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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.
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.