phillipsjk
Joined 6 years ago
Joined 6 years ago
No true: due to limited block space on the base-layer.
I am not convinced you get any efficiency increase with the LN: just more difficult capacity planning because everything is suddenly so hard to measure.
Sending a payment, whether on the first or second layer, will take a certain amount of: bandwidth, processing and storage.
Even if fewer nodes are involved with each transaction, the LN seems to rely on a lot of message passing; beyond what a simple broadcast on the base layer requires.
Even is we assume the processing and storage requirements are equal: it will be more expensive on the LN. On the base layer, your data is protected from Byzantine faults by having each node verify the transactions as they come in. With the LN, state is local to each node. That implies you need redundant hardware to protect against Byzantine faults. I have been migrating my machines to ECC RAM and redundant storage: it is not cheap. What I save on hardware costs by buying old servers I pay in extra power use.
The above paragraph did not even mention the capital requirements of maintaining a Lightning node.
https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...
The problem with lightning privacy is that to get good privacy you need more than about 2 hops. The problem is that every hop locks up money equal to the amount transferred: increasing the cost of the transaction.
The study also finds that the LN is currently subsidized, and based on the capital costs alone, fees should be comparable to on-chain (BTC) transactions. BCH transactions are currently subsidized as well, but not to the same extent (I estimate 3cents/kB would pay for processing and storage).
https://blog.dshr.org/2020/01/bitcoins-lightning-network.htm...
Around fork time, there was a coordinated push, including websites, subreddits, youtube videos (title of video by jimmy Song interviewing Roger Ver was first known use), and the censored 'bitcoin' forums all calling the fork 'bcash'. One week later, Samson Mow even did a guest column for Forbes magazine[a] mentioning the term. Adam Back later Chastised Cobra for not calling it bcash.
The goal appeared to be two-fold:
1. Strip Bitcoin Cash of the name 2. Frame it as a scam, especially if we take back the name.
a. https://fortune.com/2017/08/07/bitcoin-cash-bch-hard-fork-bl...
"The newly created Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a rushed spinoff of Bitcoin (BTC), a clonecoin of which there have been many in Bitcoin’s past. Because the name is confusing, many have taken to calling it “Bcash” to avoid buyer confusion."
A "black swan" event like a major lightning hub going down may force more channel closings than the network (as currently implemented) has time to process before time-out.
The LN simply does not work if the base layer is congested.
The current fees are well above the marginal transaction costs of processing and storing those transactions. (I estimated it was 3cents/kB, assuming GB scale blocks on ~1000 4U (36 bay) servers with 10Gbps networking distributed world-wide.) Other analysis I have seen erroneously assumes the POW is a marginal cost: which is only true with a tiny, limited, block-size.
During the September 1, 2018 "stress test" on the BCH network, the average transaction cost actually went down. All while the network processed 2 million transactions in a day.
You wanted large blocks? We'll give you large blocks!
Tangent: I would not recommend running lightning on such hardware. State is local to the node, unlike with on-chain scaling. That implies you need server-grade (read: redundant) hardware.