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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.
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.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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?
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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.
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
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.
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.