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.

Comments

Ransoms and contraband

[gnick]

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.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't put a bit into that nethack....

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[jythie]

The dark market uses for BTC kinda mirrors its regular market usage, meaning it isn't used much there either outside small circles of people.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[gnick]

I've witnessed the entire transaction for a sheet of LSD delivered to New Mexico from Germany. I wasn't involved with testing and haven't heard feedback, but it sure looked like the stuff I remember from college. If you want to browse what's available:
1) (Optional but recommended) Subscribe to and use a VPN
2) Download, install, and open the Tor browser
3) Search duck-duck-go for 'Dream Market' (they're hardly the only market, but they're a big one)
4) Register and browse
5) Use your Bitcoin wallet to order whatever the fuck you want (ketamine, cocaine, LSD, whatever)
6) (Optional and discouraged) Get caught and face the consequences
7) (Optional) Ingest the substance you bought from an anonymous source with no assurance of quality or safety

I saw it work once and there seem to be a lot of customers. I'll note that when the authorities shut down 2 of the biggest dark markets several months ago, they ran one for a month first.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[rickb928]

If you're waiting a week for your credit card transactions to clear, you are doing it very wrong, and need not, unless you are trading off time for cost. And even then you can do better easily.

Mostly you will, in the US, find that overnight is as fast as credit card transactions will clear, though the tech is easily within reach to settle in an hour, with commensurate higher costs, for some merchants. It just isn't deployed.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[eepok]

Very slick, Officer AC. Very slick indeed.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[JesseMcDonald]

The GP is using "clearing" to mean two different things for credit cards vs. Bitcoin, though. A credit card transaction may show up in your account overnight, but it remains subject to chargebacks for months. A bitcoin transaction with 3-6 confirmations (~1-2 hours) is effectively "set in stone", just as if you had been payed in cash.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[JeffSh]

jesus christ, what is this, comment on things you know nothing about day?

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[Anonymous Coward]

bitcoin is regularly 20-30% fees and can take many weeks to clear.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[sheramil]

Hmmm. one Anonymous Coward says the service has been compromised.. and another Anonymous Coward says it's fine. What should I do? I suppose I could pay yet another Anonymous Coward some real money for some pretend money and send it to some other Anonymous Coward in the hope he might send me some illegal drugs. What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[Anonymous Coward]

EU law limits credit card fees to a maximum of 0.3%. Typical fees are lower...

BTC has a fixed fee per transaction. If you buy something for â1, the fee is going to be in excess of 100%. The fee is only as low as you describe if you make huge transfers.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[reanjr]

Those aren't BTC miner's fees. Those are fees Coinbase is charging you for - among other things - charging your credit card. Those fees are part of the USD Federal Reserve banking system economy.

What we're talking about is the BTC wallet to wallet transfer fees.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[c6gunner]

BTC has a fixed fee per transaction. If you buy something for Ã1, the fee is going to be in excess of 100%. The fee is only as low as you describe if you make huge transfers.

That's not at all how that works. Technically there's no requirement for you to pay a transaction fee at all; certainly the transactions I was making back in 2015 were all done without any fees whatsoever. So no, there is absolutely not a "fixed fee per transaction".

In practice you do have to pay a fee these days because miners prefer transactions which pay the largest fee. When transaction volume is low this means your transaction may get processed quickly even if you pay a tiny fee, or even no fee at all. When transaction volume is high it means that low-fee transactions will get shunted to the back of the queue, and may take days to process.

This is effectively a problem with network capacity. If the bitcoin network were capable of processing more transactions then smaller fees would be the norm. That's partly what these changes are meant to address. However even at this point in time the fees are generally not unreasonable.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[DerekLyons]

Until the transaction time and cost rival credit cards, cryptocurrency isn't going to become the standard.

Transaction time and costs aren't the real barrier - that would be the lack of any actual reason or economic incentive to switch.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[Dog-Cow]

I can, and have, use(d) my credit card to pay for a 35 cent item. Do you think it would cost me more or less than 35 cents to do the same with BTC? What's the cutoff? I paid and walked out of the store in about a minute. How long would a merchant be waiting on a BTC tx to go through before allowing me to take said item?

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[gravewax]

so to paraphrase, bitcoin fees are cheap and it is fast.... as long as no one uses bitcoin.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[c6gunner]

I can, and have, use(d) my credit card to pay for a 35 cent item. Do you think it would cost me more or less than 35 cents to do the same with BTC? What's the cutoff? I paid and walked out of the store in about a minute. How long would a merchant be waiting on a BTC tx to go through before allowing me to take said item?

If you used coinbase to make the transaction, it would be instant and wouldn't cost you a penny.

If you were stupid enough to try and use the block chain for it ... well, you're probably the kind of guy who swats flies with a sledgehammer.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[pnutjam]

Receipt of delivery does not indicate a non-compromised endpoint. The feds play the long game.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[michael_wojcik]

This is the Internet. Every day is Comment on Things You Know Nothing About Day.

Or so I've heard.

Re:Ransoms and contraband

[rickb928]

This is why blockchain 'currencies' ought to work more like currency, and less like payment systems. Cash isn't subject to third-party chargeback. Bitcoin could do this, but the required blockchain tech would defeat most of the advantages.

Re: Ransoms and contraband

[pnutjam]

Don't believe this, there are plenty of examples of undercover agents participating in crimes. This would probably fall under the same umbrella.

A solution exists!

[stevegee58]

"slow and high-fee transactions" are a thing of the pass now that the heavy hitters like Coinbase have begun consolidating transactions *greatly* reducing fees and mempool size.

Also, read up on a well formed critique of lightning network:
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyoo...

Re:A solution exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

So, in other words, the solution to the problems of a decentralized currency is to centralize control into one broker or another thus negating the actual benefits of the block chain and going back to brokering in trust.

The reason bitcoin was hailed as a currency solution is that it removed trust from any human controlled entity and moved it into a equation which was calculated by many different people such that it would be obvious if someone was trying to tamper with the results. Now places like Coinbase and the lightening network are expecting people to trust them instead of the equations, thus negating any of the actual benefits of bitcoin itself. How can you be certain that Coinbase is consolidating the transactions properly? Can you see how they do this mathematically? If it is not all in the open how can you be sure this wont lead to gaming the market?

Until they find a way to put every single transaction on the ledger at a low cost and high speed, crypto-curriencies will never become a mainstream thing.

Re:A solution exists!

[stevegee58]

>So, in other words, the solution to the problems of a decentralized currency is to centralize control into one broker or another thus negating the actual benefits of the block chain and going back to brokering in trust.

Nope, not what I said at all. Coinbase and a couple of other large brokers were causing the high transaction fees and mempool increases. It's because they're the source of so many transactions due to their huge user bases.

Re:A solution exists!

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Re:A solution exists!

[HornWumpus]

Decentralize control to many brokers. Is it 'opposite day' where you live?

Re:A solution exists!

[phantomfive]

it has soured in the fickle imagination of the world's population.

I don't know what population you are hanging around, but now I've started seeing bitcoin billboards pop up. The hype is just beginning.

Re:A solution exists!

[NerdENerd]

Take a look at Nano. Instant and free.

Still for the 1% only

[Sebby]

I feel that by the time Bitcoin becomes "mainstream", all possible Bitcoin will already have been minted, and will basically only be in the hands of the 1% - with that 1% being the geeks this time around.

Re:Still for the 1% only

[Anonymous Coward]

After all bitcoin is mined, the incentive to keep mining is so that your own transactions can go through. If no one is mining, no transactions go through, and all the capital that was spent mining is wasted because the bitcoin can't be spent.

Re: Still for the 1% only

[Anonymous Coward]

Once the miners sell their coins and get out of the game or switch to a new coin. Why would they care?

You are making up a scenario where you have to trust them to keep doing transactions. It makes no sense.

Re:Still for the 1% only

[Anonymous Coward]

There will only ever be 21 million bitcoins. ~16 million have been mined so far. So we've already got ~75%.

Mining for new coins finds half as many every 210,000 blocks, ~every 4 years with jumps happening around 2011, 2014, and presumably... soon. This whole system was set up to reward early adopters with easy to get coins (That weren't worth anything), to set up a fundamentally scarce resource, and to gradually transition the whole affair to a transaction-fee system. The time where poor shmucks could use their PC video-cards to mine NEW coins at a profit is already long past. The time when random shmucks running their custom specially-made ASIC hardware is (I think) also past, with the big players utilizing cheap power and mass produced hardware are consolidating the mining market and making a living primarily on transaction fees.

and will basically only be in the hands of the 1% - with that 1% being the geeks this time around.

Well... of course the wealth is mainly held by the wealthy. Duh, that's kinda how wealth works. It'd certainly be nice if there was a less steep curve when it comes to the distribution, but... No part of bitcoin every had that as a goal.

- with that 1% being the geeks this time around.

Hahahaha, no. No, there are a few wealthy geeks that got in early and were printing money for a while. And if, by some miracle, they 1) made thousands of coins when they were cheap and easy 2) held onto them for years and 3) sold them at the peak of the market.... then yes, they're ludicrously wealthy and very lucky bastards. But... after that point, SOMEONE ELSE holds those coins. They sold them to someone out there. Those people will, by definition, be those people who have a lot of wealth to trade for a different type of wealth. Ideally it's a zero-sum game.

I don't feel too bad about not getting in on the action back when I heard about it in 2011. Because I know I would have sold any and all the coins I had mined as soon as I could get "real" money out of the deal, which probably would have meant ~$100. And I would have considered myself lucky for it.

I'm not really sure what you mean by "Mainstream". But I'd say that happened a couple years ago. There was a big surge where I think it got into the masses mindspace. There were other smaller surges in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Those would be the crypto-crowd hobbyists, then the crazy geeks, then geeks as a whole (along with speculative investors). This latest surge is likely a mix of common shmucks and exit-scheme fraudsters. But the fraudsters have moved onto alternative block-chains where they don't have to try and time the market. The relatively calm period of value in 2015 would be people ACTUALLY using it as a currency without any idiots jostling the boat.

Re:Still for the 1% only

[Anonymous Coward]

After all bitcoin is mined, the incentive to keep mining is so that other people's transactions can go through because they pay you to make that happen.

There we go.

Re:Still for the 1% only

[DerekLyons]

I feel that by the time Bitcoin becomes "mainstream", all possible Bitcoin will already have been minted, and will basically only be in the hands of the 1% - with that 1% being the geeks this time around.

Oh sweet summer child - how I envy your innocence.
 
Geeks don't hold any significant stock of Bitcoin now. It's all in the hands of Asian miners and increasingly in the hands of gamblers (err.. investors).

Re:Still for the 1% only

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

I got into Bitcoin and Litecoin back in 2014. At current prices I have made 30 times my money back. Anyone who got in when the first story about Bitcoin was posted to Slashdot (2011?) and held on to their coins is likely worth millions, even billions.

If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[NicknameUnavailable]

This is more or less the end:

-Create lightning connections favoring selling off coins.
-Once you've peaked at the limit of the pair transaction switch to favoring the buying of coins.
-DDoS the other party.
-Post old lightning state, showing the other party owes you.
-They can't refute it with the correct state.
-Get the free coins.
-Rinse and Repeat, or just do it in parallel.

The lightning protocol is so fundamentally flawed that anyone with enough BTC and access to a botnet (even for rent) can claim the coins of everyone else who participates in it.

Re:If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[ctilsie242]

With coins going for so much money, a DDoS would be relatively cheap, in return for the gains involved.

It might be just better to swap to another coinage protocol for transactions, and use BTC as more of a store of value as opposed to something for transactions, especially with currencies like Monero which address a lot of the anonymity issues.

Re:If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[EETech1]

Any idea what would happen in there was a major disruption to the internet?

Let's just say for that for a day, there is no internet connection between the US and China.

When the disconnect is made, China will continue to mine Bitcoin, and the US will also. To the now individual networks, doesn't it appear to be just less miners mining? It should look like a power failure at a major mining facility took out a bunch of miners. No problem, the rest just keep moving forward.

Instantly you have different versions of the blockchain.

Now when the US restores its internet connection to China, how would that be reconciled within the network?

Cheers

Re: If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[c6gunner]

Now when the US restores its internet connection to China, how would that be reconciled within the network?

That's no different than intentionally trying to pull a "50% attack". The largest network would "win". In your scenario all transactions made on the smaller half of the network after the outage would essentially be rolled back / cease to exist.

Were you trying to say something about that outcome, or were you under the impression that nobody had considered such a scenario?

Re: If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[LordKronos]

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.

Re:If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[ayesnymous]

You CAN short Bitcoin right now, at least Bitcoin futures.

Re:If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[michael_wojcik]

With coins going for so much money, a DDoS would be relatively cheap, in return for the gains involved.

According to Apostolaki et al., the BitCoin network routinely suffers routing attacks already. And by "routinely" they mean at least 100000 times a month.

It would appear that partitioning the BitCoin network is already a widely-used tactic, and that's just BGP attacks - we're not even talking DDoS yet. I haven't looked closely at Lightning (I'm not very interested in BitCoin, personally), but I wouldn't be surprised if (as GP suggested) it will make things worse.

Re:If Only I Could Short Bitcoin

[stinerman]

However the market can stay irrational longer than he can stay solvent.

What advantage does this have for me

[rsilvergun]

as a consumer. Today I pay with my CC and get cashback (basically a 1-3% discount on goods and services subsidized by folks who carry a balance and pay interest). Plus I can dispute charges up to 90 days from date of purchase.

I suppose there's privacy, but I get pretty good privacy from my CC company (albeit lousy privacy from the Credit Agencies, but those are different companies).

Now to businesses the prospect of lower transaction fees it tantalizing, but they mostly get that with Debit Cards already and haven't been able to get American consumers to switch. It doesn't help that Americans are kind of short on cash after decades of week or negative wage growth...

Aside from anonymously buying embarrassing or illegal goods what would make me jump ship?

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you know that your transaction history is public record when using bitcoin?

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[Anonymous Coward]

The merchant you buy the item from covers the discount as part of their transaction fees.

Yes, this means they pay an average of 4% per year... but it can range from 2% to 6% per transaction depending on what the rewards on the card is.

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[jeff4747]

transactions are fully settled within 10 minutes

So, for this to be ubiquitous, all that has to happen is every customer stands at the checkout for 10 minutes while waiting for their transaction to complete.

And the time required to settle the transaction will only get longer.

BTC is nearly ubiquitous as credit cards were 25 years ago

Except 25 years ago, it took a couple seconds for my transaction to complete.

and will become easier and faster to use as time goes on.

As the blockchain grows longer, it will take more cycles to add new transactions to it. Which means over time bitcoin transactions are going to get slower, not faster. And if it truly became ubiquitous, the number of transactions would go up by about 6 or 7 orders of magnitude, resulting in an even longer blockchain. Resulting in even slower transactions.

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[phantomfive]

I suppose there's privacy, but I get pretty good privacy from my CC company (albeit lousy privacy from the Credit Agencies, but those are different companies).

fwiw you shouldn't expect Bitcoin to be anonymous. Even if a transaction currently can't be traced, the record is public forever (by design) and in the future new techniques may be found to trace bitcoin ownership (as has already happened).

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

You can send it anywhere in the World without needing a third-party's approval/assistance and no one can take it from you without the private key.

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[jeff4747]

Registers and/or PIN pads where you swipe your credit card are rather old technology.

Re:What advantage does this have for me

[jeff4747]

The transaction was "pending" in seconds, and banks reconciled the transactions overnight.

It took days back when credit cards were run through imprinters instead of swiped.

Re:WONT HAPPEN

[Anonymous Coward]

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are the worst thing to happen to computer hardware, energy efficiency, and smart use of our precious resources. All for what? Generating hash codes that have no practical use beyond representing a POW. Computing has been very green until crypto. Now it is anti-green.

BULLLLLSHIIIIIIIIIT

[sexconker]

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!

Re:BULLLLLSHIIIIIIIIIT

[sexconker]

I looked it up, and yup it's bullshit.

They're just running a separate ledger on top of Bitcoin, and transactions are only committed at the start and end. The whole thing is a mess, and will only benefit people who are willing to keep a balance of BTC out of their control in order to process multiple transactions before having anything committed to the actual block chain.

It's like someone saw the ICO scams in Ethereum and decided they had to have it on Bitcoin as well.

Re:BULLLLLSHIIIIIIIIIT

[Anonymous Coward]

"If there's one thing the Bitcoin community hates, its fucking clowns and hucksters"

What's it like, being born without a sense of irony?

Re:BULLLLLSHIIIIIIIIIT

[sexconker]

"If there's one thing the Bitcoin community hates, its fucking clowns and hucksters"

What's it like, being born without a sense of irony?

I wouldn't know. Irony doesn't mean what you think it means, by the way. And when I refer to "the Bitcoin community", I'm not talking about the spazoids who are into gambling / speculating, but the people who actually use and support Bitcoin as a currency and network.

That doesn't get rid of currency exchange

[rsilvergun]

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.

Two requirements for any mainstream cryptocurrency

[presidenteloco]

0) Goes with out saying. Near instant, low-fee transactions. Comparable to debit card user experience.
1) Dead-easy for end user. No need whatsoever to understand how any of it works.
2) Currency price stability (at least comparable to any given major national currency such as USD, Euro).

If something built on top of the horrendously complicated lightning network can be made usable by average non-techie, without going completely central, then that could maybe address points 0 and 1.

Hard to see how Bitcoin achieves 2).

Re:Two requirements for any mainstream cryptocurre

[presidenteloco]

For some value of two.

What are the fees like

[rsilvergun]

if you want to get it down to what CC companies do today (sub-1 second for a large merchant, 10-15 for a mom and pop with an ancient terminal)? The question is are the competitive with what guys like Square can get you?

Also, the currency needs to stabilize if it's going to go mainstream. Several folks stopped taking it because you could sell something for $50 worth of BTC today and have $30 worth of BTC tomorrow. Now, if I can instantly (and cheaply) turn my BTC into cash that's not a problem, but I'm guessing more fees.

Re:What are the fees like

[sexconker]

if you want to get it down to what CC companies do today (sub-1 second for a large merchant, 10-15 for a mom and pop with an ancient terminal)? The question is are the competitive with what guys like Square can get you?

Also, the currency needs to stabilize if it's going to go mainstream. Several folks stopped taking it because you could sell something for $50 worth of BTC today and have $30 worth of BTC tomorrow. Now, if I can instantly (and cheaply) turn my BTC into cash that's not a problem, but I'm guessing more fees.

Bitcoin will -n-e-v-e-r- be a replacement for credit cards. It was never designed to. In fact, it was designed explicitly against such volume and frequency in order to prevent manipulation and ensure all nodes can sync the full block chain.

Re:What are the fees like

[david_thornley]

In fact, it was designed explicitly against such volume and frequency in order to prevent manipulation and ensure all nodes can sync the full block chain.

In other words, it was designed so it has to stay small and have only a marginal effect. That's not the impression I've been getting from its supporters.

Re:What are the fees like

[sexconker]

You are fake news. It was not designed for such a thing. It's designed primarily to be decentralized, and to that end there's a built-on delay between blocks, and thus a hard limit to transaction speed.

Re:Two requirements for any mainstream cryptocurre

[phantomfive]

Hard to see how Bitcoin achieves 2).

Once there is enough exchange volume (converting to and from bitcoin) that it's hard for any single investor to manipulate the market. If that ever happens.

Re:Two requirements for any mainstream cryptocurre

[stinerman]

It's inherently deflationary.

Bitcoin has flourished as an investment (albeit a very risky one). It has utterly failed as a medium of exchange.

Nano is a better coin than Bitcoin.

[NerdENerd]

Nano is a better solution than lightning.

Re: Two requirements for any mainstream cryptocurr

[phantomfive]

Well no, you are completely wrong on that point. It is used every day as a medium of exchange. It wasn't created to replace the dollar, it was created to replace egold.