Not sure why you and the other person mentioning lightning have been downvoted. I’ve noticed increasingly it’s not possible to have reasonable discussion about bitcoin on hacker news. It seems the folks from /r/btc have found this place.
The Lightning Network design is exactly what the first sentence of Satoshi's Bitcoin whitepaper seeks to avoid - payment processor middlemen.
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would
allow online payments to be sent directly from one party
to another without going through a financial institution." [2]
LN can't solve the TSP without either publishing a map of all nodes and routes, or having all nodes broadcasts to all nodes. The former significantly reduces decentralization and further removes the "electronic cash" aspect requiring payment processor hubs, while the latter will suffer from latency/scaling issues/DDoS susceptibility.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
Secondly, even if it was the TSP, you don't need to 100% solve it in order to have a working system. How do you think actual travelling salesmen can exist? They just pick a good enough route, nobody is checking whether they picked the perfect route, and nobody cares.
"A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would
allow online payments to be sent directly from one party
to another without going through a financial institution."
The constant repetition of talking points without actually addressing the critiques of those talking points may fool the gullible, but the technologically savvy see it, and it costs you your credibility with them. You guys are like Marco Rubio [1] constantly repeating the same talking points regardless what critiques are thrown your way.
You've provided no technical details, only an ad hominem fallacy.
Feel free to explain actual technical details of how LN does anything interesting, other than further centralize Bitcoin into centralized payment processor hubs?
As per the LN white paper:
8.4 Payment Routing
It is theoretically possible to build a route map
implicitly from observing 2-of-2 multisigs on the
blockchain to build a routing table. Note, however, this
is not feasible with pay-to-script-hash transaction
outputs, which can be resolved out-of-band from the
bitcoin protocol via a third party routing service.
Building a routing table will become necessary for large
operators (e.g. BGP, Cjdns). Eventually, with
optimizations, the network will look a lot like the
correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs.Satoshi Nakamoto is not a god.
The white paper is not a gospel.
This is a technology project. It's okay to rethink the possible ways of solving the problem 8 years into it.
Not only is it easy to start fresh, but it's measurably more fair for new users to avoid BTC/ETH and other early cryptocoins which use manipulative ponzi/pyramid like work:coin production:time algorithms which exploit "late" users.
Lightning Network might not be perfect solution, but it is a solution to scaling problem. Increasing block size is certainly not a long term solution.
But it can keep coins that remain in them until the channel expires and for usable channels it will be at least a month or two. So some amount of trust is required. Also, unless I don't know about something, wallet software needs to store additional data for LN to work that can't be just reconstructed from private key/paper wallet.
the truth is, that NP-hardness is only true for perfect solution in polynomial time. good-enough solutions can be found in finite time intervals just fine, there are plenty of practical implementations of that.
ever heard of this thing called "delivery companies"? well they solve TSP sub-optimally millions of times every day.
shocker, i know.
Latency?
Let's look at the Lightening network white paper:
8.4 Payment Routing
It is theoretically possible to build a route map
implicitly from observing 2-of-2 multisigs on the
blockchain to build a routing table. Note, however, this
is not feasible with pay-to-script-hash transaction
outputs, which can be resolved out-of-band from the
bitcoin protocol via a third party routing service.
Building a routing table will become necessary for large
operators (e.g. BGP, Cjdns). Eventually, with
optimizations, the network will look a lot like the
correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs.
Why not just use venmo at that point?
Why would someone want to use Bitcoin with the LN, especially if it requires them buying Bitcoin from someone else?
The routing problem of internet nodes:
the internet is not a physical space so tell me how do you
measure distance between nodes?
As stated in the OP:
LN can't solve the TSP without either publishing a map of
all nodes and routes, or having all nodes broadcasts to all nodes.
LN relies on hubs and a map. It's setup to extract wealth into centralized liquidity providers. This is antithetical to cash, and at this point why not use a faster centralized service like venmo?
You’re the one that claimed connection to TSP, you tell me.
Shortest path requires publishing all nodes and connections.
What if nodes go offline? How fast will the LN algorithm reroute? Does this mean everyone must connect to the Winkevoss/Bitmain/WellsFargo Nodes for payments?
Why would anyone bother dealing in Bitcoin when there's other usable alternatives, faster cryptocurrencies, or just paypal/venmo?
Because it's a ridiculous proposition. Just opening and closing a channel will require a transaction on-chain, with the accompanying fees.
And if someone sends you coins, you can only spend them if there's a route to whoever you want to pay, otherwise you have to close the channel....and again pay the damn fee.
Lastly: it's not even a network. A network implies that there are multiple connected nodes, and AFAIK the number of merchants using LN in production is exactly zero.