[colordrops]

The whole thing is fishy. The lightning network is pushed by Blockstream, a company which has a large number of devs working on bitcoin core. They were responsible for all the propaganda and talking points against bumping the block size leading to the BCH fork, because they wanted the "correct" solution of their lightning network. The fact that it is so complex and ill defined is dangerous and an antithesis of decentralized system design and ethos, as it's not clear how trustless transactions are protected. How do we know that there isn't an easy backdoor that allows this network to be controlled for Blockstream's purposes?

[tlrobinson]

This is pure FUD.

Satoshi himself proposed the first version of payment channels [1]. The Lightning Network paper has zero authors from Blockstream [2]. At least two other entirely independent companies are working on Lightning Network implementations [3][4]. It's well understood how trustless LN transactions work [5]. The spec [6] and code are open source, feel free to look for a "backdoor".

1. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Payment_channels#Nakamoto_high-fr...

2. https://lightning.network/lightning-network-paper.pdf

3. https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd

4. https://github.com/ACINQ/eclair

5. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Hashed_Timelock_Contracts

6. https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc

[cup-of-tea]

Whenever I see the term "FUD" nowadays I think "ah, someone who is invested in a cryptocurrency, this will definitely be an unbiased view".

[glebedel]

Only one of the implementation is coded by blockstream. It's a protocol, anybody else can create an implementation of it. Several other companies have created clients like LND (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd) - probably more popular than clightning.

> How do we know that there isn't an easy backdoor that allows this network to be controlled for Blockstream's purposes?

The code of clightning is open source, so is the code of most known clients out there.

> The fact that it is so complex and ill defined is dangerous and an antithesis of decentralized system design and ethos

Your comment really seems like a baseless conspiracy theory full of ad hominems with no proof of what you mention: - it's not that crazy complex compared to all the intricacies / op codes and game theory of the Bitcoin base layer - it is more easily distributed than the base layer since it's easier to run a LN node by itself (albeit still relying on a bitcoin full node that may not be in your control if you wish it so).

And like other said, Blockstream doesn't have many employees working on the base protocol (3 now afaik since Luke Dash JR & G.Maxwell do not work for Blockstream anymore). The few they have actually made very useful contributions to the code base since 2011/2012 which you can easily see through and most of their code is also used in all forks of Bitcoin aka BTG, BCH etc...

> They were responsible for all the propaganda and talking points against bumping the block size leading to the BCH fork

Any proof on that? Almost no bitcoin developers (albeit none apart of maybe 1 if you count Gavin which didnt contribute for years on the code base) left to work on this particular fork. There was no scientific consensus stipulating larger blocks (than 4mb) would be safe hence why the community at large did not support BCH (and why it has a minority of market share and mining share, TX usage etc).

[alexbosworth]

This is confused or wrong. They don’t have a large number of devs working on Core. They did propose and code a solution which increased the block size. Saying things are fishy and that open source solutions widely reviewed over years by a broad set of people have some secret easy supposed backdoor, seems pretty wrong to me.

[TimJRobinson]

what? There are 3 different implementations of the Lightning network, they all implement the same protocol and are all open source. You seem to be either very misinformed or just trying to spread FUD.