[badge]

The way Lightening Network is designed kills the p2p aspect of the Bitcoin protocol.. LN is predictably to benefit capital holders with enough excess capital to act as the backbone hubs. Normal users will be unable to bypass the Bitcoin banking/payment processor LN hubs and unable to reliably route though peer to peer paths on the LN.

This presumably is intended to enrich the Bitcoin oligarchs as a passive way to extract rent and wealth on the network simply for controlling existing capital.

This design choice indicates either a comic level of negligence, or intent to shift away from p2p to centralized information control.

only a 1% chance of successfully routing a $67 payment on the lightning network:

https://i.redd.it/twku0lwslz411.jpg

  Sending payments using the Lightning Network is cheaper 
  than the regular Bitcoin network, but suffers from 
  routing errors and wallet bugs that make it impractical 
  even for highly technical users. [1]

[1] https://medium.com/andreas-tries-blockchain/bitcoin-lightnin...

[jeremyt]

This is mostly nonsense.

If you don't want to use an LN hub, then create your own. If you don't have enough money, then raise some capital and start a LN hub business. Hell, create a non-profit LN hub! If you don't want to pay for the service of using other LN hubs, then send a direct payment. Of course, this will cost real money, but you always have that option. If I'm sending money to purchase a house, you can bet I'm going to send an actual transaction and not use the lightning network. For cups of coffee, I just don't need the full decentralization.

Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem, but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why the clients are in BETA.

Your link is bullshit, as I mentioned the network is in BETA. Of course people don't have a bunch of money on the lightning network and can't route large payments like $67. That's because the network is in BETA, and all of the platforms are expressly telling people not to use it for large payments.

[badge]

  Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing 
  problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as 
  claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing 
  problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem, 
  but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why 
  the clients are in BETA.

You clearly don't understand the architectural differences between how the internet routes packets, and what how the Lightening Network claims to be a decentralized routing protocol. Nodes in a decentralized network have no visibility to peers unless there's a map, the map needs to be updated, and in a payment network the complexity increases as nodes and activity increases. LN will not function for p2p decentralization, it is a design choice that creates Bitcoin banks and Bitcoin payment processors.

For digital payments I could skip the scam and use Venmo or cash.

I don't get why anyone would bother wasting their money on LN? You have to first buy the Bitcoins which is highly volatile so the risk of losing your money is always possible.

What's the use case? Why bother going though all the trouble and why is there a need to buy someone elses tokens which they basically made for free?

It sounds like you need to convince people to use Bitcoin because you own some and need more people to buy it so you can sell for fiat and make real money. Why else would you try to dismiss the inherent issue with race conditions in decentralized routing networks? Handwaving the flaw by saying "it'll be fixed in the future" is either your ignorance or a lie and an attempt to deceive.

You can't even claim it's the fault of beta software, because it's not even theoretically possible to solve the decentralized routing problem. LN is just another form of paypal/banking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

Quiet obvious how your scam works.

[jeremyt]

First of all, I know a little something about how routing works. I've written a simplified implementation of OSPF and also BGP. I've been an engineer at a backbone hardware provider before.

That said, I have never seen any convincing argument that LN routing can't work in theory... Especially because the lightning network is not completely decentralized on purpose. It works off the idea of "hubs", in which you will connect to a hub, likely one hop, and then the hub will most of the time get to your destination in one or two hops. I'd really like to see someone who claims that we don't have the ability to connect two points in a graph separated by three, or even four, hops. This is just made up nonsense.

The middle part of your comment is just "kids, get off my lawn". Why would anyone need anything besides venmo or cash? Do you mail cash to purchase things online? How many large Internet retailers accept venmo? How many people are implementing micro payments using venmo?

The rest of your comment is just an ad-hominem. And not only is it that, but it's also nonsensical because maybe I have some bitcoins because i'm putting my money where my mouth is.

Also, the travelling salesman problem is bullshit and irrelevant, because LN doesn't need to have the shortest possible route to work, it just needs a workable route.

https://study.com/academy/lesson/attacking-the-motive-fallac...