Whoa

That's the official blockstream node, and it's the one that the most popular guide on how to setup a node tells everyone to make their first connection to. Of course it's going to have a fuckton of single-connection nodes attached to it.

LIGHTNING NETWORK WILL NOT RESULT IN CENTRALIZED HUBS

........... and this is only the test net where people aren’t trying to pay the lowest fee

This shit actually makes so sense. Either go with nano if you want something untested and fee/super cheap, or with Bitcoin Cash with has been tested for the last 10 years and is also super cheap (just not free like Nano)

NOOOOOO
*WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR**
PLEASE STOP IM TRYING TO SOLVE THE SCALING PROBLEM
*SHLOOORRRRP*
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
NODES DON'T MATTER PLEA
*SHLIP*
*BRAPPPPP*

>LIGHTNING NETWORK WILL NOT RESULT IN CENTRALIZED HUBS
welp, you've convinced me, just bought 100k.

delete this.

Or go with Bitcoin which will do both while also being the most battle-tested censorship resistant distributed data ledger in history? You're missing the big picture.

It is impossible to prevent ddos attacks, impossible nobody has invented a way to prevent them. What you do is disincentivize an attacker from doing it. In the case of nano it's the pow required to accept and receive a transaction. In the case of bitcoin it's monetary fees although someone can spam the network with feeless transactions for free essentially making it impossible to ever transact for free which is probably how it already is. Your last sentence is conflating security with preventing ddos. I'd actually argue that dpos system is a more secure concept than bitcoins pow. Bitcoin is always susceptible to 51 percent attack. Someone makes a powerful secret miner, well now 51 percent attack is easy. People stop contributing by mining, once again 51 attack is easy.

In nano the protocol works perfectly fine completely until someone decides to make a malicious transaction. In that case voting using stake rather than mining power occurs. But the great part about nano is that even tho let's say you have 80 percent of all votes, you don't really have influence in the protocol, your only influence is in malicious actors so if you vote for a malicious actor your stake will almost immediately be worthless. I'd say it's essentially impossible to aquire enough stake or delegated votes for this even if you had billions of dollars to waste. Now of course nano is new we don't exactly know if there is some other crazy attack vector, and votes are centralized to default rep nodes, thus if someone can hack those rep accounts it's possible they can make malicious transactions, but the protocol itself I'd say is more secure.

iota uses a small amount of POW to prevent spam. There are services which will allow you to outsource this POW for a tiny fee but honestly it only takes like a minute or two on an old laptop so it's kinda unnecessary.

The problems I have with with LN are that it requires you to lock up liquidity. You also need to route all payments through hubs that have high liquidity and connections. Any nodes routing payments must be online, as do you to receive payment. Payments aren't finalized until channels/hubs settle on the blockchain.

Since LN's effectiveness and actual stability in the future is pure speculation at this point (seriously its not safe to use rn, could change though) its hard to say exactly how this system will even work. I don't see people actually ever holding their own bitcoin on this system. Instead they'll likely open an account with a bank that runs a hub, as opening up a channel or settling on chain is cost prohibitive for end users. This is assuming wider adoption. Fees and leadtimes were already massive when bitcoin was at 15k.

LN doesn't resemble bitcoin as it isn't a blockchain. LN is more like a checking account and the ledger is privately held by the node operator until its time to actually settle on chain. Hence "side chain" although that's misleading because there is no chain at all.

LN is fast. main-chain transactions are not

how does propagating 1gig every 10 minutes sound reasonable to you

"For blocks, whose size is larger than 20kB, each kilobyte costs an additional 80ms delay until a majority knows about the block." -'Information propagation in the bitcoin network.' granted your vision implies less nodes. you may as well go one step further and just use fucking ripple lol.

The problem with iota is that someone can ddos a node with a bunch of bogus transactions and now people using that node build on top of those transactions and now 1 hour later your transaction still hasn't gone through because the entire tree wasn't legitimate. In nano it is possible to ddos the entire network beyond its capabilities and similarly its a denial of service.

LINK

>set yourself up as a central node
>watch the network REEEEEE as you close all your channels at once

This is the price we pay for decentralization

is the IP address public for these nodes?
Why not just DDOS the central nodes?

with them offline everyone can take the money out of the channels

>being too much of a brainlet to understand DAGs

only 2 btc can even be on the lightning network while its in testing. this is basically a testnet, have you seen how centralized the mining/txs are on testnet bitcoin? it's all the same.

not to mention the whole point of lightning is for low-risk payments in the first place, high-risk/value payments will be able to afford a fee directly anyway. the low-tier payments are always going to be made between a person and a company for the most part, so it makes sense that the recipients are going to have their own lightning nodes, and theyre going to be highly connected.

if any of this confuses you maybe you should go back to robinhood.

They're both disappointing solutions, might as well use ripple.

the capital lockup is an issue but its something that can be improved on in upgrades, and lightning/plasma/second layers can be upgraded much faster than the base layers.

needing to be always online is a basic premise of decentralized networks. in the ideal world where satoshi came up with a better asic-resistant algorithm there would be tens of thousands of miners and they would all be online all the time in order to mine, thats just a fact of decentralized networks.

lightning operates in the same way, if you want to get paid fees for being a routable node, just like mining, you need to be online. if you dont want to be online, have someone else host for you, just like the centralized wallets people are happy to use today.

ripple can freeze any account they or the government wants them to, blocking any transactions involving it. it's already happened for a high profile account (the founder), and you can be sure the government is eagerly awaiting the ability to use this feature in the future.

>click a centralized hub
>bottom left corner shows URI
>following the @ displays IP and port

lnmainnet.gaben.win/

So yes.

Current liquidity is over 2BTC on LN and this isn't Testnet. They've decided to develop live. As for your use case argument, I'm not so sure about. I'm pretty sure this is meant to replace pretty much all transactional activity over bitcoin's blockchain in favor of layered settlement.

Bitcoin is designed to work in such a way that participants can come and go (online/offline) and the network goes on without missing a beat. So if 30% of the miners decided to leave, everyone else is still free to transact. However one flaw with bitcoin is difficulty adjustment.

Describe the process of "voting". Is is like an election? Has it ever happened?

Security is gay, 1 trillion transactions per second

whatever the limit is now, it's small, and right now the network is definitely in testing mode, its just graduated from being run on the testnet. and how can it possibly replace all txs? that doesnt make any sense, nor is that even something anyone is considering, other than those conspiracy theorists.

and if you want to stay offline, youre not contributing to the network, as a node or a miner, so anything could happen on the network and you wouldnt be aware of it until you re-synced again. the same is true for lightning, if youre going to be offline, you have to lock your coins for long enough for you to come online at least once to close your channel if you need to, that's all.

there's no getting around that, and the whole point of second layers is that you rarely if ever need to close your channel, and when you open a channel it will most likely be through an exchange or service that you're already using. bad actors who you have not explicitly opened a channel with can't do shit to you.

With 1MB blocks and wider adoption, it'd be not worth it to transaction on chain for most users. Which goes with what you said about just leaving channels with exchanges open pretty much indefinitely. Also supports what I said earlier about this likely turning into another banking service as opening channels or even adding funds to an open channel will still cost more money than its worth to actually hold your own bitcoin. Of course, this as I said before is speculation as we don't know how this will really play out or if Blockstream will attempt to raise blocksize or w/e.

closing a channel is only in the spec so you can resolve a dispute on the blockchain. it was not designed so you could "clean up" your channels, that doubles the load of the lighting network on the base layer for absolutely no reason.

and yes, opening a channel will cost money, as will sending non-lightning bitcoins to "refill" your channel, this is unavoidable because you would be hard pressed to find a counterparty to your channel based on the promise of them receiving bitcoins, instead of actually receiving them.

once true scaling has been introduced and is actually being used (after a ridiculously long wait) then the base layer can go through simple capacity upgrades, but it's foolish to upgrade the capacity before even thinking about scaling, especially with how pathetic the community has been at adopting basic things like segwit or taking advantage of batched transactions, they'd rather not bother and waste a lot of money in fees.

Of course it has happened before it is how double spends are prevented. If a double spend managed to get through any coin the coin's price would instantly tank probably to 0 or close enough.

So I'm not entirely sure about the specific details of the voting process but it's something like this. The first transaction is broadcast and immediately after a second double spend transaction is broadcast. These transactions propagate throughout the network. When nodes realize that there is a double spend voting automatically occurs and nodes vote for the first transaction that they witnessed. The thing is that when you broadcast a transaction in the network and immediately broadcast another one that amount of lag is much too big for the second transaction to ever catch up to the first transactions propagation. I believe it's exponential. That is the gist of it I'm not entirely sure of the specific details like how these are detected and whatnot.

the only problem with stake based systems are when we dont know or cant trust the distribution of coins, which is definitely the case for raiblocks, thanks to it's unconventional distribution methods that could have very easily been gamed without anybody realizing.

XLM prevents DDOS by increasing the fee if you try to DDOS.

increases the fee for everyone? otherwise it can still be attacked.

If it detects an attack it will increase the fee for everyone involved.

That is not preventing ddos, that is disincentivizing it.

if it tries to guess who is "involved" then its still susceptible to attackers who can simply look like theyre not "involved"

Creating valid addresses costs money, disincentivizing spamming from multiple addresses. Rapid transactions originating from single addresses increases the required fee over time.

To send repeated transactions to that address, yeah.

It's not "guessing".
Don't talk if you don't know what it does.

I posted about this a 6 gorillion times already so tldr what BTC is doing is outright fraud of its "share holders", the LN they released isn't doing anything it's supposed to

Their devs are either script kiddies or sabotaging the project on purpose

there's no kyc on the blockchain, the only prevention is the locking up/burning of currency to create new accounts, but that could have been automated a long time ago when the currency was effectively worthless.

the network isn't even done yet, they're taking their sweet ass time with it, but it's really not going to be very useful until the biggest consumers of block space, coinbase, bitpay, etc, have moved over to ln all but exclusively.

I don't think people will be loading their own funds in the future. Like I said, I believe it'll work like a bank. They already have a massive hub with lots of connections. There really isn't an incentive for users to acquire their own bitcoin just to add them to a hub later, because costs and lead times are high.

How you've described Segwit is exactly why bitcoin has been losing dominance, imo. Blockstream has limited blocksizes making user experience absolutely awful in order to pressure them into Segwit and later LN. Lets say for sake of argument that cross channel LN is a viable scaling solution. In the meantime it isn't stable and we have already been waiting on it for years and as far as we know it will take much more time before its actually safe and stable. So why not just rise the blocksize even a little amount, say to 4MB or even 2MB?

It is undeniable that Blockstream's business model clearly states that it needs full blocks in order to sell its "side chain" solutions. Does this not bother you at all? That they have hindered user experience for their own interests entirely?

they have to be pressured into it, but people are lazy, and will happily use a system that can only work in an unscaled state if it means they don't have to deal with it.

there's no side chain solution to sell, i hope you dont buy into that conspiracy theorist shit or i've been wasting my time.

Fine its all propaganda and conspiracy theories, they have absolutely no incentive at all to keep blocks small. So why are they small? Again, why aren't they risen even a pitiful amount to alleviate congestion?

Colin the developer made the distribution through faucets all around the world as a way to have it be as decentralized as possible. Once he realized people started creating bots to try and cheat the system he decided to end the faucets. I can't think of any more decentralized way of distribution. You have any ideas?

Theoretically if it was "gamed" and someone acquired 51 percent game theory still exists and if they make a malicious transaction their entire stake is now worthless. There isn't enough incentive for a bitcoin billionaire with the foresight to buy 51 percent of the next bitcoin killer, in order to just destroy his entire investment and foresight of owning 50 percent of a global currency instead of 5 percent. The most plausible story just doesn't make sense to me.

I'm willing to bet 6 shekels btc's LN will NEVER be ready.

>lose your money if your node goes offline
>just trust someone else to host it and not lose your money....
>can't send that much money through channels
>why would you ever need to refill your balance or close your channels? Impossible!

>what? LN is perfect, but why criticize it, just use on chain tx's they still work fine

because capacity is not scaling and does not help the platform in the long run, it just adds to the legeacy garbage that bitcoin is already incredibly bogged down with.

yes, make people put in electricity to mine it, or pay money to buy it at a price that makes it very difficult for someone to accumulate a majority of it.

giving it away for free over captchas that have been broken for years now is an incredibly stupid thing to do, and undermines any proof of stake security in the entire coin. and it doesnt have to be a invalid tx that they burn their stake for, just owning a very large number of coins obtained through a faulty distribution system is huge issue in and of itself, and the main reason why i think raiblocks isn't ever going to be used as a real payment method, until it gets forked anyway.

maybe, who knows. bitcoin definitely needs some scaling though, and keeping txs off the blockchain for as absolutely long as possible is the only way to do it.

That is because if I'm not gonna choose btc im gona pick xlm

What do you mean by "true" scaling?

Not really, Bitcoin Cash could easialy overtake it using only on-chain, there are already a dozen of proposals for it. Btc never wanted to scale, Bch isn't afraid to succeed.

every scaling solution has tradeoffs, and you'd be stupid to think that xlm could scale in any more a secure way than bitcoin with a bumped up blocksize or ethereum with sharding.

at some point every transaction needs to be checked and verified by only a small subset of the network.

the xrb devs have the biggest wallets at 5%
idk why you're complaining about distribution it's long been over, every other coin in the top 100 has a more centralized distribution than XRB

I'm saying just to alleviate congestion in the meantime, I didn't imply that was the only solution and they can always revert back to 1MB blocks after LN actually works. So I don't understand what exactly the problem is. The inability to transact has cost Bitcoin dominance and adoption. I'm okay with there being other cryptos to compete, however I am not okay with adoption falling off either because of incompetence or purposeful action. Blockstream has setback adoption years because of this. The recent run up in price was mania, not use.

>keeping txs off the blockchain

Honestly why even use bitcoin?

>Blockstream

This is a dumb ass conspiracy. Literally the majority of the people working on Bitcoin don't work for Blockstream.

true scaling as in, not simply increasing the capacity of the network and filling it with the more of the same inefficient transactions.

things that keep txs off the blockchain/reduce the visibility like plasma/lightning/sharding, or things that reduce the size of the transactions that needs to be distributed to validator nodes without reducing the security, like schnorr signatures, or things that reduce the computing power required to validate transactions.

scaling is improving the amount of entropy you can push on the same network, bumping up the blocksize is just increasing the requirements needed to run the network, and it's never a linear increase in requirements per capacity.

every other coin does absolutely not have a more centralized distribution, not even close. not to mention you think if i was going to try and farm free xrb i would pump it all into the same addresses?

there's no "in the meantime", you add it, it's pretty much there forever, and really, you think doubling the capacity would actually solve anything even in the short term? people will just make enough txs to fill the capacity thats available under a certain price, the demand is effectively infinite for the range of block sizes that could reasonably be used.

and if you dont understand why keeping txs off the blockchain is important why are you even arguing about lightning?

and the whole point is they can't do shit if the users decide they don't like the changes being made. they can go off to another currency, which many have, or they can simply reject the changes and do their own thing, like bch.

right now its very clear that the majority of the users with a stake in the game are happier with the way bitcoin is operating that say with the way bch is operating, they've voted with their money, and that's all that can be expected of them.

if these activists want to rally against something at least rally against the complete and utterly broken mining situation bitcoin has, with effective full chink control from the production line to the network itself. this scaling issue wouldn't have even been a debate in the first place if users were still able to mine for themselves. we would have had segwit a year earlier.

bcash is a joke tho

What do you think of cut-through that mimblewimble/grin is attempting? Might be cool.

at first it was a reasonable position to take about scaling, but then it got coopted by scam artists like wright and opportunists looking for unreasonable amounts of control over the network like ver. all of the rational users were pushed out long before bch even launched, and replaced by political activists and conspiracy theorists, which is ironic given the circumstances of bch's birth.

i never looked up mimblewimble much, isn't that a true sidechain that would require some changes to bitcoin itself? i figured it was mainly a privacy addition so i didnt bother looking into it much because im just using monero for that currently.

if captcha bots worked so well google would implement a new captcha. the entire point is that they're undoable by a bot with current tech.
people were "trying" to build bots. and failed.

you're treating baseless speculation as proof.

nobody uses code to break captcha, they just pay some indian a 10th of a cent per captcha solved. a few dollars would get you thousands of captchas and there are tens of api services that have been around for years that do this all for you automatically.

or the pajeets just take the money for themselves... like they did.
why are you so hung up on the fucking captcha thing
it's the least important part of any crypto related topic.

Spam transactions are a boogyman and the cost of doing them increases with the size of the block. I'm talking about LN because payment channels aren't a bad thing, however if users are forced to use them because transacting on chain is cost prohibitive it is.

Grin is doing a mimblewimble test implementation, that if successful, monero might add as a sidechain. They're moving away from Bitcoin because implementing mimblewimble on bitcoin would require a hard fork, which is very unlikely to happen in the near future. Cut-through just removes all unnecessary data so that the only things included on chain are block height, unspent outputs, and transaction kernels.

This board almost universally hates Bitcoin, as does /r/cryptocurrency. Do you see a future for BTC a decade from now?

i'm not hung up on it, i'm just saying distributing coins for free via captcha will always result in a terrible distribution of coins, definitely not better than the top 100 coins by a significant amount.

NEO 25% owned by the owner
Bcash 2% top wallet
Bcoin 1% top wallet (after 10 years)
XRP 80% top wallet
XLM 80% top wallet
LINK 35% top wallet

5% is nothing

raiblocks.net/page/frontiers.php

iota 25% owned by top 10 wallets
i.imgur.com/oPdbejw.png

spam txs are a fact of life when miners get paid in fees instead of a % of those coins being burned. there's simply no way around the base layer pricing some people out, but where do you draw the line? is it acceptable for someone from the west to be able to buy a coffee on-chain but not someone in a third world country?

interesting, though i dont see much value in a monero sidechain in the long term as every major coin is going to end up with bulletproof privacy as table stakes.

and i see a future for bitcoin if long term value is something that people expect from this space. btc is far from perfect, in fact its only about 10-15% of my portfolio currently, but if no.1 is going to get dethroned and decimated every few years, i dont see much future for cryptocurrencies as highly valuable networks. btc might not remain no.1 forever, especially because networks like ethereum have a much larger surface area for functionality, but people expecting btc to simply die forget that the social aspect of blockchains is significantly more important than the technical.

again, you can't rely on the number of coins in addresses. and i know i would prefer a large number of coins to be held by the project owners than some random kid who spent $10 on captcha solving services.

Can I ask what else you hold and what projects you think the devs are doing real work and not simply riding the bubble? Besides Monero/Eth.

some dumbfuck with a big GPU in 2011 has more coins than you'll ever have. why is he more deserving than some pajeet that spent 12 hours a day clicking captchas?
distribution doesn't matter, it will never be "fair".

life is a ponzi scheme, early adopters will always have the advantage.

but if that's what you truly prefer, buy ripple or xlm

Where is your evidence that it is a terrible distribution?

What this guy is saying. It is more fair to have pajeet get the chance to get coins cause his 1980 computer that takes up the entire room could hardly get 1 bitcoin in a million years, but at least he can solve captchas. I don't see the argument how captchas are less fair than centralized mining.

why do you keep wasting my time with the same comment over and over again. the people farming xrm wen't solving captchas, they paid people to solve them for them. the whole process of getting xrb could be automated away with a few dollars, which would now be worth tens to hundreds of millions. its an entirely different situation when bitcoin was easily mineable, because most people never thought it was going to be worth anything anyway. these days any shitcoin has people lining up for airdrops or handsouts, and youd be insane to think there wern't people farming hundreds of thousands of xrb from the very beginning.

you can never tell, just like you can't for any coin, but i can say for certain that their choice of distribution is by far one of the most easily abused and has the highest likelihood of resulting in a very imbalanced distribution, because the asymmetry between someone manually filling in captchas, and someone using a captcha solving service is absolutely massive.

>the asymmetry between someone manually filling in captchas, and someone using a captcha solving service is absolutely massive
it is actually more unfair in terms of the difference between the two. pajeet can't upgrade his gpu for $10, but for that he can do the work of over 10000 other people trying to "mine" it.

>Do you see a future for BTC a decade from now?
Absolutely not. It has the brand name and that's all. Far more disturbing is that there isn't a real crypto in the market anymore, BTC and LTC are shitcoin scams, XMR BCH and Dash aren't almost used.

funny you would even consider dash as anything but a scam

hardy anyone had even heard of xrb, its value was so low only pajeets cared to mine it.

why do you think some theoretical pajeet farmer was able to round up 10000 pajeets (and not have them just take the xrb themselves)

and two why do you think this is any worse than mining pools in 2011?

the effect is the same in distribution and you can see that easily by looking at the rich lists.

i dont know why you're even trying to defend it, there's no world in which it makes more sense to give it away via captcha than using a real proven distribution system, and just makes the project itself look poorly thought out.

the barrier preventing someone from abusing a captcha based system is non-existent, miners still need to have the hardware and actually do the mining, buying the currency still requires large amounts of capital. even requiring someone to post shit on social media can be much more easily secured against abuse than captchas.

they couldn't have chosen a more easily abusable way to distribute coins than if they had simply left out the captcha entirely and just said "you get one use per IP address".

I still dont get how LN works. I guess Im a brainlet.

The conversation has turned from somehow a 51 percent attack is possible to a conversation about how the distribution is unfair. 10s of millions of dollars of nano isn't enough to create a double spend. What would the motivation of someone holding 51 percent have to destroy his stake? I literally can't see anything besides a some people just want to watch the world burn shit. Fact of the matter is distribution of all coins so far has been inherently unfair it's just the way it is. If you really want to prove how unfair the distribution is do research on how fast a normal pc can solve the specific captchas used vs a human being.

so you're saying pajeets are an infinite resource?
and this pajeet farmer has all of the xrb because of that?

your attack on the distribution method is based on conspiracy theories and the assumption pajeets and time are worthless.

And if you think it was people hiring pajeets to do the captchas how is that any different than having money to buy faster miners. The argument doesn't make any sense.

its a double issue, 51% attacking is obviously unlikely for any coin, but it doesn't help when your distribution was so poorly thought out. its just one of the main reasons why i believe it doesn't have a real future.

>infinite resource
are you one yourself? can you speak english? for $10 you would be accumulating thousands of times more coins than anyone else could possibly hope to, spending no time at all to do it. if you're not going to even read my posts don't bother replying, because you clearly haven't grasped even the fundamentals of the issue.

holy shit this is getting ridiculous. what part of $10 gives you 10000+ captchas don't you understand? it's not even in the same universe as mining asymmetry.

>for $10 you would be accumulating thousands of times more coins than anyone else could possibly hope to,

No, I understand your argument perfectly. You have no sense of scale or economics.

You can't hire 10,000 pajeets to do captchas for $10.

where the fuck are you coming up with $10?

and for $10 you could have bought 1000 bitcoin at one point. how the fuck is that any better.

Why would you involve captcha solve with mining?
It's just a shittier PoW system...

oh, i see what the issue is not, you just aren't even aware that these services exist. why not try and use the internet to find out for yourself? ive been using services like these for at least 5 years, and it's only been getting cheaper as time goes on.

I dont grt how LN works with Double spending mainly. If we have a nunch of offchain transactions. How are they trustless? Surely I cam fudge something before we close it? also what happens after years of a LN connection where wallets become horribly inaccurate when browsing the explorer?

oh and my bad, seems theyve gotten even cheaper. going rate seems to be 40-60 cents per 1000 captchas these days, even cheaper. what a deal.