[kylebenzle]

They never should have allowed it in the first place. By testing the waters of trading custodial currencies they were really pushing the limits.

BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back. The only interesting cryptocurrencies are Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash and Monero. The rest are either obvious scams or dead ends at this point.

A lot of people were holding out hope for decentalized storage projects like FileCoin but that project now seems to be dead in the water as well.

[grubles]

Just to note: the "Bitcoin was hijacked by <corp>" is a running joke at this point and not to be taken seriously. Ask anyone to provide verifiable proof of this and they will respond with hyperbole or conspiracy theory.

[FreeTrade]

I'm seeing a lot of valid concerns and criticisms of Blockstream's actions and methods. I dont think they can be dismissed with ad hominems.

[nullc]

> I'm seeing a lot of valid concerns and criticisms of Blockstream's actions and methods

I've carefully reviewed each post in the thread and cannot find that. Instead, I see a couple vague and clearly false allegations which are unambiguously debunked.

What specifically are you referring to?

For the avoidance of confusion, the anonymous maintainer of "Bitcoin Cash" (a deceptively named Bitcoin clone) is named "Freetrader". Are you they?

[FreeTrade]

No, different guy.

[kallewoof]

The Blockstream hijack lie is getting really old.

And it doesn't age well either. Both gmax and pieter are not even in it anymore. Blockstream's contributions (what you consider 'hijacking') to Bitcoin are pretty slim at this point.

Which is a pity, honestly. Blockstream was a good force for bitcoin, despite the continuous stream of baseless lies coming from you people.

Gmax made a much better summary of why your statements are all baseless babbling below...

[gnrl]

I don't see any additional value of bcash over bitcoin. Eth and Monero I agree though, each of them bring fundamental values additionally to btc.

[jamoes]

I'm curious why you chose to use the term "bcash" to refer to BCH. No exchanges or mainstream projects use that term to refer to BCH. As far as I'm aware it's primarily used as a pejorative, so it seems strange that you'd use it here.

As far as BCH's additional value: I'd suggest researching the block size debate. This debate is BCH's entire reason for existing. This article [1] from 2016 by Mike Hearn contains a good primer on the block size debate itself. He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin, but others decided to raise the blocksize limit - with or without the majority, thus creating BCH. Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.

[1] https://blog.plan99.net/the-resolution-of-the-bitcoin-experi...

[nullc]

Its authors, original funders, and most exchanges originally referred to it as "BCC" which was, unfortunately, also the symbol for the Bitconnect ponzi scheme.

"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.

In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.

So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.

Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.

> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin

You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:

Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )

Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.

Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.

[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]

> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment

I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.

[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]

I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.

[jamoes]

> a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash"

"Knock-off" is a curious word choice. Are you under the impression that someone owns the term "Bitcoin"?

[nullc]

Someone doesn't have to own it for it to be fraud to mislead someone using it.

No one owns the word "gold" but if I sell you a bunch of gold plated tungsten as "gold" I'm still defrauding you.

[jamoes]

Gold has had a widely agreed upon definition for thousands of years. Bitcoin is a ~decade old open source project with a clearly established philosophical divide between small-blockers and big-blockers. In other open source project variants, small name changes like adding/changing a suffix or prefix are common, why would Bitcoin be the exception?

Given that you accepted that BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment, your comparison of it to gold-plated tungsten is flawed. BCH has a legitimate reason to exist. Your comparison might be more apt if BCH weren't born out of the block-size debate, but that's simply not the reality.

Ultimately, the market has spoken on this issue. The Bitcoin Cash name has been accepted as valid. It's not a trademark violation and it's not fraud akin to gold-plated tungsten. It's a legitimate continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment.

The term "bcash" on the other hand is quite clearly a pejorative and a transparent attempt to manipulation language. I'd expect better on a forum like this, but of course there will be some low-brow argumentation style anywhere you go. I'm frankly surprised you're still defending its use at this point.

[spurgu]

The argument as far as I'm aware is that it's like Bitcoin, except with transaction fees low enough to make it actually usable as a currency as opposed to being a pure store of value.

[haolez]

It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values. This was hinted by Satoshi as well, but was made impossible by the current BTC.

[nullc]

Wow that's super-confused!

The original Bitcoin software supported transaction replacement. You could mark a transaction as non-final and then it could be replaced until it got confirmed (potentially gated by its locktime) or until a replacement was made that was marked final. As is necessary in a distributed system, the replacement and non-replacement was best-effort and an older version could be confirmed (or a version made later than a final version). Replacement was intended for use with payment channels, like incrementally updating an open account paying someone.

Unfortunately, the functionality had a flaw: It enabled a DOS attack. You could make a transaction then replace it 2^32 times and only pay one fee. So we disabled it. Without the explicit functionality you could still replace transactions by spamming nodes (and esp miners) with the new transaction and hoping they accepted it, but it wasn't very reliable but also no longer DOS-attackable.

Later, people pointed out that the DOS attack could be avoided if it was also required that each replacement increase the tx fee by at least the minimum transaction fee that would have been accepted. And the functionality was re-enabled: you could again mark transactions as non-final.

When BCH was created they ripped out the functionality and falsely claimed that this made 'instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values' possible. This makes literally zero sense: First, in BCH you can still replace unconfirmed transactions, it's just less reliable. Secondly, replacement is functionality intended to enable faster transactions! Thirdly, you can disable it in Bitcoin (or replace a non-final one with a final version) and get the same behaviour as BCH if that's what your use case requires.

Finally, its alleged that this was some dastardly move by Bitcoin devs to "break" "0-conf" transactions, fuled by people who can't understand that Bitcoin devs saying 0-conf transactions are not very secure doesn't mean that they don't like your ability to make them if you want to, and it ignores the fact that the basic replacement functionality was there in the very first version ( https://github.com/trottier/original-bitcoin/blob/92ee8d9a99... ) and had been disabled by the self-same people being attacked for adding it.

It's basically 5G CAUSES COVID level of inanity, and it breaks my heart to see people duped by telephone-game polished versions of it.

[haolez]

Thanks for the thoughtful response. According to it, 0-conf transactions are possible in BTC as well. Why isn't more people using this? It seems safe enough, since attacking such a transaction is probably more expensive than the gains from the scam.

[nullc]

It's only safe in the sense that most people aren't trying to rip you off.

A moderately technically sophisticated attacker will concurrently broadcast one txn version near miners, and another to as many other nodes as they can reach. Their success rate on double spends can easily be >90% and the marginal cost of the attack is approximately zero.

Other than the technical know-how to setup the transaction broadcasting and the risk that you might just pay for what you were buying, there is no cost to the scam.

Same story on Bitcoin and BCH (here is a tweet about making 2511 successful double spends on BCH: https://twitter.com/peterrizun/status/1051088866743017473?la...).

The situation is somewhat worse on BCH in the sense that they only have ~1.2% of Bitcoin's hashrate, so there are many single Bitcoin miners that can reorg bch, so even single confirmations aren't particularly safe.

There are, of course, plenty of cases where 0-conf could be accepted-- e.g. you could credit someone assets but not allow withdraw until they clear, or if goods will ship the next day you need only check that they've confirmed before shipment. Some places do this now.

[gruez]

>It's not only that. There is also the "replace by fee" stuff that allows BCH to make instant payments with 0 confirmations for small values.

Can you elaborate on this? I did a quick search and the gist of it seems to be that BCH doesn't support replace by fee and bitcoin does, so therefore it's possible to "safely" accept 0 confirmation transactions on BCH because you can reasonably believe that it won't be double-spent before it gets its first confirmation. The only problem I can think of is that there's nothing preventing the attacker (the person making the purchase) from bribing a miner to mine his double spend transaction. Indeed, even without RPF there are "transaction accelerators"[1] that allow you make out of band payments to miners to increase your transaction's priority. It's not too hard to imagine a service where you can pay $$$ for a miner to mine your double-spend transaction.

[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_accelerator

[pstrateman]

He's extremely confused.

The bcash people argued that replace-by-fee (RBF) functionality made unconfirmed transactions unsafe to accept.

Except as you can tell from the name, unconfirmed transactions are not safe to accept RBF or not.

[splintercell]

Bitcoin cash is the only cryptocurrency I have regularly used in the past 3-4 years. Almost all the crypto payment options support bch seamlessly (because they aim to integrate bitcoin which results in no-effort integration of bitcoin cash).

I just can never get myself to pay the tx fees of bitcoin or ether. I recently discover that USDT exists on bch (but BitPay doesn't accept bch usdt) so I keep USDT on BCH and do JIT swaps to BCH and make almost zero fee payments.

Just to be clear, BCH will never dethrone BTC, but BCH is becoming a defacto layer 2 solution for Bitcoin. Now there are tokens and NFT tokens on BCH too.

[briefcomment]

> “BTC has been a joke ever since the GitHub repo was hijacked by Blockstream and Adam Back”

Could you spell out the implications of this?

[chemmail]

Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability. Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today. The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible. Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development." You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that. Can you believe that? Hilarious!

[ineedasername]

"out of paper"

Sure but it would have to be special paper, hard to duplicate with security measures, probably special ink, weird watermarks, a whole bunch of things. Should probably name it something other than IOU to distinguish it from normal IOUs. I've always liked Johny Cash's music, maybe we could derive a name from him.

[grubles]

This is incredible tinfoil-y nonsense that I find hard to believe is even posted on a website of HN's caliber.

[CyberDildonics]

This is all true and anyone who payed attention to more than the heavily censored propaganda soaked /r/bitcoin saw it happen in real time. Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.

[gruez]

> Years of saying that a throughput of more than a few kilobytes was impossible

I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.

>while one of the devs repeatedly - and this is not a joke - stated the sun revolved around the earth.

source?

[CyberDildonics]

> I don't think anyone thought that was impossible from a technical standpoint, just from a decentralization standpoint.

That's the same thing and it makes zero sense. Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. Validating blocks is at least 600x faster than real time on a computer from last decade. I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that. I watched people repeat this for years and when asked for explanations never saw anyone come close to something coherent.

> source?

Here he is denying evolution and claiming the sun revolves around the earth:

https://forums3.armagetronad.net/viewtopic.php?p=203752&sid=...

Here he is claiming that slavery is only "discouraged".

https://np.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/4q2cej/why...

[gruez]

> Most people never sync with the chain and those that want to only need bandwidth far less than watching a low res youtube video. [...] I would love to hear how you can rationalize a statement like that.

Except you know, the storage costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25570915

[gruez]

>The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. [...] Hence the memes: Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."

Can you elaborate on this? Isn't lightning free and open source? I'm not sure how that's going to be monetized.

[grubles]

Yes it is FOSS and multiple different implementations from different development groups / companies are available including c-lightning, LND, and eclair (I'm probably missing one or two).

The claim is truly a meme -- one that can only be laughed at when faced with the reality that I mentioned above.

[FreeTrade]

Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.

The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

Ironically, both liquid and lightning appear to be failing. Nb, both grubles and nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.

[nullc]

> Bitcoin adoption was growing and working well for monetary transfer but its capacity was throttled to encourage use of an unproven technology, the lightning network.

What? Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator. The limits are integral to protecting Bitcoin's decentralization, and have nothing in particular to do with lightning. Alternative blockchains without functional limits such as "BSV" are so bloated that it is practically unreasonable to run nodes, leaving participants blinding trusting third parties.

These trade-offs were well understood long long ago (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3118.msg44789#msg447... or https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2500.msg34211#msg342...).

Liquid isn't some replacement technology for Bitcoin, it's something it's a distributed-centeralized (federated) system that can do things Bitcoin and other completely decenteralized systems cannot do like offer instantaneous settlement. It trades off decentralization to for latency. When users have funds in exchange they've already substantially lost their decentralization benefits, for for e.g. rapid arb between exchanges this tradeoff is probably a good one.

Bitcoin gives people the freedom to use their money in a bunch of different ways.

> nullc have some close relationship with Blockstream.

I haven't have any relationship at all with blockstream for over three years now.

[FreeTrade]

>Bitcoin's capacity has been limited its entire life, the limits were coded in by Bitcoin's creator.

I researched this and found that Bitcoin had no initial capacity limit and that one was added as a temporary spam measure, not as a design choice.

When I see misrepresentations like that, I'm more suspicious of everything you've written.

[gruez]

That doesn't answer my initial question, how is blockstream supposed to monetize lightning, or anything for that matter?

>The claim, as far as understand it, is that Blockstream supported this plan, anticipating its failure, while working on its own replacement technology, Liquid.

I took a quick skim of blockstream's materials on liquid, and it sounds like it's something totally different to lightning? They describe it as some sort of ripple-like network for transacting in tokens? eg.

>Liquid uses an approach to consensus called Strong Federations. A Strong Federation removes the need for costly Proof of Work mechanisms and replaces it with the collective actions of a group of mutually distrusting participants called functionaries.

[FreeTrade]

The claim is not that Blockstream intended to profit from Lightning. Rather they used the promise of Lightning to throttle Bitcoin, in order to profit from Liquid.

[nullc]

This is just an outright lie and malicious defamation from top to f*king bottom. Hateful nonsense by scam promoters like you turns HN into a toxic enviroment.

[etrabroline]

Could you expand on why you think that? I very much agree with the substantive arguments made by chemmail, and would like to hear yours.

[nullc]

Because it's just pure nonsense, untrue, and totally unsubstantiated (and thoroughly off-topic for the thread). Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it.

Rather than any substantive argument, it merely lists a set of wild allegations.

But since you asked nicely I'll break it down sentence by sentence.

> Blockstream bought out most of the the btc devs who had commit ability

Blockstream hired myself and Pieter, two of six people at the time that had commit access to the Bitcoin software project at a time when none of the many "bitcoin companies" of the day were willing to fund developers. Though I was independently wealthy at that point, supporting my own work on Bitcoin meant spending down my Bitcoin or not working on it most of the time, so being able to get funded to work on Bitcoin and well aligned technology was appealing. Two people is not most of by any measure.

The Bitcoin software has no particular control over the Bitcoin system, but none the less we took measures to reduce any potential conflict of interest: We were substantially paid denominated in Bitcoin (pre-purchased when the company was founded), so our compensation was directly tied to Bitcoin's value. The company took no copyright interest in our work on Bitcoin, and released all our patents for public use (both under defensive licensing and the IPA). Pieter and I both had employment agreements that allowed us to quit at and continue to get paid for a year as additional insurance against any unethical conduct by the company. I also dropped my commit access.

Neither of us continue to work for blockstream, I haven't for three years now.

> Their end goal is to cripple btc to where it is today.

Blockstream hasn't done anything to "cripple" bitcoin, nor would it have made any financial sense for its employees (100% of whom were (and I believe still are) substantially compensated in Bitcoin). Quite the opposite: Blockstream's purpose was to build on-ramps to Bitcoin to help the impedance mismatch with traditional finance systems, and to monetize Bitcoin unrelated applications of the same technology (e.g. private systems) and use that to fund development work in the public interest (particularly at a time when no one else was doing so).

> The goal of this is to build an unnecessary product they can charge for on a second level. Think skimming money like charge cards do, but offering no real advantage or service beyond that. So far they have found building a new network neigh impossible.

I can't even figure out what this is attempting to talk about.

> Lightning only 18 months away, after 3 years of "development."

Lightning is a large Bitcoin industry effort involving dozens of independent developers and a half dozen companies. It isn't blockstream specific. It's just the logical progression of the payment channel idea initially described by Satoshi and baked into Bitcoin since day one. (And for a weird on-topic tangent: It's a secure implementation of the "Ripple" concept which Ripple labs bought the name of and stuck on an entirely unrelated system.)

It's not "18 months away" it exists now, it's widely used, and it works pretty well.

However, cryptocurrency for small retail payments remains a pretty uncompelling use case: It is extremely tax disadvantaged in many jurisdiction's, including the US: mandatory per transaction gains tax reporting. And retail transactions are extremely well addressed by existing solutions-- would you prefer to pay with the hardest money available, or would you prefer to pay with a credit card that is already accepted virtually everywhere, provides substantial anti-fraud protection, and extends you 28 days of credit with several percent negative fees for debt in constantly debased fiat? It's important that people have the option-- and they do-- but expecting widespread use in this application over night is fantasy.

(And not a particular problem for Blockstream, which doesn't make any fees off transactions using lightning, contrary to the parent posters allegations)

> You can find hilarious round table interviews with Adam Back where one asks how they can use btc for transactions like at bars with the fees dwarfing the regular transaction. Adam Back suggested using an IOU network out of paper or maybe build an IOU app for that.

I have no idea the context there but I can only imagine that someone asked about buying single drinks with Bitcoin and he mentioned that it's customary for people at a bar to open a tab and settle up at the end of the night. Kind of ironic that Adam, who's a teetotaler, is more aware of how bars commonly work than his critics. :)

In any case, Bitcoin is a global broadcast network whos long term decentralized security is utterly and totally dependant on getting large amounts paid in transaction fees. That has always been part of the trade-off: Centralized systems can offer extremely low fees. The only arguments about avoiding market rate fees in Bitcoin have also been argument to unlimit the supply of coins and pay for security through debasement, which is an obvious non-starter.

To the extent that there was ever even any debate over that, it long pre-dated blockstream's existence (e.g. https://en.bitcoin.it/w/index.php?title=Scalability&action=h... ).

[etrabroline]

Great response. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I'm curious why did you get interested in Bitcoin to begin with? If credit cards and fiat currencies are just fine, gold is still a pretty good store of value, why work on crypto at all?

[CyberDildonics]

It isn't defamation if it's true. You can get as upset as you want, but you can't delete what people say here like you can on /r/bitcoin.

[etrabroline]

Wall Street doesn't want Bitcoin to serve its intended purpose of removing their control over the money supply. They did this by co-opting the software project with venture capital money and making technical decisions that make Bitcoin ecommerce economically infeasible due to high fees. Initially they intended to replace Bitcoin with an alt-coin whose issuance was controlled by the Blockstream corporate entity. That project failed, and wall street investors pivoted to another alt-coin called Lightning that has failed to produce a reliable payment network after 7 years of investment, all the while the BTC fork remains unusable, which they are just fine with.

EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.

[nullc]

Man, your post is just full of malicious disinformation, most of it addressed elsewhere in this off-topic subthread.

> EDIT: The Lightning network markets itself as an improvement to Bitcoin, but it is a completely alternative settlement network that just happens to denominate in BTC. I don't think debating the use of the term "alt-coin" is material.

That is just entirely untrue. :( Whoever fed you that idea was confused or outright lying to you.

Lightning is a technique for using Bitcoin's smart contracting ability to pay bitcoin without bringing each and every transaction to the network.

The basic idea is that you take some Bitcoin and set a script on it that says that if there is a disagreement over who owns it, the involved parties will post to the ledger the last record in an external ownership transcript which is signed by the involved parties, and if anyone cheats and posts an outdated record, anyone else can post proof that a later entry existed and all the coins go to the non-cheating party.

With this in place, the parties can then transact back and forth securely as fast as they can sign and send Bitcoin transactions to each other without any global broadcast taking place. Taking it a step further, collections of these transactions can be made mutually atomic so that they're all successful or all fail (essentially by making them conditional on a common secret). This is how lightning makes it possible to pay people you've never transacted with before, by routing on a graph of these pairwise payments (that's what the 'network' in lightning network refers to).

All the transactions exchanged between participants are Bitcoin transactions-- which could be posted at any time to the network at the participant's whim, they refrain from doing so to save fees--, the system is built from the novel programmatic ability of Bitcoin, and it is completely ununsable without Bitcoin (or some clone that copies the required functionality, of course).

This kind of channelized usage of Bitcoin was foreseen by Bitcoin's creator and enabled by the consensus rules of the protocol from day one (particularly: nlocktime and sequence numbers which were explicitly added to support channels).

[programmerslave]

Preach!

[seibelj]

Lightning is not an “alt coin”. This whole comment is so absurd I don’t even know what to say other than it’s entirely conspiratorial and misinformed nonsense.

[est31]

I don't think there are any major implications. The point of blockchain currencies is to be decentralized so hacking a random github repo shouldn't have major implications. It's not even the only bitcoin node implementation out there at this point.

[etrabroline]

Before wall street involvement there was a single fork of Bitcoin that was a viable currency with low transaction fees. After Wall Street involvement there are at least 3 forks, the biggest of which had fees spiking at 60 USD per transaction making it nonviable for anything but speculators, and the others having very low adoption. The protocol was decentralized but enough of the community that controlled it was bought out to bring it down.

EDIT: calling something a lie does not make it so. also, what on earth is hateful here

[kallewoof]

Or:

Bitcoin has an incentive model based on transaction fees. This is currently being "boot-strapped" by a mechanism called subsidy, where miners get "extra" bitcoin aside from the transaction fees.

That subsidy shrinks every 4 years and will eventually be zero.

As we move towards that point, the transaction fees need to be high enough that the miners are incentivized to continue protecting bitcoin.

For regular coffee-style orders, this becomes infeasible; that's why you can use layer-2 (or higher) tech to pay really low fees for each transaction.

As Bitcoin usage increases, we hit new speed bumps -- transaction fees spiking was one of them. While this is the inevitable (for a successful bitcoin) future, there need to be ways to make cheaper payments, but everyone (who's given it some thought, and who doesn't have an agenda of some kind) agrees that permanently storing coffee sales in the blockchain directly is not the way to go, if we can avoid it, and we can.

[grubles]

Unused blockchains have no / low transaction fees.

>When people started using Bitcoin, fees went up!

That's how it is supposed to work.

[zhoujianfu]

“The threshold should probably be lower than it currently is. I don't think the threshold should ever be 0. We should always allow at least some free transactions.” -Satoshi Nakamoto

The p2p electronic cash system I signed up for in June 2010 is not working “how it is supposed to work”. $7.77 average transaction fee? Why not try raising the block size to even 2MB? That would do nothing to hurt decentralization. And do you really think an asset currently worth $500B needs to incentivize people to keep it working?!

“I would never spend $100/yr to validate/store transactions and keep my Bitcoin investment working unless I can make a profit on that $100/yr on fees!”

[nullc]

This is a hateful lie.

[CyberDildonics]

Not it isn't, it's just information you don't want people to see.

[whoisninja]

misinformed take

Blockstream has almost no say at this point

some of the top contributors are either independent or work with Chaincode labs

over the last 10 years, Bitcoin is the most resilient to protocol changes and centralization

Ethereum, Bitcoin cash and Monero are all either centralized or bad implementations

[arcticbull]

It’s also the most resistant to any and all improvements that might mitigate the environmental calamity it actively contributes to.

[37ef_ced3]

The above shouldn't be downvoted. It's an interesting statement

What do you think of the Lightning Network?

Lightning Network channels specify a blockchain hash, so Bitcoin is supported but other cryptocurrencies could be used (if the HTLC scripts, etc., were ported)

The Lightning Network web of payment channels looks good to me. You can see how it can form an efficient "overlay" on any cryptocurrency that provides sufficient scripting power:

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

[etrabroline]

Lightning is not reliable the way Bitcoin is, and correspondingly has not seen any real-world adoption. It is effectively dead.

[gruez]

>and correspondingly has not seen any real-world adoption. It is effectively dead.

but

https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to...

and

https://coingate.com/lightning-network

[etrabroline]

> In 2021

So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future. Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?

https://blog.kraken.com/post/7225/a-need-for-speed-kraken-to...

> https://coingate.com/lightning-network

Ok. What can I actually buy with it? There's tons of venture capital going into this project and no commerce happening. Bitcoin had more real commerce 5 years ago than BTC and Lightning combined do today.

[gruez]

>So they are still putting money into the project and promising things in the future.

I don't get it. A major cryptocurrency exchange says they're planning to adopt it, and that doesn't count as "real-world adoption"? I guess that's true if your original statement read as "not seen any real-world adoption ...[today]" but it certainly doesn't follow that it's dead.

>Ok. What can I actually buy with it?

One of the merchants I've made multiple purchases on uses coingate for payments so that's something for me, at least. That said I'll admit that I haven't used lightning yet because I'm quite happy with the status quo of waiting for a lull in transaction volume so I can pay pennies per transaction (my payments aren't usually urgent). Going through the hassle setting up a lightning node isn't worth saving a few pennies each month in my opinion.

>Years ago, before venture capital took over BTC, I could buy games on Steam with Bitcoin. Can I buy video games with Lightning?

To be fair, bitcoin was launched in 2009 and it took until 2016 for steam to accept it. How many years has lightning been around? Also, while looking up when steam first accepted bitcoin I also found https://twitter.com/udiWertheimer/status/952206482715660289, which answers your second question.

[aeternum]

You could buy Steam games years ago because Bitcoin volume was low.

Just try some math: How large would blocks need to be to handle just 50% of Visa's current US transaction rate?

[zhoujianfu]

VISA says they do 150M transactions per day. I’m not sure how many are US, but let’s say half. Avg BTC transaction is 250 bytes, so you’d need about 10GB a day (about 70MB) blocks to do what you propose.

A 3TB drive is $39 on Amazon right now. So maybe 13c a day in storage costs to run half of visa’s US transactions.

Not raising Bitcoin’s block size has got to be THE most insane technical decision in modern history.

[splintercell]

I find LN's UX really painful. Ethereum's layer 2 solutions are far ahead in terms of user experience. The other day I had to settle an election bet, and either I settle it in stablecoin on high tx fees of ETH/BTC or try explaining one of the layer-2 solutions.

And no, I can't pay them in USDT on bch because that requires them to get a new wallet.

Raiden network which is Ethereum's LN like solution, faces the same problem. Whatever bitcoin folks envision, they will never get LN bitcoins to have the same network effect as bitcoin itself.

[nullc]

> I find LN's UX really painful.

What did you find painful, and which wallet(s)?

[logicslave]

I thought filecoin had a successful launch?

[ceejayoz]

https://www.axios.com/filecoin-blockchain-delay-3b5e6b9a-bcc...

[logicslave]

Yeah but they successfully ICO'd since then and the market cap has held its value

[traceddd]

It says more about bcash than bitcoin that it’s supporters feel the need to push a (false) narrative anywhere they can.

[seibelj]

This is clearly FUD pushed by bitcoin cash supporters. I’m coin-agnostic and don’t get into these fights but bitcoin is 100% doing exactly what it was designed to do.

[lhl]

Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System - “The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions, and there is a broader cost in the loss of ability to make non-reversible payments for non-reversible services.” https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

Average transaction fees are frequently $5-10 these days, which completely invalidates the original proposed use case for a system that would enable “small casual transactions.” https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

Since transactions will only increase in price as demand grows (and the tx limit has been effectively capped for years), I don’t see Bitcoin ever improving in this regard. Bitcoin may be successful as a speculative asset and for other purposes, but as “peer-to-peer electronic cash” it’s a failure.

[etrabroline]

>bitcoin is 100% doing exactly what it was designed to do

Bitcoin was designed to allow low-fee small amount internet commerce. From the first paragraph of Satoshi's white paper:

>The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions [emphasis added]

This is clearly no longer the case with the BTC fork of Bitcoin:

https://privacypros.io/tools/bitcoin-fee-estimator/

Therefore BTC is not doing what it was designed to do.