From ben at mord.io Thu Nov 16 16:01:18 2017 From: ben at mord.io (Benjamin Mord) Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2017 11:01:18 -0500 Subject: [Lightning-dev] General question on routing difficulties In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: Ivan, That is mostly false, but with bits of truth sprinkled in. Contact me at ben at mord.io for further discussion so we tread lightly on the lists' email inboxes. But briefly: scale-capable routing protocols are possible as demonstrated by IP and thus by the internet itself. As for centralizing flow through small number of liquidity providers, yes that does seem economically probable, at least unless / until off-chain channel rebalancing mechanism (like the recently proposed "revive" protocol) come about. Bitcoin script is not currently revive-capable but Ethereum is, so either Bitcoin revive could be enabled via two-way pegged sidechain protocol with Ethereum, or even better, by a purpose-built (yet still not Turing-complete) extension to Bitcoin script itself in the future. In either case the lightning network seems a key first step, and even were off-chain payment rebalancing not possible for some odd reason, the lightning network seems extremely valuable and scaleable - regardless because the centralization you speak is not one that affects safety of the money supply itself, and these centralized hubs would be more dispensable / swappable versus the mining centralization risk that people more often talk about in Bitcoin. Lightning network centralization, even if it persisted somehow despite revive and future concepts, would not be an existential risk. As for transaction fees, the idea is only channel setup / tear down are required greatly reducing fees. Yes if txin fees were millions of dollars then people could not practically penalize fraud, but that is unlikely. Even if txin fees made fraud claims marginally unprofitable (yet practical) that would still be ok - the judicial systems of most countries prove that people go beyond self-interest when sufficiently ticked, a fact of human psychology which in turn creates the incentives that support honest business. (Also please be aware I'm not a lightning code contributor, so that team might also be doing more to address already than I thought to mention above.) I'll post more about this on http://ben.mord.io Thanks, Ben On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 9:26 AM, Ivan Raszl wrote: > I came across a thread discussing lightning network on reddit. A comment > was stating there is an unresolvable issue with the concept of lightning > network, related to routing. Quoting the comment: > > "The problem is, actually scaling and preventing decentralization requires > far more than a nice UX that lets you shoot tx from alpha-tester-A to > alpha-tester-B, and Lightning currently utterly fails at both of them. It > can't scale to 100,000 users due to routing difficulties; nor does it has > any plan of bootstrapping to "everyone using it" without the hubs > hypercentralizing to a few "liquidity providers" (read:banks); nor does it > have any plans to have actual security on a congested blockchain with high > fees. As a scaling solution, Lightning is a lot worse than the blockchain > itself right now." > > Can somebody comment on this? Thanks! > > _______________________________________________ > Lightning-dev mailing list > Lightning-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/lightning-dev > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: