Comment by simiones | Hacker News Reader

Comment by simiones | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Bitcoin is a terrible foundation to build transaction processing on, since it is extraordinarily slow - it would fail to handle the needs of even a small village.

The "solution" of slapping something like LN on top of it is "let's completely forgo all of Bitcoin's guarantees and build something else; while still being hurt by Bitcoin's cripplingly slow speed when creating our network".

Also, the incentive structures being discussed are only meaningful as long as the miners believe that Bitcoin will keep increasing in value. If it looks like BTC is dying, they have every reason to try to squeeze the last few drops of value from it by running an attack on it and running away with what real money they can extract.

Fedwire is a terrible foundation to build transaction processing on, since it is extraordinarily slow - it would fail to handle the needs of even a small village.

The "solution" of slapping something like banks on top of it is "let's completely forgo all of the Fed's guarantees and build something else; while still being hurt by Fedwire's cripplingly slow speed when creating our network".

Also, the incentive structures being discussed are only meaningful as long as the Banks believe that the Fed will keep increasing the money supply. If it looks like USD is dying, they have every reason to try to squeeze the last few drops of value from it by running an attack on it and running away with what real money they can extract.

> completely forgo all of Bitcoin's guarantees

ah, he doesn't understand at all how lightning works. He's just repeating sound bites.

It's the other way around: I took a look how Lightning works, and understood that, unless you open and close channels constantly, you don't interact with Bitcoin at all. Repeating soundbites you've just heard without understanding the system would be saying "LN fixes Bitcoin's speed problem".

While a channel is still open, transactions happening on the channel aren't in any way protected by Bitcoin's guarantees (they get LN's guarantees, which are different). And those are the only transactions that have any speed boost.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com