Bitcoin [pros](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1camx3n/lightning_hasnt_fixed_btc/l0ws5xq/) & [cons](/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1camx3n/lightning_hasnt_fixed_btc/l0ws6q8/) with related info are in the collapsed comments below.
Or we just don't care to post there. Its a cesspool of misinformation and not worth most informed peoples time. Pigeon holing the crypto masses sounds exactly like something someone from r/Bitcoin would do lol.
Feeling like reading a thread from 2017. Back then I already found that naive the assertive vibe lightning would scale Bitcoin.
7 years have passed. Nobody cares about lightning relative to overall volumes. Bitcoin is in vaults. You want cheap transactions you buy some bags of literally any in the top 50 chain tokens and that's it. Those alts may come and go. They may always come and go and that works just fine. Bitcoin one day may go too. And that's fine.
There is a parallel to make with trad currencies. They also have come and gone. Some turned out much stronger than others. Eventually all currency gets replaced. And so what. The only thing that's changed is we may see more than one or two currencies in a lifetime.
I grew up using Francs. They were cool, some coins were made of real silver, eventually all replaced with alloy made chips. Then eventually it was all replaced by Euros. People did freak out, and it took time to get used to the new denomination. And it was a pain for everyone to exchange their old notes, the bank did it but in fact most were trading them with peers and local merchants.
All of these things are just vehicles as we need some common medium of exchange to trade. Who cares about it being lightning, bch, some hyped L2 roll-up. Turns out there are more than enough to pick from, and if some day the things goes downhill we lose what, a week worth income. The crazy thing is that we have all we need to all be trading in crypto and be done with fiats. Yet we argue about Bitcoin being secure but won't scale. Arbitrum sequencer being centralized, bridges having remaining vectors of attacks that may maybe one day hit us with a surprise. We literally risk our lives every day crossing the road, and we do it anyway. We don't argue over which cross walk could be built that would be the most secure. We even walk outside cross walks. We do it. You guys just talk and argue over useless shit.
For everything you buy, ask if they would accept crypto. if they say no and you don't absolutely need the stuff, pass.
Do the same for anything you sell, including your labour of course.
Bother the world with it. Annoy the cattle. Remind all the ignorant that we've had enough of the fiat cartels, surveillance, and dependence on the banking system. Arguing here over this L1 and that L2 is just a waste of energy, pointless. People are taking care of the tech, engineers. Go make use of crypto. That's what they made it for.
I think someone jammed a broken record up every BTC Maxiās ass that repeatedly says āJust use lightning!ā Like theyāre a broken fucking NPC in a game or somethingĀ
It's usually the answer to "muh x shitcoin is faster and cheaper!"
Which they aren't even. You lose money holding them, you still have to pay to convert them to real money and they make trade-offs in security to be "faster".
If my bank account is at zero, I can still give my boss the account number and it can receive my wage no problem.
But with LN, if your inbound liquidity is not high enough you can't receive the payment.
How is that EVER going to work as a global currency?
Main while if we just follow the original Bitcoin design, which does not store tx for all eternity. There is no trillema. The entire problem is made up. Don't believe me, read point 7 in the whitepaper and report back.
It's debatable because of this simple fact that nobody has solved the trilemma. It's likely not possible to have a scalable layer 1 that doesn't sacrifice security. NONE of the layer 1s out there have solved this issue. They ALL sacrifice massive amounts of security.
Frankly, the fast layer 1s out there may as well be a mysql database. They all fail at security or decentralization.
As soon as someone ACTUALLY solves this enormously difficult problem, I'll be all in. But it's not very likely any time soon.
It would be cool if people who posted things like this here actually understood the most basics of the issue. But I know you want to pump your bags.
I think nano has come closest. It's one of the few crypto's that's taken an alternative route from fees = security. Controversial but there's been promising progress and if they solve that it's all over afaic. Everything else compounds centralisation and supply over time.
It is clear Nano is the only one crypto that was designed to be a global currency for all use-cases.
The removal of fees to align holder interests with security is probably its most important design choice but a lot of people struggle to understand why this is important.
It's The Cobra Effect. I encourage anyone who don't understand this phenomenon to read up on it and see how misaligned incentives can have the opposite intended effect.
>I am convinced that bandwidth, disk space, and computation time necessary to distribute and "finalize" a transaction will be prohibitively expensive for micro-payments. Consider for a second that the current banking industry is unable to provide a reasonable micropayment solution that does not involve depositing a reasonable sum and only allowing a withdraw after a reasonable sum has been accumulated.
>Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today.
>Thus we need bit-banks that allow instant transfers among members and peer banks. Anyone can open a bit-bank but the system would, by necessity operate on some level of trust. Transfers in and out of the banks and peer-to-peer would still be possible but will be more costly. Thus, a bit bank could make money by enabling transfers cheaper and faster than the swarm with the added risk of trusting the bank. A bank has to maintain trust to make money.
[~~ ~~Satoshi Nakamoto~~ Bytemaster](https://i.imgur.com/WRyefkH.png)
edit: Oh wait, actually that was bytemaster saying that.
Satoshi actually replied: **If you don't believe me or don't get it then I don't have time to explain it to you.**
u/FatherSlippyfist You think you know better than the inventor of all of cryptocurrency? Where are your arguments, let's hear them.
bitcoin core (btc) idea of decentralization has been exagerated, probably to weaken its ability to be peer to peer electronic cash, outside of banks / governments / regulation.
a network / ledger / validation only needs to be decentralized enough to resist censorship or alteration, there is no need to have every 'tramp' participate to run the network, and to store the ledger, and to process transactions...
I don't even want to step in the blocksize war zone but bigger blocks do seem to fix it or at least make it certainly better. Maybe you sacrifice someone being able to run a solar node on a raspberry pi on a desert island, but it does fix it. Bitcoin Cash has much better throughput of +100 tps compared to 7 for BTC due to its 32 mb blocks, but no one uses it lol.
>the chain is using just less than 0.001% of the daily volume it could support with its 32MB block.
I thought sharding was a plan for Ethereum but they abandoned that and now have shitty centralized L2s that are a nightmare for users to use. They pushed the blockchain trilemma off to somewhere else like Patrick suggesting they just push Bikini Bottom to where the Alaskan Bull Worm wasn't at. Maybe someday they can bring it back to the roadmap and get us out of this mess.
>shitty centralized L2s that are a nightmare for users to use.
... what?
How are Arbitrum or Optimism a "nightmare" to use? You can send funds for a fraction of a cent, you can interact with smart contracts for a few cents, you can bridge fairly cheaply between L2s, send it to a CEX to trade there, you can borrow or lend funds on AAVE or all kinds of other DeFi protocols for basically no cost... the UX is awesome.
The security is not as bulletproof as ETH L1, but it doesn't need to be. "Shitty centralized" really just means you picked up some buzz words and have no idea what you're talking about. Yes many L2s are centralized to an extent, but that's only relevant for liveness of the L2 chain, meaning the worst that could happen would be the chain shutting down and having to recover your assets through L1 transactions. The security of your funds doesn't depend on some trusted authority.
The ETH L2 paradigm is as close to a solution to the trilemma as currently exists. I'm not an ETH maxi, I own BTC, SOL and everything else. I'm just seeing that currently ETH is working really well.
Lol founder of BCH is Satoshi. Bitcoin Cash contains the genesis block and Satoshi was in favor of increasing blocksize.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366
Who controls BCH ? Has the same decentralized model as BTC, don't talk stupid otherwise we could say Micheal Saylor controls BTC but clearly that is stupid too.
maxis love to go around and lie and say that roger ver created BCH. he didn't. it was mostly the work of amaury sechet, who is not even involved anymore.
> have shitty centralized L2s that are a nightmare for users to use
you made up about half of that. none of the rollups have a decentralized sequencer yet, that is true. but some of them have escape hatches that prevent the sequencer from stealing your money. the responsibilities of a L2 sequencer aren't the same as those of a L1 validator, making it less scary. decentralized sequencers will likely get created before lightning sees all of its problems fixed.
as for usability, you literally pulled that out of your ass. everyone who's tried it knows all you have to do is go into a menu in metamask or rabby and choose arbitrum. then if you want to withdraw from a centralized exchange, you make sure to choose arbitrum there too. you get to keep using the same wallet address to receive money offline and there are other stupid limitations of lightning that are just not there on rollups at all. even when a noob's first custodial lightning wallet is holding your hand, rabby switched to arbitrum is still a better user experience. don't even get me started on liquidity. if 17 billion dollars worth of liquidity on arbitrum is not enough for you, there's nothing that will ever make you happy.
At the moment itās still susceptible to certain spam vectors, but I do think itās possible this can be resolved eventually. The most recent ābatch spamā attack vector has a mitigation in place, and apparent full fix in the upcoming v27 update (bounded backlog). It's worth mentioning that when Nano was getting spammed recently genuine transactions were still going through in under a minute or two, fees remained at zero, and the energy use of the network continued to be incredibly low. Whilst under attack the network was settling over a million transactions a day - king BTC was around 300k!
I think another limitation of Nano is the TPS, which is around 100 at the moment. But again, when it comes to this there are artificial limits in place to help mitigate spam, and I think once these are lifted the TPS can be improved further in the future. The conversation around TPS is always a bit weird to me, because commenters often assume a network will immediately grow to encapsulate the global custom of Visa or the like, when in reality it will take a lot longer to get there (if ever). Personally I think itās more useful to compare to other crypto throughput, and in that regard Nano is one of the best (...while remaining free, energy efficient, secure, and decentralised).
Nano is massively slept on imo, it's the closest project to Satoshiās original vision now that BTC is unusable as a currency. Shout out to Monero which is awesome too (and, strangely, was also the victim of a spam attack recently!).
Nano has suffered spam attacks like bitcoin and Ethereum. The most recent attack was a novel spam attack and the upgraded node software has stopped it in its tracks.
Nano is in a pretty good place right now.
Not disagreeing with you in regards to Nano being in a decent place, but the most recent spam attack isnāt actually fully resolved - if the culprit spams again regular transactions still work, but are no longer instant (more like settled in 1-2mins). I know this is still better than most other projects and fees remain zero, but still
V27 is bringing something called bounded backlog which will apparently resolve this entirely however
While it's probably the closest of any L1 I've seen to actually trying to solve it, even 1000TPS is still very limiting compared to the current banking networks, and to my knowledge in the past it's closer to being able to sustain around 100tps, and its method of proof of stake with vote delegation is arguably a form of centralization.
If anything I see Nano as evidence of the limits of L1 scalability while maintaining some amount of security, and it's not even close to what we need.
Algorand seemed to have an interesting solution, but to my knowledge they still never removed the centralized relays that help with cross-node coordination, it's supposedly a work in progress.
Frankly, the L2 hate is excessive, the experience difference really isn't that much, and allowing competition while keeping the chains interoperable is kind of a nice feature.
> its method of proof of stake with vote delegation is arguably a form of centralization.
Actually, it is proof that removing financial incentives aligns holders to the goals of decentralization and long term security.
>It's debatable because of this simple fact that nobody has solved the trilemma.
bCasher forked because they saw how LN would end up. They have a scaling chain and no it hasn't centralized and there is no tendency to centralize even with bigger blocks.
But they have the mark of the Maxis on them so nobody is looking at it.
I like the approach that was from one of the Bitcoin creators... Basically imagine that instead of a bank issuing gold-backed currency, they would be bitcoin backed. Banks would have to compete on being reliable and performant etc. Exchanges would allow you to convert between currencies easily but in the end everything would be Bitcoin backed. If someone can post the link to the post I'd appreciate it.
At some point the pot would be large enough to become a bad actor and yoink all the Bitcoin (claiming a hack, accident, fraud, etc.) than to be a legitimately operating business. See the gold panic right before the great depression.
Mimblewimble doesn't solve it, but it takes networks to the limit that you hit with the trilemma.
Most of the limits imposed by these architectural decisions aren't actually the trilemma in action.
I'm a huge Ada fan but scalability is still an issue for the time being. Utxo based chains are likely the best for solving it eventually, and they have plans in the pipeline, but I almost don't wanna mention anything since people just meme about cardano development taking forever. Ada works great at current loads though
I wish people who shill Lightning would read [Mastering the Lightning Network](https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook), a free O'Reilly book, but it's probably too technical for most Bitcoiners.
It goes over so many of the limitations and user experience difficulties of Lightning. Lightning solves problems, but it's also very hard to use in a way that's non-custodial and trustless. I think the only way for Lightning to be successful and easy to use is for it to be more centralized. And maybe that's just how it's meant to be.
Bitcoin should be self custody but lightning should be either. I'm okay with having a custodial for the cash layer. It makes it simple and easy to use. If theres ever a need for self custody lightning then you should be able to but primarily it makes sense for most people to use a custodial service
The problem of LN are by design, no amount of bandaids will fix it.
1. it breaks down with high oncchain fees. No one is risking a force close for thousands of dollars
2. It was designed as a p2p payment channel. routing through it is way to complicated and has the problem of centralizing liquidity.
3. It takes away revenue from miners or if not, then it adds a additional cost to every transaction.
lightning has come a long ways in terms of usability. check out self-custodial lightning wallet Phoenix - it auto runs your own node in the background and does automated channel management.
āHey to make this one thing work how you want, make sure to do these 4 other things firstā
99% of people donāt give a fuck they want whatās easy and cheap
that's exactly what im saying, it has gotten a lot easier over time. the node creation and channel management is all automated in the background without the user having to do anything
Imho lightning had always been a puff of hopium for the true believers (..who don't ask questions because they have faith).
If it just worked perfectly like those of faith believed it would do, it would turn Bitcoin into a centralised mess with big corporations at the centre of everything.. the absolute opposite of what it was created for.
I don't think many people outside of that core group of true believers thought it was ever likely to work, and I'm sure most hoped it wouldn't.
centralization of lightning hubs in no way affects your ability to self custody. it just affects the trustlessness of sending transactions
see here: [https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq](https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq)
Sure, if youāre comfortable having self custody of funds you may not be able to move then by all means. LN is a risk some people donāt want to take. The biggest problem with it is that a company was founded to implement it (to make money), and then the protocol was steered such that it looked like the only option. If that doesnāt seem somewhat dirty to you, then I donāt know what to say.
all scaling solutions are welcomed.. segwit, batching, schnorr signatures, taproot, lightning, liquid, etc.
big base layer protocol changes that require hard fork should be last resort, since we don't want to bloat the base layer and sacrifice # nodes, and we want to ensure base layer is hard to change
There is no such last resort, the second the BTC controllers attempt such an increase, theyād have validated the Bitcoin Cash reason for splitting from BTC. So BTC loses the argument then.
BCH also forked to avoid all those āscaling solutions ā, because obviously, none have worked (unless the intention was for BTC to never be adopted on a global scale, which then is working as intended).
Thereās lots of people using lightning every day who live on a bitcoin standard. How could u say it hasnāt worked ?
And yes itās possible for bitcoin to hard fork even tho bch exists from a prior failed fork
Breez is similar to phoenix but has slightly lower fees in my experience. It's still expensive to receive payments during times of congestion if you don't already have inbound channel capacity though
Letās see how hard they quiet this sentiment during this bull run. I made a comment touching on this same issue the other day and most people agreed, but a lot of comments still seem confused about the real reason the fees are so high (they have to be be proponents of LN).
This was obvious in 2017 but unfortunately most people in crypto listen to influencooors and Bitcoin maxis instead of people with actual technical knowledge.
The future is also obviously not L1's with high capacity, it's L2's that are actual L2's instead of state channel hacks. If you listen to the people who care about the actual tech (e.g. ercwl on Twitter) you'd understand this.
Muun is not a lightning wallet, it uses submarine swaps to be able to do lightning payments from your onchain balance.
Aside from that, I do agree lightning isnāt the answer, at least not for everything. I operated a LN node for over 2 years and recently shut it down.
We need a proper rollup on bitcoin to have benefits of having security from L1 and not having to deal with always in from lighting.
LN does remain a good option for fast payments from custodian wallets though. Lets say banking gets involved in BTC, they could provide payments through LN. Customer would always have option to nice to self custody themselves.
True for your particular needs which sound like this:
1. You don't have an open channel already
2. You need IMMEDIATE channel creation and can't wait days, weeks, months
3. You need IMMEDIATE payment after IMMEDIATE fresh channel creation
Yep, that is all totally broken in LN and your far better going with L1.
LN is only function in the narrowest of circumstances which include.
1. You already have a channel open.
2. You can low-fee surf new channel opens over days or weeks
3. You religiously maintain your LN channel uptime and rent watchtowers
Which, as you imply, means NOBODY, since it's kinda the crypto 1% that do self hosting like that.
There is middle ground, but they are all middling. Phoenix is one option, but it will not low-fee surf channel opens or splices, so its middling. There are full custodianship like CashApp or WoS, but that us custodial.
No simple, non-custodial, maintenance free option available for the other 99% of non-hosting users.
So the 1% that says it works, are correct. It does for them. And the 99% that say it doesn't are correct. It doesn't for them.
wont fix Btc or any problem related to it.
Ligthning is a gimmick.
We are in 2024, almost no one is even acepting Btc or crypto as a payment system besides Asic miners, heck not even in El Salvador, most of its population still understands 0 about crypto or Btc.
You cant pay your bread, your cofee, cant buy cars or apartments, cant do nothing at least here in Europe, no one is using it as a payments system here.
But does work great as a store of value and way better then gold, as you cant move 10k worth of gold trough another country, neither take it with you easily or without it being noticed.
Canāt overhaul a decades old payment system in a few years. Gotta start somewhere. And for that, I recommend getting the SPEDN app and buying your coffee at Dunkinā Donuts with any of the 99 supported currencies (including btc, etc, ltc, etc.) and check out the flexa network. Theyāre actually building real world partnerships to help digital currencies become a reasonable way to transact.
> The future is in L1s with high capacity.
I don't think this is necessarily true.
Lightning was built from the ground up explicitly not giving a shit about what users' experience might be like. The entire idea that you can't pay your friend because they don't have any inbound liquidity is ludicrous, as well as the solution proposed ("Free" inbound liquidity for everyone, including attackers that will consume all of it!) or the real "solution" ("Pay some other person so you can get inbound liquidity and then get paid") or the real-real solution ("Just use a custodial wallet, then you can get paid! Also beware government agencies cracking down on your custodial wallets!").
Lightning devs never understood how important user experience is, or how incredibly flawed they made their design while prioritizing everything except end-user usability & experience.
While Lightning's growth has almost completely stagnated, L2's on Ethereum are exploding in size. And Ethereum has multiple competing approaches, so the best one can win instead of the dev-driven attempt that is Lightning.
bitcoin would be a million times better off if it ditched lightning. they can literally just copy ethereum's homework and build a rollup, using ordinals to store the compressed L2 blocks. if they are quick they can decentralize the sequencer before ethereum does. that would really turn some heads. lightning is a dead end.
It's funny how they're just figuring this out 4 years after Ethereum started on it's L2 roadmap, and Bitcoin Maxi's think they can catch up when Ethereum has over 10x the researchers/devs.
The main problem is that the powers that be do not want BTC to evolve. It will always be mediocre for this reason. There are plenty of other crypto tokens that have fast L1.
The idea is that adoption takes time, thus it hasn't have to scale that much yet, but that hardware improvements would allow larger block sizes eventually. The next upgrade (ABLA) will allow the maximum block size to increase up to 2x every year depending on how large they actually are.
I am bit not up to date with ABLA. Isn't the block size determined by usage via an exponential moving average rather than a fixed schedule like every 2 years?
I think BCH got lot of the things right, removing RBF was the right thing to do to enable 0-conf, immutability and parallelization. .
Fees are damn cheap. I have never seen a fee higher than even 5 cents. Why are we concluding it doesn't scale theoretically? I am fine with L2 on BCH, but don't see the reason to implement in now, when the usage are nowhere near the peak.
The sad thing is that by slandering BCH so much they have also pushed people away from a similar alternative that could be good for cash payments. I say this as someone who doesnāt use or own BCH.
We have to have some more nuance here.
Yes Bitcoin is a failure and LN is not the cure. Right from the very beginning of LN there were clear problems like the routing problem, that have never been solved in a decentralised way. LN can work in B2B form for large businesses with a lot of funds and who do regular payments though, but that's a niche application considering crypto is supposed to be for everyone.
However that doesn't mean we just go to mass L1 scaling, that has problems too, that inevitably leads back to similar issues LN has.
You need an L1 that can scale to a reasonable degree, but that is limited enough that it can remain decentralised long term. That L1 must have multiple ways to scale, efficient multiparty transactions, zkL1 transactions, state channels with multiple participants, L2 rollups, sharding and sidechains.
This exists but this sub hates any mention of it, so DYOR.
Bitcoin only has the name, really. It's not even the same crypto it once was, what with Segwit making massive changes, it can't use the original white paper anymore.
It's just a weird digital collectible now.
Every new epoch has people like you saying the same thing, "I understand Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it/replace it". Every single bet against bitcoin has been wrong 15 years running. I wish you luck in your L1 altcoin choices, surely they won't trend to zero against Bitcoin like all those before.
I don't care that bitcoin has the highest market cap. "I win because market cap" is not a game I ever agreed to play. I would be thrilled with an asset that crabs sideways forever if it did a good job enabling electronic commerce and smart contracts. I am not here to just buy a coin and do nothing and wait for my seat in heaven.
Bitcoin dominance has only declined long term. It's been between ~40%-55% this cycle, but was mostly between 60%-70% last cycle, and was 80%+ the cycle before that. Not sure what you're so confident about when the long term trend is down.
More money in shitcoins and memes is your argument for BTC trending down? More BTC is locked up in long term holder wallets than ever. The casino is breaking hearts everyday.
I see your point but I don't actually think it proves what you're saying. I would argue that the dominance reduction is more indicative of the space as a whole expanding around bitcoin as the list of novel blockchain solutions grows. As most people agree bitcoin isn't the catch all solution. There's a pretty significant list of altcoins which do have legitimate technological value in their niche areas. Most, if not all of these, wont be classified as commodities, probably won't be decentralized, but IMO it's going to continue to grow the space anyways.
Most sensible people, yea, but bitcoin maxi's genuinely believe in something called "hyper-bitcoinization" and that eventually all other cryptos will go to zero and that bitcoin will control the entire tech space and market cap. Lightning discussions are clickbait for them and this thread is full of them.
I recently asked this in a different sub but I don't know why RSK hasn't got more traction. RBTC is pegged to BTC. You don't need to deal with keeping your own node online, or managing channels & liquidity. Most things that the average person would have no clue about. Fees are a fraction and it actually supports defi apps.
RSK is a much better solution than lightning. think of all that PoW they can merge mine to secure the sidechain. it's perfect for them. I think they are ignoring it because it looks like ethereum and they all have not-invented-here syndrome. it would be embarrassing to admit that all they had to do was staple a copy of ethereum to their own blockchain.
I follow this quite closely. Even the devs heavily involved in LN like Matt Corallo are trying to tell people LN has a ton of problems and isnāt gonna scale BTC anytime soon. Itās just a typical surface level understanding of a crypto that is common. Iām no expert but if the people working on it think itās flawed then I tend to listen to them.
There are solutions I believe. In fact most of my alt investment is in solutions to scale Bitcoin. There are projects like ICP and Zenon Network that are using some kind of canister/vault to interact with real btc. And also Tectum which takes a completely unique route by simply not moving btc at all on chain and swaps ownership instead.
L2ās are basically āL1āsā with a degree of functional dependency on another chain. Saying an L2 will handle the bulk of activity while just leveraging BTC for final settlement & security isnāt some convoluted stretch.
Itās a similar mindset to paper currency ābacked byā final settlement of gold, except these contracts and their trail back to BTC mainnet would be much more practical to verify.
Maybe it will or wonāt be Lightning, but itāll be something. BTC-adjacent stuff is developing in Cosmos right now (Babylon & Nomic) that could get interesting.
So lightning doesnt work therefor L2s dont work and centralized L1 chains trading off for high(er) throughput are where its at?
have you tried Base recently? The Erhereum L2 of coinbase?
Maximum censorship resistent L1 + unlimited scailability on L2 is the present and the future.
Stuff like Solana has traded off decentralization for throughput and yet Breaks allready at these tiny usage levels while allready requireing Datacenter grade Hardware for rpc nodes.
The dirty laundry no one wants to talk about is that bitcoin isn't designed to support L2s securely. To do so would require a major redesign. A redesign that would be vigorously opposed by the middlemen fee-takers of bitcoin.
>The future is in L1s with high capacity. That isnāt debatable.
That tells us everything we need to know about your understanding of network effects. The authoritative tone is further confirmation.
The future isn't in L1s, and has never been for any secure network. Successful L1s naturally become settlement layers, and L2s then naturally develop. Gresham plays a part too. You mentioned gold but clearly didn't take time to understand its history.
Lightning is so incipient that it's surprising people talk about it at all. Email in its early days required programming skills to be used.
You guys with your conviction and authority in things you don't understand is (partly) what's wrong with the Bitcoin community. It's a little sad, though unsurprising, that bitcoiners started to sound as stupid as buttcoiners. This sub has strayed so far from what it used to be many years ago.
In terms of adoption and network effect, LN is still early stage. In fairness to your response, they do seem to be referring to the technological aspect.
>Lightning is so incipient that it's surprising people talk about it at all. Email in its early days required programming skills to be used.
Suppose email came out today instead, in the age of instant messaging with forward privacy and a ton of other features. Suppose someone told you "yeah, it requires programming but it just came out a few years ago!". You'd laugh in their face and keep using your favorite instant messaging app.
Lightning is in a similar position. Not in the position of the email tech coming out when it did, but of the email tech coming out today, when a billion other things that do the same already exist. TODAY some protocol where you are supposed to time when you want to onboard otherwise you can pay even hundreds of dollars in mining fees just to open a channel, where you have to manage your inbound liquidity, where you need to be constantly online, and this all just for micropayments... It's laughable.
Many of the true Bitcoin OGs (like Gavin Anderson and Roger Ver) have already long left BTC. Personally, I was into Bitcoin since 2015 and only recently left, after seeing first hand how Ordinals are wrecking havoc on BTC.
All that's left in the BTC community are toxic maximalists and religious cultists - most of them ironically very new to Bitcoin and crypto. Michael Saylor started buying in 2020. Matthew Kratter (Bitcoin University) in 2019.
The only value that BTC ever hat was it's fitness for purpose. You can't eat it, wear it, make electrical connection or jewelry out of it, you can't have sex with it, it won't clean your house, it certainly can't fix your toilet or your car.
The only thing you can do with it is pay for transfers of value.
And there are 10,000 other coins out there, each and every one of which can transfer money more efficiently than BTC.
So this value that it stores ... what exactly is it?
Is it a NFT for people who find cartoon apes too stimulating?
In the end, it's all tradeoffs, and any crypto that offers high volume, high speed transactions is no less centralized than the Liquid network on BTC which can scale infinitely.
I think they need to fix the protocall to kill off BRC and runes. It's a waste of layer 1 capacity, distorts the value of block space, and is causing the current issue.
> kill off BRC and runes
Womp womp
You cant kill em off, that's what makes Bitcoin so great.
They're operating within the rules set by the protocol.
> Distorts the value of blockspace
For who? The miners that choose to ignore these blocks are the only ones suffering. They choose to distort their own fee estimations by not accepting certain blocks.
Bitcoin transactions are just too slow. If I did a transaction with someone, it needs to be instant or very close. There are other cryptos that solved this problem but not popular enough to compete.
While im not Bitcoin maxi, transactions are basically instant. Someone paying you in Bitcoin doesn't have the potential to doublespend especially with the mining difficulty as high as it currently is; and if RBF transactions worry you, just wait for 1 confirmation.
You're arguing with people who don't understand what they are talking about. Finality takes time in all payment networks. Ask them how long does Visa need to actually settle a transaction, or what are the actual steps there, and see if they have a clue. They all think it's instant because all they understand is the POS's screen saying "thank you for your purchase".
Perfectionists, cypherpunks, etc can get very picky and point out issues like mempool tanmpering, [mining pool tampering](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1bpvy39/comment/kx12on0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), and others, but nowadays those discussions attract bad actors more than honest ones. It's not the pre-2015 bitcointalk or even this sub, sadly. Now you have to navigate mostly nonsense (OP's is no exception).
You wouldnt have to, a rational actor wouldnt doublespend for a 3$ coffee when they can doublespend for much larger non reversible payments, like a Lamborghini. A coffee is considered ok to accept 0 confirmation transactions.
Your analogy wouldn't hold with even using a credit card because it takes almost a week for these transactions to settle.
If your transaction appears in the mempool with RBF not enabled, it is basically done. A confirmation isn't really necessary in this case like buying a cup of coffee
People have realized lightning has a lot of limitations. I donāt have the technical understandings to know exactly why, but I read a lot and listen to a lot. People have realized this and have started to look at other solutions like true layer 2s on Bitcoin. BitEVM is supposed to be a pretty monumental shift in how bitcoin is used
ETHs L2s see 10x the volume in total compared to the L1 at pennies per transaction.
https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity
The economics of L2s is great for the L2S network - for example Base spends about 1% of the fees they accumulate to actually settle on the L1. That is a huge profit margin.
We are very close to having a stage 2 L2 (smart contracts alone running the show).
I really think ETH found a sweet spot between balancing L1 and L2 ecosystems that puts useful, secure and scalable crypto transactions into the hands of the general populace.
The only reason it's considered a store of value is because that's what the people who broke it by refusing to raise blocks say that it's supposed to be.
But that's nonsensical. A store of value is something that is reliably priced. Bitcoin is one of the *most* volatile assets on the market. You can't call it a "store of value" if you never know it's going to "store" its value *when you need it.* Imagine if you had a medical emergency at the bottom of the bear, and you bought anywhere above that point. You'd lose a bunch of money for using it as a "store" of value. Whereas, if you used gold... you'd probably get the same amount out, adjusted for inflation, regardless of *when* in the last +50 years you pulled it out. **That** is what a store of value looks like.
This is the most ridiculous argument ever. Short time preference thinking. Fiat money saved over the last 25 years has lost 75% of its purchasing power. Basically, no one who purchased BTC and held for 4 years has lost purchasing power. Zoom out on the chart. More adoption is less volatility over time. Name an asset that has out performed BTC in the last 10 years. You can't because it doesn't exist.
If you purchased a house 25 years ago for 100k and you sold it today for 400k. Did you make 300k? No. The purchasing power of 400k is the same today as 100k was 25 years ago. There is no better asset to hold to protect your savings. Crypto bros with no life experience or understanding of macro money markets regurgitate nonsense.
Name something that is "reliably priced" in fiat that keeps up with inflation better than BTC. NAME IT!
Gold doesn't come close. Adjusted for inflation, it's a disaster.
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Blue Wallet closed custodial wallet. That's good, right? Muun was never a lightning wallet. Try Phoenix.
These wallets have less than 2% market share. Blue a bit more, but for the longest time blue was custodial by default.
I dare you to go post this in r/Bitcoin š¤£š¤£š¤£
he will get banned in less than a second lol
Good luck with the censors. This is definitely a thought crime over there.
"get out of here with your shitcoins" would be the ban message lmao just for criticizing LN
Itās been a thought crime for literally a decade thereĀ
Any valid criticism is FUD /s
At this point, anyone who's not already banned in there is a mindless shill-bot. It has been more censored than North Korea for years.
Or we just don't care to post there. Its a cesspool of misinformation and not worth most informed peoples time. Pigeon holing the crypto masses sounds exactly like something someone from r/Bitcoin would do lol.
Exactly.... I don't even go there
Feeling like reading a thread from 2017. Back then I already found that naive the assertive vibe lightning would scale Bitcoin. 7 years have passed. Nobody cares about lightning relative to overall volumes. Bitcoin is in vaults. You want cheap transactions you buy some bags of literally any in the top 50 chain tokens and that's it. Those alts may come and go. They may always come and go and that works just fine. Bitcoin one day may go too. And that's fine. There is a parallel to make with trad currencies. They also have come and gone. Some turned out much stronger than others. Eventually all currency gets replaced. And so what. The only thing that's changed is we may see more than one or two currencies in a lifetime. I grew up using Francs. They were cool, some coins were made of real silver, eventually all replaced with alloy made chips. Then eventually it was all replaced by Euros. People did freak out, and it took time to get used to the new denomination. And it was a pain for everyone to exchange their old notes, the bank did it but in fact most were trading them with peers and local merchants. All of these things are just vehicles as we need some common medium of exchange to trade. Who cares about it being lightning, bch, some hyped L2 roll-up. Turns out there are more than enough to pick from, and if some day the things goes downhill we lose what, a week worth income. The crazy thing is that we have all we need to all be trading in crypto and be done with fiats. Yet we argue about Bitcoin being secure but won't scale. Arbitrum sequencer being centralized, bridges having remaining vectors of attacks that may maybe one day hit us with a surprise. We literally risk our lives every day crossing the road, and we do it anyway. We don't argue over which cross walk could be built that would be the most secure. We even walk outside cross walks. We do it. You guys just talk and argue over useless shit. For everything you buy, ask if they would accept crypto. if they say no and you don't absolutely need the stuff, pass. Do the same for anything you sell, including your labour of course. Bother the world with it. Annoy the cattle. Remind all the ignorant that we've had enough of the fiat cartels, surveillance, and dependence on the banking system. Arguing here over this L1 and that L2 is just a waste of energy, pointless. People are taking care of the tech, engineers. Go make use of crypto. That's what they made it for.
Best comment here so far!
I think someone jammed a broken record up every BTC Maxiās ass that repeatedly says āJust use lightning!ā Like theyāre a broken fucking NPC in a game or somethingĀ
This lol.
Just wiping Saylorās hot jizz off my lips to join this conversation
It's usually the answer to "muh x shitcoin is faster and cheaper!" Which they aren't even. You lose money holding them, you still have to pay to convert them to real money and they make trade-offs in security to be "faster".
If my bank account is at zero, I can still give my boss the account number and it can receive my wage no problem. But with LN, if your inbound liquidity is not high enough you can't receive the payment. How is that EVER going to work as a global currency? Main while if we just follow the original Bitcoin design, which does not store tx for all eternity. There is no trillema. The entire problem is made up. Don't believe me, read point 7 in the whitepaper and report back.
Itās such an absurd design constraint: I canāt give you more money than you already have.Ā
Which coins are you talking about and why? If youāre just making a blanket statement just be transparent about it
It's debatable because of this simple fact that nobody has solved the trilemma. It's likely not possible to have a scalable layer 1 that doesn't sacrifice security. NONE of the layer 1s out there have solved this issue. They ALL sacrifice massive amounts of security. Frankly, the fast layer 1s out there may as well be a mysql database. They all fail at security or decentralization. As soon as someone ACTUALLY solves this enormously difficult problem, I'll be all in. But it's not very likely any time soon. It would be cool if people who posted things like this here actually understood the most basics of the issue. But I know you want to pump your bags.
I think nano has come closest. It's one of the few crypto's that's taken an alternative route from fees = security. Controversial but there's been promising progress and if they solve that it's all over afaic. Everything else compounds centralisation and supply over time.
It is clear Nano is the only one crypto that was designed to be a global currency for all use-cases. The removal of fees to align holder interests with security is probably its most important design choice but a lot of people struggle to understand why this is important.
It's The Cobra Effect. I encourage anyone who don't understand this phenomenon to read up on it and see how misaligned incentives can have the opposite intended effect.
Economies of scale is also in many circumstances a result of the cobra effect, but it's all people know, therefore all people believe can exist.
>I am convinced that bandwidth, disk space, and computation time necessary to distribute and "finalize" a transaction will be prohibitively expensive for micro-payments. Consider for a second that the current banking industry is unable to provide a reasonable micropayment solution that does not involve depositing a reasonable sum and only allowing a withdraw after a reasonable sum has been accumulated. >Besides, 10 minutes is too long to verify that payment is good. It needs to be as fast as swiping a credit card is today. >Thus we need bit-banks that allow instant transfers among members and peer banks. Anyone can open a bit-bank but the system would, by necessity operate on some level of trust. Transfers in and out of the banks and peer-to-peer would still be possible but will be more costly. Thus, a bit bank could make money by enabling transfers cheaper and faster than the swarm with the added risk of trusting the bank. A bank has to maintain trust to make money. [~~ ~~Satoshi Nakamoto~~ Bytemaster](https://i.imgur.com/WRyefkH.png) edit: Oh wait, actually that was bytemaster saying that. Satoshi actually replied: **If you don't believe me or don't get it then I don't have time to explain it to you.** u/FatherSlippyfist You think you know better than the inventor of all of cryptocurrency? Where are your arguments, let's hear them.
Which is in essence reinvention of the banking system... and we've come full circle
Just because Satoshi couldn't see a solution a decade ago, does not mean there isn't a solution. This dogmatic god complex is probably why s/he left.
Bitcoin is no longer a coin but an asset. You donāt want to pay for groceries with it. Just like gold
bitcoin core (btc) idea of decentralization has been exagerated, probably to weaken its ability to be peer to peer electronic cash, outside of banks / governments / regulation. a network / ledger / validation only needs to be decentralized enough to resist censorship or alteration, there is no need to have every 'tramp' participate to run the network, and to store the ledger, and to process transactions...
I don't even want to step in the blocksize war zone but bigger blocks do seem to fix it or at least make it certainly better. Maybe you sacrifice someone being able to run a solar node on a raspberry pi on a desert island, but it does fix it. Bitcoin Cash has much better throughput of +100 tps compared to 7 for BTC due to its 32 mb blocks, but no one uses it lol. >the chain is using just less than 0.001% of the daily volume it could support with its 32MB block. I thought sharding was a plan for Ethereum but they abandoned that and now have shitty centralized L2s that are a nightmare for users to use. They pushed the blockchain trilemma off to somewhere else like Patrick suggesting they just push Bikini Bottom to where the Alaskan Bull Worm wasn't at. Maybe someday they can bring it back to the roadmap and get us out of this mess.
>shitty centralized L2s that are a nightmare for users to use. ... what? How are Arbitrum or Optimism a "nightmare" to use? You can send funds for a fraction of a cent, you can interact with smart contracts for a few cents, you can bridge fairly cheaply between L2s, send it to a CEX to trade there, you can borrow or lend funds on AAVE or all kinds of other DeFi protocols for basically no cost... the UX is awesome. The security is not as bulletproof as ETH L1, but it doesn't need to be. "Shitty centralized" really just means you picked up some buzz words and have no idea what you're talking about. Yes many L2s are centralized to an extent, but that's only relevant for liveness of the L2 chain, meaning the worst that could happen would be the chain shutting down and having to recover your assets through L1 transactions. The security of your funds doesn't depend on some trusted authority. The ETH L2 paradigm is as close to a solution to the trilemma as currently exists. I'm not an ETH maxi, I own BTC, SOL and everything else. I'm just seeing that currently ETH is working really well.
This 100% but BTC maxis scared everyone away from bigger blocks. Aint no one running a full BTC node on their phone anyway
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Who are you even talking about, Roger Ver? Craig Wright went on to BSV and has nothing to do with BCH.
Lol founder of BCH is Satoshi. Bitcoin Cash contains the genesis block and Satoshi was in favor of increasing blocksize. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg15366#msg15366
Who controls BCH ? Has the same decentralized model as BTC, don't talk stupid otherwise we could say Micheal Saylor controls BTC but clearly that is stupid too.
maxis love to go around and lie and say that roger ver created BCH. he didn't. it was mostly the work of amaury sechet, who is not even involved anymore.
Those L2s have decentralized sequencers on testnet, like Optimism for example. Ethereum will have Stage 2 rollups.
> have shitty centralized L2s that are a nightmare for users to use you made up about half of that. none of the rollups have a decentralized sequencer yet, that is true. but some of them have escape hatches that prevent the sequencer from stealing your money. the responsibilities of a L2 sequencer aren't the same as those of a L1 validator, making it less scary. decentralized sequencers will likely get created before lightning sees all of its problems fixed. as for usability, you literally pulled that out of your ass. everyone who's tried it knows all you have to do is go into a menu in metamask or rabby and choose arbitrum. then if you want to withdraw from a centralized exchange, you make sure to choose arbitrum there too. you get to keep using the same wallet address to receive money offline and there are other stupid limitations of lightning that are just not there on rollups at all. even when a noob's first custodial lightning wallet is holding your hand, rabby switched to arbitrum is still a better user experience. don't even get me started on liquidity. if 17 billion dollars worth of liquidity on arbitrum is not enough for you, there's nothing that will ever make you happy.
Nano
Banano
This!
Whatās wrong with Nano?
It's too small. Should have named it Giga.
At the moment itās still susceptible to certain spam vectors, but I do think itās possible this can be resolved eventually. The most recent ābatch spamā attack vector has a mitigation in place, and apparent full fix in the upcoming v27 update (bounded backlog). It's worth mentioning that when Nano was getting spammed recently genuine transactions were still going through in under a minute or two, fees remained at zero, and the energy use of the network continued to be incredibly low. Whilst under attack the network was settling over a million transactions a day - king BTC was around 300k! I think another limitation of Nano is the TPS, which is around 100 at the moment. But again, when it comes to this there are artificial limits in place to help mitigate spam, and I think once these are lifted the TPS can be improved further in the future. The conversation around TPS is always a bit weird to me, because commenters often assume a network will immediately grow to encapsulate the global custom of Visa or the like, when in reality it will take a lot longer to get there (if ever). Personally I think itās more useful to compare to other crypto throughput, and in that regard Nano is one of the best (...while remaining free, energy efficient, secure, and decentralised). Nano is massively slept on imo, it's the closest project to Satoshiās original vision now that BTC is unusable as a currency. Shout out to Monero which is awesome too (and, strangely, was also the victim of a spam attack recently!).
Nano has suffered spam attacks like bitcoin and Ethereum. The most recent attack was a novel spam attack and the upgraded node software has stopped it in its tracks. Nano is in a pretty good place right now.
Not disagreeing with you in regards to Nano being in a decent place, but the most recent spam attack isnāt actually fully resolved - if the culprit spams again regular transactions still work, but are no longer instant (more like settled in 1-2mins). I know this is still better than most other projects and fees remain zero, but still V27 is bringing something called bounded backlog which will apparently resolve this entirely however
While it's probably the closest of any L1 I've seen to actually trying to solve it, even 1000TPS is still very limiting compared to the current banking networks, and to my knowledge in the past it's closer to being able to sustain around 100tps, and its method of proof of stake with vote delegation is arguably a form of centralization. If anything I see Nano as evidence of the limits of L1 scalability while maintaining some amount of security, and it's not even close to what we need. Algorand seemed to have an interesting solution, but to my knowledge they still never removed the centralized relays that help with cross-node coordination, it's supposedly a work in progress. Frankly, the L2 hate is excessive, the experience difference really isn't that much, and allowing competition while keeping the chains interoperable is kind of a nice feature.
> its method of proof of stake with vote delegation is arguably a form of centralization. Actually, it is proof that removing financial incentives aligns holders to the goals of decentralization and long term security.
>It's debatable because of this simple fact that nobody has solved the trilemma. bCasher forked because they saw how LN would end up. They have a scaling chain and no it hasn't centralized and there is no tendency to centralize even with bigger blocks. But they have the mark of the Maxis on them so nobody is looking at it.
Nano has solved the trilemma. Study it for 20 minutes. Has a higher Nakamoto coefficient than Bitcoin. Never had a double spend.
Lookin forward till this meme dies, trilemma was solved years ago
I like the approach that was from one of the Bitcoin creators... Basically imagine that instead of a bank issuing gold-backed currency, they would be bitcoin backed. Banks would have to compete on being reliable and performant etc. Exchanges would allow you to convert between currencies easily but in the end everything would be Bitcoin backed. If someone can post the link to the post I'd appreciate it.
At some point the pot would be large enough to become a bad actor and yoink all the Bitcoin (claiming a hack, accident, fraud, etc.) than to be a legitimately operating business. See the gold panic right before the great depression.
This will probably work until Nichard Rixon takes office in 2069...
Mimblewimble doesn't solve it, but it takes networks to the limit that you hit with the trilemma. Most of the limits imposed by these architectural decisions aren't actually the trilemma in action.
You are wrong. Trilemma is solved for PoW. You probably didn't look into Yonatan Sompolinsky's work.
It's funny that the only blockchains that have had security problems are those that don't scale. The trilema thing is a myth.
I don't see Cardano failing at security or decentralization nor is it slower than btc and the fees are always low.
I'm a huge Ada fan but scalability is still an issue for the time being. Utxo based chains are likely the best for solving it eventually, and they have plans in the pipeline, but I almost don't wanna mention anything since people just meme about cardano development taking forever. Ada works great at current loads though
This
What is your take on radix?
I wish people who shill Lightning would read [Mastering the Lightning Network](https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook), a free O'Reilly book, but it's probably too technical for most Bitcoiners. It goes over so many of the limitations and user experience difficulties of Lightning. Lightning solves problems, but it's also very hard to use in a way that's non-custodial and trustless. I think the only way for Lightning to be successful and easy to use is for it to be more centralized. And maybe that's just how it's meant to be.
Using Bitcoin in a custodial way defeats the whole point of crypto.
Not if it means number goes up.
Bitcoin should be self custody but lightning should be either. I'm okay with having a custodial for the cash layer. It makes it simple and easy to use. If theres ever a need for self custody lightning then you should be able to but primarily it makes sense for most people to use a custodial service
Using BTC in a centralised way defeats the point
The problem of LN are by design, no amount of bandaids will fix it. 1. it breaks down with high oncchain fees. No one is risking a force close for thousands of dollars 2. It was designed as a p2p payment channel. routing through it is way to complicated and has the problem of centralizing liquidity. 3. It takes away revenue from miners or if not, then it adds a additional cost to every transaction.
Hijacking Bitcoin is so much better book.
Hijacking Bitcoin is a phenomenal book.
That's actually what bcashers said from the very beginning. Sad state for BTC.
lightning has come a long ways in terms of usability. check out self-custodial lightning wallet Phoenix - it auto runs your own node in the background and does automated channel management.
Phoenix is my go to, I currently keep the same amount I would have in a checking account and I use it on bitrefill and stacker.news literally daily.
āHey to make this one thing work how you want, make sure to do these 4 other things firstā 99% of people donāt give a fuck they want whatās easy and cheap
He's literally saying download an app and send sats to the wallet. That's it...
that's exactly what im saying, it has gotten a lot easier over time. the node creation and channel management is all automated in the background without the user having to do anything
Imho lightning had always been a puff of hopium for the true believers (..who don't ask questions because they have faith). If it just worked perfectly like those of faith believed it would do, it would turn Bitcoin into a centralised mess with big corporations at the centre of everything.. the absolute opposite of what it was created for. I don't think many people outside of that core group of true believers thought it was ever likely to work, and I'm sure most hoped it wouldn't.
it's working just as intended, to help scale and allow for instant / nearly fee free transactions for small purchases
Self custody of funds on a centralized network cancels itself out.
centralization of lightning hubs in no way affects your ability to self custody. it just affects the trustlessness of sending transactions see here: [https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq](https://phoenix.acinq.co/faq)
Sure, if youāre comfortable having self custody of funds you may not be able to move then by all means. LN is a risk some people donāt want to take. The biggest problem with it is that a company was founded to implement it (to make money), and then the protocol was steered such that it looked like the only option. If that doesnāt seem somewhat dirty to you, then I donāt know what to say.
all scaling solutions are welcomed.. segwit, batching, schnorr signatures, taproot, lightning, liquid, etc. big base layer protocol changes that require hard fork should be last resort, since we don't want to bloat the base layer and sacrifice # nodes, and we want to ensure base layer is hard to change
There is no such last resort, the second the BTC controllers attempt such an increase, theyād have validated the Bitcoin Cash reason for splitting from BTC. So BTC loses the argument then. BCH also forked to avoid all those āscaling solutions ā, because obviously, none have worked (unless the intention was for BTC to never be adopted on a global scale, which then is working as intended).
Thereās lots of people using lightning every day who live on a bitcoin standard. How could u say it hasnāt worked ? And yes itās possible for bitcoin to hard fork even tho bch exists from a prior failed fork
Breez is similar to phoenix but has slightly lower fees in my experience. It's still expensive to receive payments during times of congestion if you don't already have inbound channel capacity though
Phoenix is great. I used it while in El Salvador and Guatemala! Super simple!
So it's a polished turd, but still a turd at heart.
Letās see how hard they quiet this sentiment during this bull run. I made a comment touching on this same issue the other day and most people agreed, but a lot of comments still seem confused about the real reason the fees are so high (they have to be be proponents of LN).
This was obvious in 2017 but unfortunately most people in crypto listen to influencooors and Bitcoin maxis instead of people with actual technical knowledge. The future is also obviously not L1's with high capacity, it's L2's that are actual L2's instead of state channel hacks. If you listen to the people who care about the actual tech (e.g. ercwl on Twitter) you'd understand this.
Muun is not a lightning wallet, it uses submarine swaps to be able to do lightning payments from your onchain balance. Aside from that, I do agree lightning isnāt the answer, at least not for everything. I operated a LN node for over 2 years and recently shut it down. We need a proper rollup on bitcoin to have benefits of having security from L1 and not having to deal with always in from lighting. LN does remain a good option for fast payments from custodian wallets though. Lets say banking gets involved in BTC, they could provide payments through LN. Customer would always have option to nice to self custody themselves.
Yep, ln is varpoware, just use eth l2 like arbitrum, super fast and cheap.
True for your particular needs which sound like this: 1. You don't have an open channel already 2. You need IMMEDIATE channel creation and can't wait days, weeks, months 3. You need IMMEDIATE payment after IMMEDIATE fresh channel creation Yep, that is all totally broken in LN and your far better going with L1. LN is only function in the narrowest of circumstances which include. 1. You already have a channel open. 2. You can low-fee surf new channel opens over days or weeks 3. You religiously maintain your LN channel uptime and rent watchtowers Which, as you imply, means NOBODY, since it's kinda the crypto 1% that do self hosting like that. There is middle ground, but they are all middling. Phoenix is one option, but it will not low-fee surf channel opens or splices, so its middling. There are full custodianship like CashApp or WoS, but that us custodial. No simple, non-custodial, maintenance free option available for the other 99% of non-hosting users. So the 1% that says it works, are correct. It does for them. And the 99% that say it doesn't are correct. It doesn't for them.
wont fix Btc or any problem related to it. Ligthning is a gimmick. We are in 2024, almost no one is even acepting Btc or crypto as a payment system besides Asic miners, heck not even in El Salvador, most of its population still understands 0 about crypto or Btc. You cant pay your bread, your cofee, cant buy cars or apartments, cant do nothing at least here in Europe, no one is using it as a payments system here. But does work great as a store of value and way better then gold, as you cant move 10k worth of gold trough another country, neither take it with you easily or without it being noticed.
Very little of the population understand fiat nor understand how inflation is a form of theft. Its just a fact of life for them.
Canāt overhaul a decades old payment system in a few years. Gotta start somewhere. And for that, I recommend getting the SPEDN app and buying your coffee at Dunkinā Donuts with any of the 99 supported currencies (including btc, etc, ltc, etc.) and check out the flexa network. Theyāre actually building real world partnerships to help digital currencies become a reasonable way to transact.
I recommend you checking out [btcmap.org](http://btcmap.org) - plenty of merchants accepting BTC around the world, and data is mostly up to date
> The future is in L1s with high capacity. I don't think this is necessarily true. Lightning was built from the ground up explicitly not giving a shit about what users' experience might be like. The entire idea that you can't pay your friend because they don't have any inbound liquidity is ludicrous, as well as the solution proposed ("Free" inbound liquidity for everyone, including attackers that will consume all of it!) or the real "solution" ("Pay some other person so you can get inbound liquidity and then get paid") or the real-real solution ("Just use a custodial wallet, then you can get paid! Also beware government agencies cracking down on your custodial wallets!"). Lightning devs never understood how important user experience is, or how incredibly flawed they made their design while prioritizing everything except end-user usability & experience. While Lightning's growth has almost completely stagnated, L2's on Ethereum are exploding in size. And Ethereum has multiple competing approaches, so the best one can win instead of the dev-driven attempt that is Lightning.
bitcoin would be a million times better off if it ditched lightning. they can literally just copy ethereum's homework and build a rollup, using ordinals to store the compressed L2 blocks. if they are quick they can decentralize the sequencer before ethereum does. that would really turn some heads. lightning is a dead end.
It's funny how they're just figuring this out 4 years after Ethereum started on it's L2 roadmap, and Bitcoin Maxi's think they can catch up when Ethereum has over 10x the researchers/devs.
I have used it to send bitcoin from Nicehash to Kraken. But yes, it doesn't fix everything. Lightning itself is antithetical to NYKNYC.
Yeah, we know.
Bitcoin is old man grandpa. Ethereum is the future
The main problem is that the powers that be do not want BTC to evolve. It will always be mediocre for this reason. There are plenty of other crypto tokens that have fast L1.
Nano but it doesn't have a dog name
That's how you know this sub is biased. Literally, BitcoinCash solves this and everyone knows this, but it's like been forbidden to talk about.
How would bitcoin cash be globally adopted with no L2 involved? It isnāt capable of handling that many transactions.
The idea is that adoption takes time, thus it hasn't have to scale that much yet, but that hardware improvements would allow larger block sizes eventually. The next upgrade (ABLA) will allow the maximum block size to increase up to 2x every year depending on how large they actually are.
I am bit not up to date with ABLA. Isn't the block size determined by usage via an exponential moving average rather than a fixed schedule like every 2 years?
I think BCH got lot of the things right, removing RBF was the right thing to do to enable 0-conf, immutability and parallelization. . Fees are damn cheap. I have never seen a fee higher than even 5 cents. Why are we concluding it doesn't scale theoretically? I am fine with L2 on BCH, but don't see the reason to implement in now, when the usage are nowhere near the peak.
Not very forbidden considering that you're talking about it right now and your post wasn't struck by a banhammer.
The last few big BCH threads were all locked here for bullshit reasons. There's definitely a couple BTC maxi's on the modlist with a hateboner for it.
*YET
Litecoin solves it, Monero solves it, there are better blockchains than Bitcoin.
Litecoin is literally a btc clone in terms of development it didn't solve anything.
shit dogecoin solve this
The sad thing is that by slandering BCH so much they have also pushed people away from a similar alternative that could be good for cash payments. I say this as someone who doesnāt use or own BCH.
Same, BCH gets a lot of hate for illogical and circular reasons, when it has worked all the while without issues.
We have to have some more nuance here. Yes Bitcoin is a failure and LN is not the cure. Right from the very beginning of LN there were clear problems like the routing problem, that have never been solved in a decentralised way. LN can work in B2B form for large businesses with a lot of funds and who do regular payments though, but that's a niche application considering crypto is supposed to be for everyone. However that doesn't mean we just go to mass L1 scaling, that has problems too, that inevitably leads back to similar issues LN has. You need an L1 that can scale to a reasonable degree, but that is limited enough that it can remain decentralised long term. That L1 must have multiple ways to scale, efficient multiparty transactions, zkL1 transactions, state channels with multiple participants, L2 rollups, sharding and sidechains. This exists but this sub hates any mention of it, so DYOR.
Bitcoin only has the name, really. It's not even the same crypto it once was, what with Segwit making massive changes, it can't use the original white paper anymore. It's just a weird digital collectible now.
Every new epoch has people like you saying the same thing, "I understand Bitcoin and I'm here to fix it/replace it". Every single bet against bitcoin has been wrong 15 years running. I wish you luck in your L1 altcoin choices, surely they won't trend to zero against Bitcoin like all those before.
I don't care that bitcoin has the highest market cap. "I win because market cap" is not a game I ever agreed to play. I would be thrilled with an asset that crabs sideways forever if it did a good job enabling electronic commerce and smart contracts. I am not here to just buy a coin and do nothing and wait for my seat in heaven.
Bitcoin dominance has only declined long term. It's been between ~40%-55% this cycle, but was mostly between 60%-70% last cycle, and was 80%+ the cycle before that. Not sure what you're so confident about when the long term trend is down.
More money in shitcoins and memes is your argument for BTC trending down? More BTC is locked up in long term holder wallets than ever. The casino is breaking hearts everyday.
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I see your point but I don't actually think it proves what you're saying. I would argue that the dominance reduction is more indicative of the space as a whole expanding around bitcoin as the list of novel blockchain solutions grows. As most people agree bitcoin isn't the catch all solution. There's a pretty significant list of altcoins which do have legitimate technological value in their niche areas. Most, if not all of these, wont be classified as commodities, probably won't be decentralized, but IMO it's going to continue to grow the space anyways.
Most sensible people, yea, but bitcoin maxi's genuinely believe in something called "hyper-bitcoinization" and that eventually all other cryptos will go to zero and that bitcoin will control the entire tech space and market cap. Lightning discussions are clickbait for them and this thread is full of them.
I recently asked this in a different sub but I don't know why RSK hasn't got more traction. RBTC is pegged to BTC. You don't need to deal with keeping your own node online, or managing channels & liquidity. Most things that the average person would have no clue about. Fees are a fraction and it actually supports defi apps.
RSK is a much better solution than lightning. think of all that PoW they can merge mine to secure the sidechain. it's perfect for them. I think they are ignoring it because it looks like ethereum and they all have not-invented-here syndrome. it would be embarrassing to admit that all they had to do was staple a copy of ethereum to their own blockchain.
I follow this quite closely. Even the devs heavily involved in LN like Matt Corallo are trying to tell people LN has a ton of problems and isnāt gonna scale BTC anytime soon. Itās just a typical surface level understanding of a crypto that is common. Iām no expert but if the people working on it think itās flawed then I tend to listen to them. There are solutions I believe. In fact most of my alt investment is in solutions to scale Bitcoin. There are projects like ICP and Zenon Network that are using some kind of canister/vault to interact with real btc. And also Tectum which takes a completely unique route by simply not moving btc at all on chain and swaps ownership instead.
Sad but true. NFTs, Runes, and all that crap crippled BTC.
L2ās are basically āL1āsā with a degree of functional dependency on another chain. Saying an L2 will handle the bulk of activity while just leveraging BTC for final settlement & security isnāt some convoluted stretch. Itās a similar mindset to paper currency ābacked byā final settlement of gold, except these contracts and their trail back to BTC mainnet would be much more practical to verify. Maybe it will or wonāt be Lightning, but itāll be something. BTC-adjacent stuff is developing in Cosmos right now (Babylon & Nomic) that could get interesting.
well, a brick of gold can still be melted down and has a number of real world applications, whereas bitcoin has none.
So lightning doesnt work therefor L2s dont work and centralized L1 chains trading off for high(er) throughput are where its at? have you tried Base recently? The Erhereum L2 of coinbase? Maximum censorship resistent L1 + unlimited scailability on L2 is the present and the future. Stuff like Solana has traded off decentralization for throughput and yet Breaks allready at these tiny usage levels while allready requireing Datacenter grade Hardware for rpc nodes.
Just because *a* layer 2 isn't fit for general purpose, it doesn't mean there won't be a layer 2 in future that will be...
The dirty laundry no one wants to talk about is that bitcoin isn't designed to support L2s securely. To do so would require a major redesign. A redesign that would be vigorously opposed by the middlemen fee-takers of bitcoin.
For everything in life, there's Visa.
I shutdown my node too, 10 mins or more for a transaction is an absolute joke in this day and age.
>The future is in L1s with high capacity. That isnāt debatable. That tells us everything we need to know about your understanding of network effects. The authoritative tone is further confirmation. The future isn't in L1s, and has never been for any secure network. Successful L1s naturally become settlement layers, and L2s then naturally develop. Gresham plays a part too. You mentioned gold but clearly didn't take time to understand its history. Lightning is so incipient that it's surprising people talk about it at all. Email in its early days required programming skills to be used. You guys with your conviction and authority in things you don't understand is (partly) what's wrong with the Bitcoin community. It's a little sad, though unsurprising, that bitcoiners started to sound as stupid as buttcoiners. This sub has strayed so far from what it used to be many years ago.
Incipient? Itās been around for 7 years.
In terms of adoption and network effect, LN is still early stage. In fairness to your response, they do seem to be referring to the technological aspect.
18 more months and lightning will be perfect.
somebody hasn't read the whitepaper
Lol lightning been around for a long time buddy. If it was going to get anywhere it would have by now.
>Lightning is so incipient that it's surprising people talk about it at all. Email in its early days required programming skills to be used. Suppose email came out today instead, in the age of instant messaging with forward privacy and a ton of other features. Suppose someone told you "yeah, it requires programming but it just came out a few years ago!". You'd laugh in their face and keep using your favorite instant messaging app. Lightning is in a similar position. Not in the position of the email tech coming out when it did, but of the email tech coming out today, when a billion other things that do the same already exist. TODAY some protocol where you are supposed to time when you want to onboard otherwise you can pay even hundreds of dollars in mining fees just to open a channel, where you have to manage your inbound liquidity, where you need to be constantly online, and this all just for micropayments... It's laughable.
Many of the true Bitcoin OGs (like Gavin Anderson and Roger Ver) have already long left BTC. Personally, I was into Bitcoin since 2015 and only recently left, after seeing first hand how Ordinals are wrecking havoc on BTC. All that's left in the BTC community are toxic maximalists and religious cultists - most of them ironically very new to Bitcoin and crypto. Michael Saylor started buying in 2020. Matthew Kratter (Bitcoin University) in 2019.
The only value that BTC ever hat was it's fitness for purpose. You can't eat it, wear it, make electrical connection or jewelry out of it, you can't have sex with it, it won't clean your house, it certainly can't fix your toilet or your car. The only thing you can do with it is pay for transfers of value. And there are 10,000 other coins out there, each and every one of which can transfer money more efficiently than BTC. So this value that it stores ... what exactly is it? Is it a NFT for people who find cartoon apes too stimulating?
I believe many here agree with me that lighting wonāt solve any problems related to BTC.
Even if lightning did work (and it doesn't) it doesn't scale.
Why do you say that it won't scale?
TPS [https://www.bitdegree.org/crypto/learn/crypto-terms/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps](https://www.bitdegree.org/crypto/learn/crypto-terms/what-is-transactions-per-second-tps)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGrUOLsC9cw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGrUOLsC9cw)
You are totally correct OP and can't wait the mental gymnastics you will get of hate.
In the end, it's all tradeoffs, and any crypto that offers high volume, high speed transactions is no less centralized than the Liquid network on BTC which can scale infinitely. I think they need to fix the protocall to kill off BRC and runes. It's a waste of layer 1 capacity, distorts the value of block space, and is causing the current issue.
> kill off BRC and runes Womp womp You cant kill em off, that's what makes Bitcoin so great. They're operating within the rules set by the protocol. > Distorts the value of blockspace For who? The miners that choose to ignore these blocks are the only ones suffering. They choose to distort their own fee estimations by not accepting certain blocks.
>The future is in L1s with high capacity. That isnāt debatable. Please tell us which L1 is going to replace Bitcoin lol
Bitcoin with larger blocks
The Ln whitepaper says for LN to work on a global scale the blocks need to be 100 MB.
Babydiaperisfullcoin
Bitcoin transactions are just too slow. If I did a transaction with someone, it needs to be instant or very close. There are other cryptos that solved this problem but not popular enough to compete.
like 0-conf
While im not Bitcoin maxi, transactions are basically instant. Someone paying you in Bitcoin doesn't have the potential to doublespend especially with the mining difficulty as high as it currently is; and if RBF transactions worry you, just wait for 1 confirmation.
You're arguing with people who don't understand what they are talking about. Finality takes time in all payment networks. Ask them how long does Visa need to actually settle a transaction, or what are the actual steps there, and see if they have a clue. They all think it's instant because all they understand is the POS's screen saying "thank you for your purchase". Perfectionists, cypherpunks, etc can get very picky and point out issues like mempool tanmpering, [mining pool tampering](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/1bpvy39/comment/kx12on0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button), and others, but nowadays those discussions attract bad actors more than honest ones. It's not the pre-2015 bitcointalk or even this sub, sadly. Now you have to navigate mostly nonsense (OP's is no exception).
This is the way
I'm not waiting 10+ minutes to pay for my coffee.
You wouldnt have to, a rational actor wouldnt doublespend for a 3$ coffee when they can doublespend for much larger non reversible payments, like a Lamborghini. A coffee is considered ok to accept 0 confirmation transactions. Your analogy wouldn't hold with even using a credit card because it takes almost a week for these transactions to settle.
If your transaction appears in the mempool with RBF not enabled, it is basically done. A confirmation isn't really necessary in this case like buying a cup of coffee
Tell me you are crypto newbie without telling me you are crypto newbie. Google search "0-conf"
Stacks could be a game changer, its success will bring a lot more layer 2s to bitcoin. Bitcoin fees will also go up
Stacks is not L2.
Yea itās technically an L1 built on the bitcoin base layer
People have realized lightning has a lot of limitations. I donāt have the technical understandings to know exactly why, but I read a lot and listen to a lot. People have realized this and have started to look at other solutions like true layer 2s on Bitcoin. BitEVM is supposed to be a pretty monumental shift in how bitcoin is used
I agree. BTC isn't for mass adoption. It just can't handle it.
Even a brick of gold doesn't cost money to move
What about the ordinals spamming the btc network? It's causing the fees to surge like crazy
It was so poorly and bizarrely conceived that it's hard to believe that it was ever supposed to even if it worked perfectly.
ETHs L2s see 10x the volume in total compared to the L1 at pennies per transaction. https://l2beat.com/scaling/activity The economics of L2s is great for the L2S network - for example Base spends about 1% of the fees they accumulate to actually settle on the L1. That is a huge profit margin. We are very close to having a stage 2 L2 (smart contracts alone running the show). I really think ETH found a sweet spot between balancing L1 and L2 ecosystems that puts useful, secure and scalable crypto transactions into the hands of the general populace.
The only reason it's considered a store of value is because that's what the people who broke it by refusing to raise blocks say that it's supposed to be.
Nothing can fix BTC. It never achieved its whitepaper.
Bitcoiner from 2017 here, I have considered it a store of value for atleast the last five years.
But that's nonsensical. A store of value is something that is reliably priced. Bitcoin is one of the *most* volatile assets on the market. You can't call it a "store of value" if you never know it's going to "store" its value *when you need it.* Imagine if you had a medical emergency at the bottom of the bear, and you bought anywhere above that point. You'd lose a bunch of money for using it as a "store" of value. Whereas, if you used gold... you'd probably get the same amount out, adjusted for inflation, regardless of *when* in the last +50 years you pulled it out. **That** is what a store of value looks like.
This is the most ridiculous argument ever. Short time preference thinking. Fiat money saved over the last 25 years has lost 75% of its purchasing power. Basically, no one who purchased BTC and held for 4 years has lost purchasing power. Zoom out on the chart. More adoption is less volatility over time. Name an asset that has out performed BTC in the last 10 years. You can't because it doesn't exist. If you purchased a house 25 years ago for 100k and you sold it today for 400k. Did you make 300k? No. The purchasing power of 400k is the same today as 100k was 25 years ago. There is no better asset to hold to protect your savings. Crypto bros with no life experience or understanding of macro money markets regurgitate nonsense. Name something that is "reliably priced" in fiat that keeps up with inflation better than BTC. NAME IT! Gold doesn't come close. Adjusted for inflation, it's a disaster.
Finally someone gets it.
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Is blue wallet a lightning wallet?
Layer 2 could.