Comment by someplaceguy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by someplaceguy | Hacker News Reader

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> Transactions that don't count and aren't useful to anyone until they become a bitcoin transaction,

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).

which can all transact amongst themselves

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.

> I can trade IOUs with a bunch of people in my local cult

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?

That's because your definition of "money" is USD, so your sentence is a meaningless tautology.

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.

> lightning transactions are useless until you sync them with the main network.

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).

What middle man? Is the middle man in the room with us?

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.

> Bitcoin right now has the bandwidth of a 28.8 modem

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...

A $9 VPS with gigabit internet is literally one million times the bandwidth that bitcoin transactions take. ONE MILLION. Downloading the whole chain should take just over one hour. There is no argument here. You didn't use actual numbers at all. It's all fake propaganda nonsense. And again, someone using a cryptocurrency doesn't need to sync with the chain. Exchanges and nodes do.

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.

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