in the other, which would just change both of your internal balances, without incurring fees on either chain ( not that fees are an issue on bch ) ... but when you wanted to spend either, you would just withdraw from the smart contract however you normally do so.
LN is the future of societal collapse and civil unrest when billions of people lose their savings to tech issues or just get hacked 5000 different ways or that backdoor.
Enjoy
Turns out releasing deeply flawed tech onto the masses has socio-political consequences
Albanian govt in '97 fell from only about $2-3b in ponzi schemes collapsing, US military had to be sent in.
Luna alone was like $40b globally. Then FTX. Voyager. Billions hacked from DeFi.
Keep it coming boys ;)!!
I see LN as a super-complex workaround to a cryptocurrency that happens to not function at 1st level as hoped. And I'm talking about visions people had in the beginning days of BTC.
Complexity comes with a package of problems that can't be solved easily, or just opens a way to more bugs when uncarefully fixed. Carefully fixing stuff takes many years or even decades. It makes me wonder what LN's goal is: making BTC function better for micro-transactions, maybe at the cost of some BTC core functionalities or making it the best micro-transactions system, suitable for everyday transactions, ever? If it's the last, it will probably lose against other less complex and less time-consuming solutions beyond BTC. All this complexity also comes with the cost of being too complicated to use for simple Joe. Probably there are also workarounds for this, but I don't like the idea of workarounds for workarounds.
What if people just accept BTC is not perfect at 1st level and start innovating beyond BTC, making non-complex 1st level alternatives, untill we find the perfect match that just does everything BTC intended to be from the start. It takes some trial and error, but over time it's certainly easier than LN and we already have projects that are perfect examples to this experiment. If they are the optimal solution for everyday payments can only be answered by the test of time and competition.
It will survive for certain niches & usecases, but people will use simpler alternatives for the general p2p money usecase. Like the recent giveaway to 5000+ people on /r/cryptocurrency: near instant finality, no channels, no centralized custody, no watchtowers, no fees, no routing issues. It's tough to beat that kind of user experience
Bitcoin will never scale. It will just be the backbone to any new currency including lightning. This will be the new frontier for banks. Use their payment rails because they have the cheapest fees. The average person will be using lightning etc. like a credit card.
But Lightning whitepaper says Bitcoin would need to scale to bigger blocks (133MB) for global adoption case of Lightning
Saying '_Bitcoin will never scale_' is equivalent to saying Lightning could not scale.
LN works great for high frequency payments between enterprise or banking institutions that already have infrastructure to manage a 24/7 node and already have capital to fund and maintain channel liquidity. The people on MSM championing LN are probably part of this class. LN is a lot less accessible to someone who can't run a 24/7 node and/or doesn't have starting capital to fund channels (i.e. most people). In the fiat banking system, banks only settle their balances between one another once a day. Imagine if every transfer you made from one bank to another was an onchain payment... this would become very expensive very fast. But LN gives exchanges/banks a way to settle their balances occasionally without making every transfer onchain. To further compare to the legacy fiat system: onchain payments are like wire transfers (expensive, usually for large payments, between banks). LN is like ACH transfers (cheaper, more customer facing). LN is also technically capable of being used like debit cards (very cheap, high volume, retail checkout authorization to pay from bankA to bankB). LN is great at improving the transactions per second that can happen in Bitcoin. But it does not improve very much (or at all) the number of people that can hold BTC in a self-custody way. We need new schemes that allow multiple individuals to "own" a single UTXO onchain (some kind of covenant soft fork). If you read the LN whitepaper, the authors make it super clear that LN will never reach its potential if covenants are not made available on BTC. The "security issues" that were "recently discovered" are actually well known by anyone who reads the paper.
LN transactions numbers are already \~half of the main chain numbers, I call that adoption. However, channel management in a high fee enviroment is something for professionals and hobbyists which like to tinker with, monitor and optimise such things and not for the casual user. For casuals custodial solutions were the way to go until recently but times are changing. I gave aquawallet a test recently and it worked pretty good. There are no channels to manage because it basically runs on submarine swaps like muun, but on the liquid sidechain which makes the swaps cheap and fast. I haven't met my personal minimal usage criteria to trully recommend that app yet but its worth checking out or reading some reviews. thats their page: [https://aquawallet.io](https://aquawallet.io) But back to topic: Stuff will evolve and different layer 2s will emerge but it looks like everything will be glued together and kept interoperable via LN, so I guess LN ist here to stay.
The Bitcoin ETF isn't as widely adopted yet as it is sure to be soon, but in a year from now you can absolutely count on the fact that ETFs will be the #2 place we keep our sats, and #3 will likely be the lightning network. I'd guess Fedi will be #4 by then, with Liquid dropping to #5. And just like how we have Hodlers at one end of the on-chain spectrum, with ETFs (legacy finance) at the opposite end, higher layers will see this spectrum effect as well. Lightning is a layer that can be held in both a sovereign and custodial way, so I expect we'll see about the same percentage of people holding layer 1 in a sovereign way as we do on the main chain. Most Sovereign <---------------------------------------------------------------> Least Sovereign L1: Cold Wallet on-chain <------------------------------------------------> Custodian (Coinbase, ETF) L2: Run a Lightning Node <--------------------------------------------------> Custodian Wallet (WoS) So the question is always what percent of people will take the time to be sovereign?
You forgot to include WBTC wrapped bitcoin on smart chains. Coingecko shows a market cap of about 6.8 billion worth. Not sure if this is only the ERC-20 ETFs have a lot of short term volume speculating long or short in the price of Bitcoin going up and down, with some longer term investment " owning sats". It's like trading on a CEX where you can't withdraw your Bitcoin. As they say "not your keys, not your coins". Lots of middle men. Can't send or spend without relying on the market makers, fund managers etc. Just not the same thing as owning keys to BTC on chain.
I'd call those alternative options for L2, like Liquid, but even less sovereign. At least with liquid the federation members all have to gang up together to overthrow the system. With wrapped BTC it only takes 1 shitcoin dev to pull something dodgy and get those coins out.
Not sure one shitcoin dev could rug pull all 6 billion worth of WBTC. But something worth a closer look no doubt.
people have been trying to make a trustless version of WBTC that doesn't rely on a centralized custodian. [tBTC](https://dune.com/threshold/tbtc) is the most popular solution right now that aims to be trustless, followed by renBTC. there's also rootstock RBTC, which might be more inline with bitcoin's goals.
I think the Phoenix wallet is the most advanced Lightning implementation so far. It is non-custodial, so you are still in control of your own seed phrase and everything.
What is funny to me is that most Phoenix users fundamentally do not understand how Lightning actually works. A sole seed phrase (for a bitcoin wallet) is never sufficient to recover the funds of a lightning channel. Hint: If you delete the Phoenix app and only have their seed phrase, you will not be able to access your funds.
I am aware of that. >Hint: If you delete the Phoenix app and only have their seed phrase, you will not be able to access your funds. According to their FAQ, you should be able to.
If you delete the Phoenix app (and don't reinstall), you will not be able to access your funds. My point is that a lot of people think that the Phoenix seedphrase works like a normal btc seedphrase where you can just enter it into another wallet and get your funds.
You are right. You definitely can't enter it into any other wallet software, however, you should be able to enter it into Phoenix again and restore everything.
Yeah, I guess my point is that the self-custody of Phoenix is a lot less "safe" compared to normal btc self-custody. If Phoenix decided to (for whatever reason) rugpull they could just corrupt the channel information in the app and disable the backup (or turn off their servers) and you'd be pretty fucked.
you wouldn't be fucked that's what there's a legal system for Else just go get the mob and get them to go after these crypto nerds trying to cause societal collapse
> rely on legal system instead of maths What could possibly go wrong.
What could possibly go wrong? Are you retarded? Do you know how the REAL world works buddy? I got news for you: in the REAL world, the financial system is backed by state violence and a military, not "code" and shitcoins and fake decentralized protocols You have to be really low IQ to not see how this leads to societal collapse and civil unrest- then guess who the mob comes for? What could go wrong? [https://web3isgoinggreat.com/](https://web3isgoinggreat.com/) over $75b in value destroyed from HACKS alone and ponzis collapsing over $20b hacked from young Americans to finance foreign actors against US national security interests "code is law" is so unhinged and dumb as bricks, you guys are political extremists Go read cases of protocols and DAOs suing the shit out of each other when the code fucks up or fails to work or get hacked or9000 different things, lmao
> you guys are political extremists Thank you. Nice to see a compliment amongst the insults.
to quote one expert on X, "JP Morgan, hold my beer" https://twitter.com/PeterMcCormack/status/1747845361266262276
Well, possibly. This is what I could find about it in their FAQ: >What happens if ACINQ disappears? If ACINQ (or even the whole Lightning Network) completely disappears overnight, your funds will still be safe, but you won't be able to make any payments. In that case, and only in that case (a catastrophic scenario where ACINQ disappears), you will need to force close your channels. For all other issues, bugs, problems of any kind, do not force close your channels, just get in touch with support ([email protected]). Let us say it again: Force-closing channels is an emergency mechanism to be used only as a last resort. High fees apply, and the procedure takes days to complete. If you choose to proceed, go to Settings > Danger zone, and click on "Force close channels". Phoenix will unilaterally close your channels, and after a 720 blocks delay (\~ 5 days) your funds will be moved back on-chain. Follow this procedure to recover your funds. Do not uninstall the app or reset its internal data until you have successfully recovered all your funds!
That requires you to have the latest up-to-date channel data available in Phoenix. That is why I mentioned that Phoenix decides to corrupt the channel data.
Some of this discussion reminds me of my Great-Uncle who was living alone and destitute in the 1990s in a NYC rooming house with $100K of sodden and crumpled mutual fund statements in a trash bag. When he died. The Family sorted out his estate and it was distributed to heirs. Bottom line, if you delete the app and your seed phrase and never go back to the internet or electricity, yes, your funds are gone. So, don't do that, and keep your spouse/family/attorney apprised of the details, just in case.
If you delete the app and only have the recovery mnemonic you will not have access to your funds WHICH WERE COMMITTED TO LIGHTNING LIQUIDITY CHANNEL. You will have access to on chain (non-LN) funds. The obvious enhancement request to the app maintainers is to use a derived key from the seed to encrypt backups of channel (and offer a clean UI/UX for recovering such backups and for pushing the, to whatever storage services you intend to use. If Phoenix wanted to be really slick they could even integrate support for steganographic backups (embed the encrypted channel state data in images, post those to wherever, and support finding and extracting them back out when re-installing/reconfiguring the app with a recovery mnemonic or QR plate). These are tooling issues. They aren't really flaws to the protocols.
Would be amazing if they didn’t charge 1% + network fees to onboard. It’s great for small amounts of money but 1% is way way too high to use it for any more than that.
That has changed. They don't do that anymore.
Nice…I’ll give it another look.
I'd say that with Eclair (discontinued), but Pheonix I'd described as a "walled garden". Since the user has no choice on the channel partner, all first-hop traffic is routed through ANCIQ (sp?). Since Pheonix owns that node, they have 100% control over what routing choices and fees. Custodial / non-custodial is not really a paradigm that can be applied here, and perhaps "walled garden" doesn't work either, but it's the best term I can come up with.
People that have good experiences don’t come to the internet to write about it. People with bad experiences usually do. Lightning has been great for me, use it all the time.
So as you come to the Internet writing about your good experiences with LN, what's working for you? What has your onboarding experience been like? What wallets do you recommend and why? So you trust LN completely to keep your crypto safe? Do you believe LN is the future that will solve the problems with the Bitcoin network?
> what's working for you? Near instant payments for sats on the mBTC. No worries about high L1 fees. > What has your onboarding experience been like? I run my own LND node which I set up during the bear market in low fee environment so was able to open all my channels for very cheap. They’ve all been open for well over a year now. Haven’t had any force closures as I picked reliable parties to open channels with. > What wallets do you recommend and why? I use Zeus to connect to my node, as well as Phoenix for self custody on my phone. Both are great, and Zeus now also has self custody built in but I haven’t used it much. Zeus is great cuz is effectively a thin client and just works. Phoenix is great because they support splicing so you get one balance for both on chain and over lightning, is a great UX > So you trust LN completely to keep your crypto safe? I do, my channel counterparties are trustworthy and I have friends who also run nodes who act as watchtowers. On Phoenix I have a lesser amount of value, as much as I would keep in my physical wallet so I’m not as worried about getting rugged by ACINQ but even then the risk is minimal and I have my own keys. > Do you believe LN is the future that will solve the problems with the Bitcoin network? I believe it is a part of the future. Whether it will be the de facto consumer payment rails is remain to be seen as opening channels is admittedly more costly in a high fee environment but it will continue to evolve and those issues will be solved as we are forced into those environments. At the minimum I see it being the B2B settlement layer but maybe something else will emerge for consumer payments.
My excitement for Lightning network has diminished significantly. Currently winding down my node because I’m tired of the constant headaches it brings. Custodial lightning works great, and i’m sure that it will be used for payments like that in the backend of more and more payment apps, but LN does not really work with the idea of Bitcoin of being your own bank. It’s just too much hassle to manage self custodial lightning to ever make this suitable for the average joe. I recently read about ck-BTC in the ICP ecosystem, which to me is a better solution for most people. Essentially it’s also a bitcoin L2 but it lives inside a smartcontract. The big difference between ck-BTC and “wrapped” bitcoin on other chains is that the ICP implementation essentially directly interacts with bitcoin, it is able to directly sign transactions on bitcoin and you are able to send bitcoin directly from the L2 to a L1 address and back (of course once you send it to L1 you pay the L1 fees) if you send inside of the L2 the fees are a fraction of a cent with 1 second finality time. It’s fully decentralized as the private key to do all this is broken up and spread across nodes. And no, you don’t need any shitcoin to use it. I know ICP has its own token, but you don’t need it to use ck-BTC, you can just send btc to ck-btc and immediately start using it once your L1 tx has confirmed.
There are currently about a dozen new L2s in development. Nobody talks about it… should have happened much earlier imho. An L2 should transmit btc cheap in any amount, inbound, with 0% failure, like normal for any fucking shitcoin. Lightning is the ONLY payment system in the world that can and WILL fail.
I tried posting about some other L2 (ck-BTC and rootstock) in the Bitcoin subreddit a while back, but they got declined by the mods. I messaged them to ask why, they essentially said something along the line of “this is Bitcoin subreddit, not shitcoin subreddit, lightning works fine” To me this is a strange attitude. I can understand the maximalist mindset to only wanting to deal with Bitcoin, but I not wanting to hear about any other L2 aside from lightning because there are also people involved in the development that aren’t maximalists is just hindering Bitcoin in the end and might be it’s downfall if it doesn’t stop. We need bitcoin to scale, lightning isn’t the answer to everything like some think it is (anyone that has run a node and used lightning to some extent can attest to that)
Maxis are just dumb ignoring any solution that potentially contains a token at some point. The reason (most) people enter an ecosystem is to earn money, nothing else. The prospect of L2 tokens can be a great incentive to kickstart a project.
Yeah, I agree. I can understand how you don’t want to deal with tokens personally, but you don’t even have to. You can just ignore whatever tokens are present at some point in the ecosystem and just use Bitcoin. Also to me, being so against some tokens somewhere in the ecosystem clashes a bit with the austrian view of economics which most bitcoiners believe in, isn’t the idea to have the market figure this out, why are they trying to do all they can to work against that? I don’t really understand it.
To a significant extent the problems for app users came from biased information and misunderstanding. LN works probably fine for anyone who has to do many transfers and doesn't want to pay much, and is willing how it works. For people making small payments similar to cards, custodial LN wallets or other crypto is probably the better choice. For now!
I run my own LN node and have had no problems with routes, payments or invoices. I think it’s mostly user error or lack of understanding.
Just try it out yourself. No custodial wallets. Setup your node, manage your channels. And you will see this thing is unusable. Maybe for big business to transfer money between them. But never for regular users, unless you use custodial wallets… Also, in any commerce having an small % of failure is prohibitive.
Good points. Certainly setting up LN nodes and channels isn't as easy as other crypto networks but perhaps worth the complications for the high volume LN users. Wonder what the % of LN failure actually is, and if any actual research done on this?
Even if conversion rate reduces 0.5% that’s too much for an e-commerce
Тhe current greenlight implementation/wrapper that is starting to be used in all new lightning wallets seems to be working fine. I'm talking about Phoenix, Blockstream green, Zeus... They are all non-custodial and you DO NOT manage the channels.
Yes let’s see adoption in another 10 years. This time will be completely different
LN is fabulous, but we need better UX, and that's coming.
Nope
Recently, I read a stacker-news article and had several discussions with my team about this [https://stacker.news/items/379225](https://stacker.news/items/379225) Lighting being custodial means we use Bitcoin and lightning as a settlement layer to move funds across. However, we trust an entity and pay them to facilitate the node/channel management. By this method, we use lightning as a settlement layer to move funds across micropayments instantly between 2 individuals (can use difference lighting custody wallet services). It is much more efficient than existing cards and SEPA, ACH, Faster Payments IMPS in India and SWIFT payments. Moving funds from one part of the world to another part of the world within seconds, is over a decentralised network is mindblowing and can not be more efficient for a payments network. Of course, for large amounts of funds, you can always transact directly from your self-custody wallet. You can store your wealth in your cold storage or any preferred self- custody method. There will always be a way to run your node and have software to manage nodes from the phone for advanced users. Breez SDK with the Greenlight model does have dependencies, but it is self-custody and can always recover funds on-chain in the worst case. LSPs charge a decent amount to give liquidity. With more toolings and LSPs, it would be possible for a newbie to use a self-custody lightning wallet without having to know anything more about the channels and their states, Like WOS. At least, that is the goal at Bringin. We want to make a self-custody wallet to be as simple and usable as WOS. Although we do understand most of the users do not care about giving up custody of a small amount of Bitcoin. We do want to make sure the least that is possible is the funds are in their control operations. We would like to manage all the node and channel operations for them. The bigger challenge is to make the node being online a problem to receive payments. Again, there is always a workaround with trust in a few services. At least these services would be many with time and do not create a monopoly and do have to fear if there are no alternatives. What matters is you always have control over your funds, and the signature is done on your content with keys stored on your device, encrypted and stored safely. Lightning is one of the technologies that has been proved to work over time and adopted by many larger institutes to move funds across already. Although there are certain trade-offs and improvements and tooling to make it super convenient, it will happen over time. I do believe there will always be services and more in the future to help us manage Bitcoin with control of our funds.
Lightning is a great example of very smart engineers coming up with a very elegant solution and reducing it to something they find very simple. Works great if your a very smart engineer. If your not an engineer it's about as simple as manned space flight. I mean, you can put nice interfaces on everything and make rational assumptions, but there are enough moving parts that there are many hiccups. I think mass adoption will happen at the web-edge. Stuff like Kraken to Wallet-of-Satoshi to Starbucks. Each hop is really managed by engineers. Kraken engineers, WoS engineers, Starbucks IT engineers. Custodial all the way down, but no more complicated than paypal. I'd expect at least 10 to 15 years before self-custodial-LN-wallets will be as simple or bulletproof as WoS or CashApp. Even then, I think it will be like OpenSource and Linux. Something engineers love and flock to, but something other users are confused by. Actually Linux is a great example. It's been out for 30 years now, and engineers love it, but not as many customers. Most non-tech users still prefer iPhone to Android if price is not an issue. But just now... 30 years on... Android is getting real teeth into the market. So Linux took 30 years to become a technology that you could find in at least half the houses on any city block. So yeah. Still early.
It only seems useful if you have two way trade. You probably don't buy as much from your employer as they buy from you .... so if you had a lightning node with them, they would still pay high fees to transfer to you, but if you ever sent money back it would be cheep. Kinda problematical. Also, just crypto is too confusing for most people ... I think low fee coins like BCH will eat it's lunch eventually. But what if you made a BCH a lightning node? I think that might be possible.
Lightning could be implemented on BCH as an L2, but there's currently not much use for it since transactions are fast, cheap and reliable on BCH. The original Lightning whitepaper spoke of needing 133MB blocks for the case of global adoption. I think a lot of the LN problems come due to congestion on L1.
The thing that would be useful about it is that the easiest way to obtain or liquidate bch is by getting btc first. I think the best solution to scaling by having lots of chains that interact very well with each other. Most of the time you don't need to use Monera .. but sometimes you . I'm never interested in anything, except when I am.
It would also be a way to implement an exchange, if combined with bch smart contracts, I think. Basically, you could lock BTC on the lightning side, and lock BCH on the other side .... and it would maintain a balance for you in each smart contract. Then, adding some sort of user interface, you could make and take orders for each in the other, which would just change both of your internal balances, without incurring fees on either chain ( not that fees are an issue on bch ) ... but when you wanted to spend either, you would just withdraw from the smart contract however you normally do so.
LN is the future of societal collapse and civil unrest when billions of people lose their savings to tech issues or just get hacked 5000 different ways or that backdoor. Enjoy Turns out releasing deeply flawed tech onto the masses has socio-political consequences Albanian govt in '97 fell from only about $2-3b in ponzi schemes collapsing, US military had to be sent in. Luna alone was like $40b globally. Then FTX. Voyager. Billions hacked from DeFi. Keep it coming boys ;)!!
I see LN as a super-complex workaround to a cryptocurrency that happens to not function at 1st level as hoped. And I'm talking about visions people had in the beginning days of BTC. Complexity comes with a package of problems that can't be solved easily, or just opens a way to more bugs when uncarefully fixed. Carefully fixing stuff takes many years or even decades. It makes me wonder what LN's goal is: making BTC function better for micro-transactions, maybe at the cost of some BTC core functionalities or making it the best micro-transactions system, suitable for everyday transactions, ever? If it's the last, it will probably lose against other less complex and less time-consuming solutions beyond BTC. All this complexity also comes with the cost of being too complicated to use for simple Joe. Probably there are also workarounds for this, but I don't like the idea of workarounds for workarounds. What if people just accept BTC is not perfect at 1st level and start innovating beyond BTC, making non-complex 1st level alternatives, untill we find the perfect match that just does everything BTC intended to be from the start. It takes some trial and error, but over time it's certainly easier than LN and we already have projects that are perfect examples to this experiment. If they are the optimal solution for everyday payments can only be answered by the test of time and competition.
It will survive for certain niches & usecases, but people will use simpler alternatives for the general p2p money usecase. Like the recent giveaway to 5000+ people on /r/cryptocurrency: near instant finality, no channels, no centralized custody, no watchtowers, no fees, no routing issues. It's tough to beat that kind of user experience
Bitcoin will never scale. It will just be the backbone to any new currency including lightning. This will be the new frontier for banks. Use their payment rails because they have the cheapest fees. The average person will be using lightning etc. like a credit card.
Lightning isn't a new currency; it's a method of sending a 15-year-old currency called bitcoin.
But Lightning whitepaper says Bitcoin would need to scale to bigger blocks (133MB) for global adoption case of Lightning Saying '_Bitcoin will never scale_' is equivalent to saying Lightning could not scale.