[user-the-name]

I am very familiar with the lightning network. It only exists in toy form. What currently exists can not scale, and nobody know how to make it scale.

As it exists, it does not work beyond the toy levels of usage it is seeing today.

[keymone]

a toy form with 1800BTC ($54mil) only in public channels. i don't think you're familiar with it at all, it scales very well because payments are actual peer to peer, don't need to be globally broadcast and checkpointed. millions tps.

[user-the-name]

It does not scale. At all. The only reason it works at all at the moment is strong centralisation.

Routing in the Lightning network is an open problem in computer science, one that nobody know how to solve. Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries. And how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through.

[keymone]

> Routing in the Lightning network is an open problem in computer science

if you're trying to say that routing in lightning is an instance of traveling salesman, you're not only wrong - routing is actually shortest path problem, but even if you were right, your statement that TSP somehow makes the system unworkable is simply false in light of the fact that businesses like USPS and DHL and countless more delivery companies exist and are profitable.

> Payments aren't peer to peer, they have to be routed through intermediaries

by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries.

> how to do that is basically impossible to figure out, except if you just have a handful of giant hubs you can route through

yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.

if you say something is impossible to figure out - you need to back up that claim with something, anything.

what if i told you, you were lied to by skeptics and scammers, trying to sell their shitcoins, and you need to put away your biases for just a minute and invest a little time to see, if what they were saying is actually true?

[user-the-name]

> if you're trying to say that routing in lightning is an instance of traveling salesman, you're not only wrong - routing is actually shortest path problem

I am not. I am saying we don't have the map that we need to solved the shortest path problem, and we have no way to get that map.

> by this metric nothing on the internet is peer to peer, because packets are routed through intermediaries

And we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.

> yes, there will be hubs, large and small and there will be clusters of interconnected local meshes and there will be users routing however they wish through the system instead of taking the cheapest most connected path.

No, there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.

[keymone]

> I am saying we don't have the map that we need to solved the shortest path problem, and we have no way to get that map.

of course we do, connectivity graph and updates to it are gossiped all the time and each node has imperfect representation of it.

> we have routing protocols to do so for the internet. We do not have one for the Lightning network that works at scale.

we do, lightning nodes do that all the time right now.

> there will only be a small number of very large hubs. Nothing else actually works in practice.

again, you're making a statement without backing it up by anything.

your entire argument boils down to: if a node can't have perfect information about connectivity graph, then it can't perfectly route payments.

and you're right, that statement is true, but it is irrelevant because imperfect routing through imperfect connectivity graph is fine and works great.

[user-the-name]

> of course we do, connectivity graph and updates to it are gossiped all the time and each node has imperfect representation of it.

Yes, that is exactly the part that does not scale beyond a toy network, and for which there is no solution.