We Are All Satoshi
1 HN recommender · recommended in 4 months, 2018–2019
25:14 · 14K views · Feb 25, 2018
Rick Falkvinge responds to viewer feedback on his earlier Lightning Network video and raises a flaw he says was not previously discussed. The main thread is the network's unsolved routing problem.
HN commenters cite it, with a pointer to the section from about 10:00, when arguing that Lightning has no solved routing algorithm; most mentions are critical of Lightning.
8 comments from Hacker News
> Dont be an ignorant big blocker. Look at the smartest people in this space. The real technical folk. What are they saying? I'm seeing them zoom in on the key technical problem: at no point has LN fixed the key technical issue, how to route. Every transaction invalidates the routing path, because it changes the amount of liquidity available in the channels. Rick Falkvinge nails this point. Key bit from 10:00 on, though the rest is well worth your time (and I say that as someone who hates watching videos on YouTube): this video LN proponents explicitly compare it to BGP - but BGP is a completely trust-based protocol, where a lot of telecoms engineers have an agreement that they'll keep the network going no matter what, and bad actors are dealt with by hand. Trust-based and fixing problems by hand is the diametric opposite of the cryptocurrency model.
LN Dev: "We're 6 months away." Dec 14th, 2015 [LINK] Something seems off with what LN claims is a p2p network, as the claim is they've created something better than BGP yet there's going to be many many race conditions if the network is ever actually used at scale and the only solution to those race conditions will be broadcasting updates to inform other nodes the route is inaccessible.. which will raise the bandwidth demand for anyone running nodes needing those updates. this video For LN to claim to be p2p seems rather disingenuous, as everything about it is going to favor wealthy centralized payment processor hubs. What's the point than? Why not use venmo / stripe / square where there's less risk of scam for both consumer and retailer? Running a LN node will require a hot wallet with keys in memory, so if a Spectre/Meltdown style attack hits your node your key and funds are at greater risk of being stolen. LN also opens up the ease of money laundering, so will all LN nodes need to keep KYC/AML logs for future audits?
Does anyone know how Lightening Network code actually routes nodes? The LN claim is basically decentralized BGP but much more complex and prone to race condition errors. this video The white paper doesn't even mention how LN routing works! 8.4 Payment Routing It is theoretically possible to build a route map implicitly from observing 2-of-2 multisigs on the blockchain to build a routing table. Note, however, this is not feasible with pay-to-script-hash transaction outputs, which can be resolved out-of-band from the bitcoin protocol via a third party routing service. Building a routing table will become necessary for large operators (e.g. BGP, Cjdns). Eventually, with optimizations, the network will look a lot like the correspondent banking network, or Tier-1 ISPs. It seems impossible to implement true decentralized routing, so it's likely they're using some sort of hack to prioritize "masternodes" as the backbone routers instead of actual peer to peer routing.
If you understand computer science and design, there are some claims the LN team makes which will never be possible. The lightening network inherently suffers from limitations on transaction rates and an inability to scale up. [LINK] It's one of the most basic computer bugs, and LN design is incompatible with a fix for race conditions due to decentralization. There's also the aspect that the Lightening Network's design inevitably turns it into a banking network, designed to extract fees for the wealthy. this video Compounding the already highly centralized wealth of Bitcoin oligarchs who took control of the supply for pennies on the dollar and need new users to dump their nearly free coins out for real money in fiat, where they would be able actually buy property. [LINK]
I think this is the right direction as I think all money is a form of debt - usually coupled with some settlement mechanism. Once we get a good implementation of debt settlement then I think we might actually get a usable decentralised money. As a few comments have pointed out this similar to the Lightening network and Ripple. One comment mentioned that Ripple never found a routing algorithm and that is also a major criticism of Lightening, see for example [1]. How are you planning to address these challenges? [1] this video P.S. I only came across Rick Falkvinge today so I don't know how controversial he is in the crypto space. Given that he backs BCH I guess he might be.