[frankenst1]

Growth continued on second layers: Bitcoin's tx count on the Lightning Network has doubled over the last year. Forks of Bitcoin who attempted to scale by increasing the blocksize all failed and are practically dead (Bitcoin SV, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin Cash, eCash, Bitcoin ABC, ...).

[CyberDildonics]

That's not growth, bitcoin's throughput is still less than a 56k modem from 25 years ago.

Being able to send and receive from anyone is growth, lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.

If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.

It's unnecessary nonsense because bitcoin is pointlessly crippled. Every other cryptocurrency has plenty of throughput and can be used decentralized.

[frankenst1]

> lightning isn't on the bitcoin chain until it gets synchronized.

That is literally the purpose of building second layers. We don't need to keep on-chain records of every microtransaction and coffee purchase in an immutable, ever-growing blockchain synchronized across thousands of nodes across the globe.

> If I give you a bitcoin address, you can't send anything to me with the lightning network.

Sure I can. It is called a submarine swap.

[CyberDildonics]

> Sure I can. It is called a submarine swap.

You can call it whatever you want, someone still has to sync with the main chain, where all the utility is. You can get together with your friend and give each other IOUs all day every day, it doesn't somehow change the fact that bitcoin's throughput is severely crippled to be the speed of a dialup modem.

Have you ever stopped to think that other cryptocurrencies don't have second layers because people don't want them and their chains don't need them? Why go through all this when there is no reason to have a crippled chain in the first place?

Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.

[frankenst1]

> Using regular cryptocurrencies is incredibly simple and elegant. It's only when people started to believe propaganda about disk space and cpu time (that never made sense with the most basic examination) that somehow something that worked amazingly well is now a complete mess.

Bitcoin SV did not care about these things and is dead because of it. Its blocks are ~200MB spammed with mostly non-payment related data. Its blockchain has grown to over 6 TB, the global number of nodes verifying the chain is down to 20 and it has been delisted by many exchanges and block explorers.

Bitcoin and Lightning in comparison have ~25,000 nodes.

[CyberDildonics]

Anyone can spin up as many nodes as they want.

Your example is bizarre since it is a nonsense fork made by a scammer. Even so it does actually work and keeps running even though all the people that sold you a second layer said throughput above a 56k modem was impossible. The spam could easily be prevented by a minimum fee. Even $0.10 per transaction would be $120,000 an hour paid by spammer and going to miners.

[kranke155]

Someone needs to explain to me how the Lightning Network actually works, because I find it super sus. How do people make money off transactions as miners if BTC transactions are so cheap ?

[Yizahi]

People must lock BTC in the "channels" from them to each of the peers they ever want to transact with, in the amount of what they will spend with them in the future. This should produce approximately 10billion*10billion channels in total (so 1^20 whateverellion channels for all humans). Then magic internet machine will solve this Traveler Salesman problem for each transaction.

After people realised that this is a crap idea, they have reinvented banks, who take people's BTC and give them IOUs instead. Then only banks have to deal with the "channels" and "locked" tokens in a centralised way, lessening the overall complexity.

Few understand :)

[thinkloop]

People have realized this a long time ago. The expected configuration is a node-based network like the internet. Messages (money) hop from "router" to "router" until they reach their final destinations through the shortest paths. The "bank" would still be your bitcoin wallet, while your lightning allocation would be like a credit account with every vendor simultaneously. The nodes are routers. The amount you put "at-risk" in lighting only needs to be a minimum amount you need to transact for the day/week/month - and it is not really "at-risk" since there are strong protections built-in.

The general story is that not all transactions are equal. A payment from your cousin for a poker debt doesn't need the fury of a million computers protecting it. Similarly if you have an ongoing relationship with a vendor, and many other examples. In real-life there are vastly differing trust-profiles between transactions. It's ok to trade some security for some efficiency sometimes. It doesn't make sense to treat them all the same.

[Yizahi]

So user gets a credit at the Not-A-Bank router-node for the full amount of what he intends to spend. Tell me, how exactly does this differ from a bank? Except with less oversight?

[Yizahi]

More info about LN:

https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network

[kranke155]

Seems like what I expected. Core Dev team of Bitcoin has corrupted that project completely. It’s a shame that Hal Finney/Nakamoto went away so early.

[thinkloop]

Are you asking how do lighting STAKERS make money if lightning transactions are so cheap? Right now they don't, people are doing it to bootstrap the network. But in the future, they will be able to make it on volume. Staking is nearly costless. There were 369 billion purchase transactions for goods and services worldwide in 2018 [1]. At a penny per, that's a lot of scratch.

[1] https://www.cardrates.com/advice/number-of-credit-card-trans...

[kranke155]

This rests on the amazing assumption that Bitcoin will replace all currency everywhere somehow.

This is why I can’t get Bitcoiners - their assumptions are always over the top “we will take 100% of gold’s value” “nations will dissolve because of Bitcoin” or something of that order.

Compare that to ETH - people will build decentralised applications and ETH will be the currency in those applications. Stakers get a fee.

Simple.

[mtrycz2]

Since we're on a tech inclined site, you'll be happy to hear that an RPi4 can process 256MB blocks in well less than two minutes. Current 32MB size limit on BCH in 8 seconds. Check for yourself.

Bitcoin Cash (the og big block chain) is alive and kicking, and getting stable updates (both features and performance), and also has optional (affordable) coin shuffle). Lightning Network is a security and usability nightmare, and its total liquidity is in the low thousands of BTC (lol).

[frankenst1]

Since LN's inception, liquidity and transaction count on the LN have roughly doubled with every year.

In comparison, BCH has lost 80% of its transaction volume in the last year alone. Its blocksize is now 100KB on average and it now processes fewer transactions than LN. It also regularly hard-forks, either because of leadership cults (Ver, Wright, Sechet, ...) or because of scheduled hard-forks every 6 months which kick off all users who haven't updated. It's the opposite of stable and the market apparently does not share its determination in sacrificing decentralization for adoption.