[kain_niak]

Hardly, because building LN on the 1MB base layer is like building a pyramid upside down, it's unstable and creates more problems than it was meant to solve.

Lightning was supposed to make tx fees low right? Well it technically has, but it also introduced the following problems that Bitcoin never had:

- LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.

- If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.

- In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. Well when Bitcoin fees hit $3 a few months ago, 60% of the Lightning network capacity was locked up in miner fees lol... defeating the purpose of microtransactions and the LN network

- In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. In addition to stealing your LN private keys, a bad user can attempt to steal your funds when you're offline. Which is why LN requires a 3rd party service called Watchtowers to watch over your funds. Way more complicated than Bitcoin

- The unsolvable routing problem. A good chunk of LN transactions will fail simply because the routing is weighted and chanes constantly. Compare that to Bitcoin's gossip network which doesn't require any weighted routing. FYI weighted routing is currently a mathematically unsolved problem.

- LN is centralizing around LNbig.com At one point LNBig.com had over 70% of the entire LN network capacity. LN will continue to centralize around these big hubs, because they can offer cheap connections and low fees than a regular peer can. Welcome to Bank of America LN Hub TM.

- With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.

- Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved. Like the race condition when a big hub closes and hundreds of users all attempt to race to transmit their transaction to miners.

- In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion... And Blockstream blocked a minor 2MB increase. So good luck.

So congrats to Lightning, for "solving" 1 problem and creating 12 new ones.

There's many more, but these are the ones easily digestable by users without going into the deeper technical problems with LN. There's a reason Lightning is always 18 months away from completion....for 5.5 years now. While Bitcoin Cash just works.

[adiabat]

> - Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publically stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin [citation needed] The initial presentation of the paper was titled "SF Bitcoin Devs Seminar: Scaling Bitcoin to Billions of Transactions Per Day". If we didn't mean it to help scaling, what was it meant to be? [note: am one of the authors]

[kanzure]

Here's a transcript of that talk:

https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/sf-bitcoin-meetup/2015-02...

[once_inc]

> LN requires that both sender and receiver be online at the same time to transact. This never existed on Bitcoin.

Correct, but this is clearly stated in its whitepaper and is one of the tradeoffs to get massively more txs and privacy.

> If you're an LN merchant accepting payments, you must periodically topoff your side of the channel...just so you can keep accepting money. This problem never existed on Bitcoin. I can have an empty address on Bitcoin and receive any amount of money without any limits.

Correct, but you can also move those funds to other channels you have already opened. Also, loop-in and loop-out are coming. Also, receiving multiple bitcoin transactions on a single UTXO is a privacy hit for all involved.

> In Lightning when making a transactions you must always reserve the current Bitcoin onchain miner fee, so that if either channel party wants to close the channel it'll get accepted and mined by a Bitcoin miner. (...)

You need to if you don't plan to aggregate your settlement and opening txs, or aggregate those transactions with others. All if that tech is still coming.

> In Bitcoin my coins can only be stolen if I leak my private key. Well for LN your money can be stolen simply by not being online to monitor your money. (...)

This is your first statement rewritten. I will not address it again.

> The unsolvable routing problem. (...)

And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.

> LN is centralizing around LNbig.com (...)

Like bitcoin was centralizing around Satoshi's mining farm in the first year of Bitcoin? LN is at infancy stage, and has a hard cap on what amount of BTC you can open a channel with.

> With Bitcoin I can keep my money in a cold wallet. With LN it's either a hot wallet or cold wallet and I must close all my channels and pay the Bitcoin onchain fee just to close it. You're literally choosing betwen low fees OR security with Lightning, where as with Bitcoin you have both.

Besides the fact that bitcoin will still be there, all of these points are explained as part of the network. I don't understand why you are harping about these sorts of issues when the whitepaper or easily found literature about LN clearly state these issues. Also; don't forget that LN doesn't have to be the only second layer on Bitcoin. I can imagine banks building a second layer walled garden with the feature of settling onchain. Heck, this could be made in less than a year, and would basically give every user in the world the option to buy bitcoin. They would however need to have the right volume of BTC available, so it would be utterly devastating to those vested in fiat (which is why they aren't doing it yet).

> Both creators of Lightning Drya and Poon have publicly stated LN was never meant to be a scaling solution for Bitcoin and show many problems that will simply never be solved.

Drya is, to my knowledge still very positive on LN, don't know about Poon though.

> In the Lightning whitepaper, LN requires AT LEAST 133MB+ blocks for global adoption for LN to work without congestion (...)

With the then current code, and the then current block size. Block size has increased with Segwit. Taproot will further increase capacity. Channel factories are a thing thought of after publishing the white paper, etc.

> While Bitcoin Cash just works.

Bitcoin Cash works. I agree. It's miners will keep raising the block size and spammers will keep filling those blocks to make the ghost towm seem inhabited. Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online. After that, it will centralize to a small set of players that will be able to change the consensus rules to their wish. Is that the decentralized peer-to-peer money you wanted? This attack vector is a considerably more important threat than reduced adoption will ever be.

[lawn]

> And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem, and further improvements like AMP will further reduce the number of failed fees. Another option is to make an on-chain transaction.

Oh that's funny. While you're right that payments failing for not finding a route is a big problem, it's not even the real problem with routing.

The problem is for LN to function at scale, it have to centralize around a few big hubs. Because otherwise routing is impossible, and transactions will fail.

Decentralized routing is an intractable problem, and LN have to choose between centralization and scaling.

[DagAgren]

> And yet, the vast majority of transactions on the LN proceed without a problem

Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.

[alwillis]

Because LN is seeing barely any usage at all. The routing problem will bite as soon as it tries to scale.

Definitely not true.

As I previously mentioned in this thread, lightning has over $6 billion USD in liquidity, nearly 11,000 nodes and tens of thousands of transactions every day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21980404

[DagAgren]

Those stats are either false, or are actually evidence that the network is tiny. Tens of thousands of transactions per day means it's not even doing a single transaction per second, which is miniscule.

[phillipsjk]

According to a recent study, the privacy properties of the lighting Network are weak.

The problem with lightning privacy is that to get good privacy you need more than about 2 hops. The problem is that every hop locks up money equal to the amount transferred: increasing the cost of the transaction.

The study also finds that the LN is currently subsidized, and based on the capital costs alone, fees should be comparable to on-chain (BTC) transactions. BCH transactions are currently subsidized as well, but not to the same extent (I estimate 3cents/kB would pay for processing and storage).

https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...

[dolebas]

> Then, users will slowly stop their BCH full nodes because it becomes a bother to keep them online.

Why do you assume BTC/LN will improve scalability properties but not BCH? On-chain capacity can be optimized over time without increasing the average cost for running a node.