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

[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

[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

[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.

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!

[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.

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 other people's transactions can go through because they pay you to make that happen.

There we go.

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

[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

[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.

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?

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.

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).