| > It seems I wasn’t the only one with this concern as there’s been a fairly recent pivot away from the hub-and-spoke network topology to a more organic, wallet-to-wallet routing. The network is now envisioned as a more pure p2p payment layer without those large scale payment hubs. As the co-author of the Lightning Network, this is not true, there has been no pivot. The design has always designed around wallet-wallet topologies from the beginning (try doing a Find for the word "hub" in the paper). Will there be nodes more connected than others? Of course. But with LN, they are designed to be interchangeable and formless. It may look like other P2P topologies of ever-shifting "supernodes", but never irreplaceable "hubs" like Visa or Fedex's single primary Memphis, TN hub -- in fact you'd be challenged to find a P2P network with a topology of only a handful of static hubs (this makes sense because establishing connectivity is cheap in a virtual system, opposed to physical infrastructure like wires or an airport). I'm not particularly happy that "small-block skeptics" are using LN as some kind of punching bag against their pet ideas of who the enemies are (the arguments have become highly politicized in the bitcoin community). The LN paper itself presumes bigger blocks, and have never argued that LN is the sole solution, merely that a large component of scalability needs to occur via moving transactions off-chain. The alternatives are a failure of mining incentives (whether it be low-value transactions get crowded off bitcoin and moves to a bitcoin-backed centralized ledger, or the fee-market breaks down and miners reduce fees far too low due to commons externalities). There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems. It is is akin to assuming that systems are easily capable of a broadcast topology -- that everyone in the world can be on the same wifi access point. Bigger block capacity is desirable, but it's also desirable to be able to instantly transact a payment of $0.0001 without everyone in the world processing that payment. (I'm going to be intermittent with computer access today due to the holidays but I will reply to email or respond tomorrow :P) |
This is very clearly not true, and you don't do yourself any favours by saying such things. The paper discusses hubs that need to provide various guarantees, like being continuously online and routing payments for arbitrary third parties. This is not at all the same thing as a wallet and Chris is right to point out the distinction.
With respect to your point about becoming a punching bag, I'm afraid I am not particularly sympathetic. When Blockstream started floating LN as an alternative to raising the block size (which is what they have consistently done) you should have condemned that and them right away, loudly and clearly, as it was obviously an absurd suggestion and not going to happen anywhere near in time.
LN is a highly theoretical system that doesn't have any implementation that ordinary people could actually use. There is no practical experience with running such a network. It doesn't even have answers to basic design questions, like how routing and addressing would work. The chance of project failure is therefore quite high, as is always the case for research projects.
Thus to imply LN is some sort of dead-cert thing is hubris. Academics have been producing e-cash white papers for decades. Almost none of them actually turned into real-world systems. Nobody will know if LN actually works better than Bitcoin does (or did) until it's built and has competitive usability, which is a very long time away.
> There is a clear obvious misunderstanding of core principles in computer science, wishful thinking does not solve real problems
That's not very charitable is it?
I can assure you, the CS understanding of the people who disagree with you (like Chris, Gavin, myself and Satoshi) is just fine, but I have to question your understanding of engineering. The calculations were done years ago that showed for typical payment network loads that global broadcast could work just fine. Computer science doesn't mean "some algorithms never work and some always work". It just gives us the tools to analyse costs. By simply ignoring complexity and engineering costs of LN, as well as some rather tricky algorithmic costs around pathfinding in global non-suspended networks, you can obviously make any actually existing system look bad in favour of a theoretical proposal.