Two nodes in the Lightning network [1] could right now be performing 5M transactions per day and you'd be none the wiser (unless they'd tell you, that is).
And that's just 2 nodes out of the current 15K-20K.
[1] i.e. Bitcoin second layer.
And that's just 2 nodes out of the current 15K-20K.
[1] i.e. Bitcoin second layer.
They don't? Then surely you wouldn't mind sending me a few bitcoins over a lightning channel? Pretty please?
> no one needs to send 1000 transactions of single penny
There is no such "single penny" limit.
> then have the exact same problems as everyone else
What problems?
I could write down a seed phrase on a piece of paper and hand it to you, and that's a completely offline transaction.
It prevents the parties of a transaction from double-spending balances behind each other's backs.
It also doesn't require trusting the other party once a transaction has (almost instantaneously) completed.
The fact that I even have to ask you already demonstrates how shitty your third layer is compared to Lightning, not to mention all the other obvious ways in which it's infinitely worse.
In any case, seeing that I don't have a valid signed BTC transaction from you (because your 3rd layer suuucks), you don't want to allow free exchange between your layer and the upper layers, and I wouldn't want to bother with court litigation even if you were serious, well, have a nice day and good luck with your third layer lol
Except that those transactions don't count until they get on the main chain
While you quoted me as:
> those transactions don't count
You lost some of my message. Maybe your are reading it through a lightning node and it went offline half way through.
There is no such "single penny" limit.
No one said that, but lightning's examples are always these nonsense situations of paying a single party a thousand times.
What problems?
A transaction rate that could fit over the bandwidth of a 28.8 modem.
If you have to misquote people to make your point, maybe you're on the wrong side of the argument.
So what's your point? Your point is that the balance will be reflected in the first layer after some time instead of being reflected after each and every lightning transaction?
What does that have to do with what we were talking about? The point of this thread was how many transactions per time period you could do with Bitcoin, not whether the balance will be public information in real time?
> lightning's examples are always these nonsense situations of paying a single party a thousand times.
It's not a nonsense situation. Micropayments is something you can (trustlessly) do with Lightning but not with traditional payment technologies.
It doesn't mean you can only do micropayments with Lightning.
> A transaction rate that could fit over the bandwidth of a 28.8 modem.
I just told you that Lightning can transact orders of magnitude more than that.
You can do millions of Lightning transactions per Bitcoin transaction.
You are complaining about Bitcoin's transaction rate limit but my whole point is that Lightning allows you to have an effectively limitless transaction rate (under certain conditions, at least), even if it requires occasional Bitcoin transactions to settle balances.
Transactions that don't count and aren't useful to anyone until they become a bitcoin transaction, and that's still expensive and slow.
No one cares about it because it is terrible technology that doesn't actually solve anyone's problems, because the people that made it made the problems in the first place.
I have no idea why you're making such an obviously false assertion.
These transactions obviously "count" and are useful to the entities running those 15K Lightning nodes (many on behalf of multiple customers), which can all transact amongst themselves over the network, even without touching the Bitcoin network (or occasionally doing it just to settle balances).
These transactions have almost exactly the same cryptographic and trustless assurances as normal bitcoin transactions, which are far superior assurances than those provided by traditional payment / money transfer technologies.
> No one cares about it because it is terrible technology that doesn't actually solve anyone's problems
I think you are confusing your own ideas and problems with other people's ideas and problems.
Just because you don't care about it doesn't mean that other people don't (or that even you won't in the future, if your circumstances change).
I can trade IOUs with a bunch of people in my local cult, but they aren't money until someone makes an actual USD transaction.
Lightning transactions are not based on IOUs.
IOUs can be defaulted upon, while BTC received over Lightning cannot.
Also, you need the cooperation of the other party to redeem IOUs. Lightning transactions don't require cooperation for settlement, they can be settled at any time by any of the parties.
All of this means that the BTC that is exchanged over Lightning is just as valuable as any other BTC, unlike IOUs.
> they aren't money until someone makes an actual USD transaction
That's because your definition of "money" is USD, so your sentence is a meaningless tautology.
It's like saying "raw beans aren't real food until someone cooks them". Uhm, sure, but does that mean raw beans aren't valuable or that you can't easily convert them into food if necessary?
And what's your point even? This point is equally applicable to the first layer.
BTC received over Lightning can easily be exchanged for USD if you want, or (even easier) for BTC in the first layer, so why does this point matter at all?
No, btc is money too, lightning transactions are useless until you sync them with the main network. Skip the middle man that no one wants. It has been 10 years, no one wants this, it doesn't solve anything. Every other currency has bigger blocks and never had this problem in the first place.
This is absolutely false. Why do you even think this??
Heck, have you never seen people buying real world stuff with Lightning transactions in El Salvador?
Are you aware that if you receive BTC over lightning, you can spend them over lightning, with a different party, without hitting the main network?
> Skip the middle man that no one wants.
What middle man? Is the middle man in the room with us?
> no one wants this, it doesn't solve anything
False and false.
15K entities want this (at least, i.e. not counting hosted wallets). And it solves the limited transaction rate, which you were complaining about.
> Every other currency has bigger blocks and never had this problem in the first place.
And when they get moderately popular, the size of their block history becomes prohibitively expensive to download and verify.
All while not really fundamentally solving the problem, but rather only allowing a slightly faster transaction rate which would still not be able to compete with VISA (as an example).
The middle man is a layer that no one wants and it is not in the room with us now because no one wants it.
15k "Entities" means a bunch of VMs spun on the same servers.
And when they get moderately popular, the size of their block history becomes prohibitively expensive to download and verify.
This is where the technical rubber meets the road with all the lightning sycophants. This is insanely untrue and it never has been. No one is ever able to prove this with numbers, they get out the playbook of dealing with a claim they can't back up.
Bitcoin right now has the bandwidth of a 28.8 modem. At one point single transactions cost more than the space to store the entire chain. Normal people don't even need to sync with the main chain if they don't want to. The actual numbers of bandwidth and storage of this argument are so far removed from reality I can't believe people still say stuff like this. It's pure propaganda.
You're only considering the bandwidth to monitor/receive transaction confirmations in real-time and not the bandwidth to download the transaction history, which cumulatively grows over time, forever.
It's already at more than half a terabyte, which you certainly can't download over a 28.8 modem.
> At one point single transactions cost more than the space to store the entire chain.
The problem has never been about space, it has always been about bandwidth.
> Normal people don't even need to sync with the main chain if they don't want to.
Sure, but you need to put some bounds on how fast the main chain can grow to ensure that anyone (even the people, say, in El Salvador or the Central African Republic, both poor countries where Bitcoin is legal tender) can verify it if they want to.
> The actual numbers of bandwidth and storage of this argument are so far removed from reality I can't believe people still say stuff like this. It's pure propaganda.
Or perhaps you are privileged and you don't even notice, and therefore you are incapable of empathizing with others who are less privileged than you (in this specific instance)?
In any case, even if you were to ignore this, increasing the block size even by a factor of 100 would not fundamentally solve the problem.
It would still be a pathetically low transaction rate compared to Lightning and it would also certainly constrain Bitcoin usage as it was intended (as a trustless currency/asset).
That's not to say I would be against increasing the block size by a reasonably small factor, but I'm certainly not in a position to judge whether this should be done right now. I think it'd be better to ask the people in those countries, or even poorer ones who might one day make Bitcoin legal tender as well...
Even though you already said it's all about bandwidth, next you'll say it's about the CPU to verify, even though that takes a second per block at most.
Then you'll say it's actually about hard drive space, even though a 512 GB SSD costs $24 dollars while fees for a single transaction spiked above $30 on average earlier this year. Right now they are at $6 USD!
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
You didn't make a technical argument with numbers because you can't. Your next reply won't have real numbers either, it will be more attempts to obscure what you can't defend with attacks, distractions and more copy and pasted arguments that don't add up.
None of what you just said makes any sense.
BTC has been consuming all of the planets energy since at least 2020[1]. This increased transaction rate of Lightning just means that BTC will soon be consuming over twice the total energy produced by humanity, which is unsustainable.
Of course, people who don't understand the scientificness of this all are still defending bitcoin as if we don't already have enough payment apps.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/bitcoin-consume-more-power-than-world-2020/That is plainly false[2], and the linked article does not say what your sentence purports it to say. :D
2: as evidence I can point out that I have seen at least one car moving since 2020. That was clearly using energy BTC did not consume. Same with observing at least one light bulb illuminating, or at least one person breathing.