From ron.ohara54 at gmail.com Sun Jul 10 08:35:21 2016 From: ron.ohara54 at gmail.com (Ron OHara) Date: Sun, 10 Jul 2016 09:35:21 +0100 Subject: [Lightning-dev] LN question - real life transaction bundling Message-ID: <578208C9.4090807@gmail.com> Hi .... forgive me if I have missed something obvious. In the LN whitepaper (like many others) the discussion revolves around Alice and Bob interacting ... fine. IF Alice and Bob interact many times during an interval, there is clear chance to optimize that to a single 'settlement' on the block chain. My question is about how likely it is that Alice and Bob are going to interact many times per interval. Take the Point Of Sale case - just using myself as an example. I might make a number of purchases, but that will be with a number of shops in any given day. So there is no optimization possible there. Lots of single A-->B interactions ... but many different 'B' entities. If the interval is a month ... then since I am fairly predictable... , I purchase from the same shops many times in that month... that could be optimized. BUT will the merchants be happy with (up to) a months worth of revenue still pending inside LN? I dont think so. Visa via the banks, allows merchants access to the pending funds, with the proviso that they may be reversed in the future. Cashflow is vital to merchants. OK - that is for the Alice and Bob case of interactions. Now for the other little problem I see here - which makes things even worse. With Bitcoin it is NOT 'Alice transacting with Bob'. It is Address(1) transacting with Address(2) .... and if both parties are following the recommended practice of not re-using addresses, then their next interaction is Address(3) transacting with Address(4) - removing any possibility of optimization. As far as I can tell, long running channels, are by definition identical to address re-use for the period they are open. That makes them very vulnerable to traffic analysis and thus have lower security that native Bitcoin transactions. That is probably acceptable for many use cases, but it is a tradeoff to gain performance. I have some other questions for Rusty about routing and location brokerage too - but that can wait. Cheers Ron OHara -- Talent hits a target no one else can hit, genius hits a target no one else can see -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 490 bytes Desc: OpenPGP digital signature URL: