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Bitcoin's Highly Anticipated 'Lightning Network' Goes Live (thehill.com)
Lightning Labs on Thursday announced the beta release of its highly-anticipated Lightning Network Daemon (LND), a developer-friendly software client used to access Bitcoin's Lightning Network, anonymous readers wrote, citing media reports. From a report: Bitcoin supporters believe that the network has the potential to help the cryptocurrency achieve mass adoption. Bitcoin has struggled in recent months with slow and high-fee transactions, which make it harder for bitcoin to achieve mainstream popularity. Lightning Labs, the company behind the network, also announced on Thursday that it has received investments from major financial technology players, including Square chief executive and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks.
Until the transaction time and cost rival credit cards, cryptocurrency isn't going to become the standard. Seems to work for ransoms. Great for contraband. If you're an investor, it's as good as roulette (with the exception that fraud on the roulette table is illegal.) I've heard that overstock.com accepts Bitcoin, but it seems more useful in the dark markets.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Unfortunately for Bitcoin, it's a little bit too late. Bitcoin isn't going to go away, but it has soured in the fickle imagination of the world's population. Bitcoin isn't the golden boy anymore, now it's a dirty word.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Bitcoin supporters believe that the network has the potential to help the cryptocurrency achieve mass adoption.
No one with a brain believes this "Lightning Network" shit has potential, will help, or that Bitcoin even needs help.
Bitcoin has struggled in recent months with slow and high-fee transactions, which make it harder for bitcoin to achieve mainstream popularity.
Bitcoin isn't struggling. Blocks are mined just as quickly/slowly as they were before. Transactions are only slow if you don't want to pay fees. Fees are only high if you want to speed up the transaction. This is by design. This isn't preventing mainstream popularity, rather mainstream popularity is causing cheap/free transactions to slow down. If you want to use the network, support the network. Pay a fee or wait, it's your choice. Or mine yourself.
Lightning Labs, the company behind the network,
Keep in mind this company is not behind Bitcoin in anyway. They're behind their own bullshit and nothing else.
also announced on Thursday that it has received investments from major financial technology players, including Square chief executive and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and PayPal chief operating officer David Sacks.
They think this is a good thing? If there's one thing the Bitcoin community hates, its fucking clowns and hucksters from the obsolete establishment trying to wedge themselves in.
I don't know what Lightning Labs actually is (and neither does Lightning Labs), but I know it's bullshit!
barring a seismic shift I'm going to want my BTC to be in my native currency at some point. Most of the exchange fees come from that conversion.
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While you are technically correct, the question still does raise an interesting point.
The network is designed to favor the longest chain. Yet sometimes the longest chain loses. Two miners are working on block n. Miner A completes block n. A while later, miner B (who either didn't get the message about miner A, or decided maliciously to ignore it) mines block n, then gets lucky and mines block n+1. Assuming miner B's block goes on to become the official new chain, then miner A never technically mined any of those block successfully, and all those transaction are invalid (even though they were confirmed initially).
This doesn't happen often, but it does happen from time to time. Yet with every block ahead one version of the chain gets, it makes it increasingly more unlikely for the other chain to catch up (unless the other controls a majority of the hashing power). That's why the generally accepted system is that a block is mined every 10 minutes, but a transaction isn't generally considered completely verified until 6 block (1 hour) later. By the time that 6 additional blocks have been mined, it is statistically extremely unlikely for the other chain to catch up.
Yet, in the proposed theoretical scenario, what you have is 2 different fractions of the network cut off from each other. Both are working with the best of intentions, and after several hours have passed, certainly everyone would have expected the completed transactions in each half to be set in stone. Yet when the 2 parts of the network are rejoined, the result is that one of the parts is going to have all of its transactions invalidated.
So yes, the protocol handles the scenario perfectly, but that is little consolation to anyone who honestly thought the transactions were final and thus released physical goods. Now they have neither the goods nor the bitcoin to show for it.