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Ragnar Lifthrasir ⚑ - @Ragnarly
1 month ago
RT @JamesGMorgan: Cool #LN viz https://t.co/nPKKlasnS0 https://t.co/3gsjeQbbqR
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Dennis Parker⚡️ - @Xentagz
1 month ago
RT @JamesGMorgan: Cool #LN viz https://t.co/nPKKlasnS0 https://t.co/3gsjeQbbqR
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alex10304
10 months ago
What I still don't understand is, if there's supposed to be a fee market to support miners once the block reward ends, this means there must be high on chain fees right? That means that it will be expensive opening channels?
1
DakotaChiliBeans
10 months ago
It can happen for all of you for 6 months before I join the party. Hopefully any fund losing bugs will be found by then.
1
HasKeenTv
10 months ago
So the BitcoinNewsAndUpdates twitter account (a bcash shill) tweeted an article from "Bitcoin Enquirer" that claimed LN will never be a working solution. It was in Jan. I tweeted back at them with the current status and mainnet beta launch news... They blocked me. We are doing all the right things people.
1
Zelgada
10 months ago
what do you mean by "apps"? I bought some steam credit using LN through bitrefill. It took about 5 seconds to send payment, and claim code to have the funds in my steam wallet.
It was actually faster than using VISA.
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pilotavery
10 months ago
I have Eclaire for Mainnet.
You can build the APK yourself, or I can send it to you. Been stable, and I use it at Albertos Mexican Food (Only LN main net restaurant I know of in San Diego)
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stevev916
10 months ago
yeah its not "happening", if you need to compile code or run nodes, and copy paste transaction codes to use LN... and I dont have a user friendly AppStore LN app.
SORRY delusional pumpers can downvote me all they want but it will happen when it happens
0
pilotavery
10 months ago
All I know is I tap the eclair app on my phone, it opens up nicely, a nice easy gui, and I scan and hit send. If you can't figure it out, that's on you.
Well, maybe you have an Apple device.
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pilotavery
10 months ago
Weird. I don't copy paste.
You don't have it on the app store because Apple and iOS sucks. Devleipers don't use it anyway.
I can e-mail you the APK and you can just tap and install it. You know how windows let's you download an EXE? Well Android let's you too even off the play store.
Also, I don't copy paste. I scan.
When I pull up to Alberto's, they have the total on the screen and a QR code. I scan it and tap "send" and it sends the correct amount.
Easy enough for me :)
Maybe it's too complex for you, but then again, most people are computer illiterate.
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CONTROLurKEYS
10 months ago
If you already have a full Bitcoin node, I cannot recommend enough following the installation and tutorials here: http://dev.lightning.community/guides/installation/
If you have managed to set up a full node I'd rate this at the same difficulty level.
Learning by doing is always the best imo.
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Kinolva
10 months ago
Yes. I agree. Mine has been up 4 days. Fantastic learning opportunity. And amazing to see the future arriving!
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tyzbit
10 months ago
[Set up](http://dev.lightning.community/guides/installation/) a testnet node and buy some fake [ice cream](http://www.blockandjerrys.fun/) (down right now) and [coffee](https://starblocks.acinq.co/#/)!
The [Eclair](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.acinq.eclair.wallet&hl=en) wallet works great on mobile as well, but be forewarned: all of this stuff is still beta! Expect to have to wipe everything down and start fresh!
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CardCollector1
10 months ago
We set a the test item yesterday in our store, so far c-lightning to lightning was smooth, not so much with an LND if you want to test here's a [dummy item](https://bitcoinshirt.co/shop/uncategorized/ln-test/) In theory you can use it for any other item, but please don't since we're still testing the implementation and all of our other items are over 10$. If you do try it out let me know if you experienced any problems as feedback is crucial here.
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CONTROLurKEYS
10 months ago
It is relevant as you asserted he didn't want to and he just invalidated your assertion.
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binarygold
10 months ago
According to this explorer, we're up to 1400+ nodes: https://explorer.acinq.co/#/
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TheGreatMuffin
10 months ago
-
All these explorers are not 100% reliable, they mostly depict the network from the point of view of one, single node, which not always sees everything.
Imagine you are in a room full of people. From your perspective, there will be people hidden behind others, so you won't have the "bird's eye" view on the whole room. -
here are more explorers listed, some of them with really cool visuals: https://gist.github.com/bretton/798ec38165ffabc719d91e0f4f67552d
Depending on which explorer you look at, there seem to be around 900-1100 public nodes (+ some more "private" nodes)
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TJ11240
10 months ago
Wow, that's a lot of explorers. It would be incredible if there was a way to collate the data and find hidden corners from individual points of view, as you describe. Surely with about a dozen explorers, 95%\+ of all the nodes could be visible.
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starkbot
Lightning Network Expert 10 months ago
Also nodes have the option to not advertise their existence. While explorers are fun to look at, they're not a reliable picture of the network.
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Kinolva
10 months ago
Is this the --private option?
Honest question: what's the reason to do this? IE: don't nodes WANT to be found, and thus expand the possible routes through the network?
Put differently: why run a hidden node?
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PhillipoDelTutiFruti
10 months ago
Honest question: All the payments you make directly with Bitcoin right now, are you going to go 100% with LN? What is the average transaction amount of the things you buy with Bitcoin right now?
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[deleted]
10 months ago
I'd imagine "private" nodes would still be routing payments, granted they have open channels with other nodes. It's not like when a node attempts to make a payment, it attempts paths through every other node in the network. It only tries paths whose edges are payment channels between nodes. By definition, any node surely must know about any other node whom it has an open channel with, be that node "private" or not.
The only effect this "private" option having on routing that I can imagine is if a node is trying to find new nodes to connect to in order to successfully route a payment. In this case setting your node as "private" means that other nodes in the network cannot attempt to open up a new channel with said private node.
In other words, routing is generally expected to happen only through nodes that have open channels between them. If a node has an open channel with another node, it will already know it exists, even if the node is "private" - a "private" node is only hiding from nodes whom it doesn't have an open channel with, and thus wouldn't be able to route payments with anyway
Hopefully some of that made sense :) and notabene I'm not even sure if what I'm saying is correct
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tripledogdareya
10 months ago
Nodes do not need to be direct peers in order to route transactions for one another. However, a sender must have knowledge - potentially indirect knowledge - of a given channel in order to include it in the route it builds. Private channels would require an alternate announcement mechanism, forming a shadow route to a private network. In order for the private channel to remain so, the alternative announcement would need to limited to a trusted network.
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[deleted]
10 months ago
Hmm, are you saying that the sender must be able to explicitly see every node that the payment gets routed through?
It would make sense. My post was under the impression that say Charlie is a private node, Alice could send a payment to Dave through Bob and Charlie, without knowing that Charlie exists on the network. That is Alice would get the information from Bob that he can route forward through Charlie, but Alice wouldn't need to know that Charlie existed.
Now I'm grateful that I decided to add the "I'm not sure wtf I'm talking about" disclaimer at the end :)
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tripledogdareya
10 months ago
Not necessarily every node. You're right that Charlie can give Alice the information necessary to get from Dave to him. But if we extend it one more hop, so Charlie gives Alice a route from Bob-to-Dave-to-Charlie, we run into a problem. If B-D is secret and D-C is secret, Charlie can't know how to create that route. If Dave tells Charlie about the (edit) B-D channel, he must trust Charlie to keep it secret. (edit) Dave would also be violating Bob's trust at that point.
> Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.
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chrisrico
10 months ago
It's not about nodes being private, it's about channels.
You might want to do this if you had a large organization with lots of channels and wanted to mitigate routing fees. You'd have an internal private network that connected to a single (for instance) "border" node. All of your internal channels would be private and propagated through some other means. They would be able to find a route to the border node, which would have public channels with the rest of the public LN.
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Kinolva
10 months ago
Good points. And thanks for the link.
But, I misunderstand your analogy about the room full of people. Don't the LN nodes need to know about all other nodes in order to be able to find the best route through the network?
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tyzbit
10 months ago
I think the "room full of people" might be my analogy I posted the other day on the LND Slack so lets stretch it some!
Imagine you want to pay someone on the other side. Of course, you can talk to them but you can't move about (making channels, in Lightning terminology). What do you do?
**You**: "Who do you see?"
**Them**: "I see Bill, Jim, Jerry, Vanessa, Lance"
**You**: "Ah, stop there, I know Lance. I'm close enough to pass a message to Alice, who can pass it to Bob, who can reach Lance."
**Them**: "Great, then the rest of the path should be from Lance to Mark, then Craig, then me!"
You: "Awesome".
That's _one_ (**but not the only**) way of figuring out routing through the network, and the method I believe is employed now. Every implementation can choose how they want to figure out routes, from trying to keep a whole picture of the network (unrealistic and difficult to scale) to the method I described (I believe it's called something like Beacon routing since in this case, Lance acted as a beacon for both parties to figure out a path).
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tripledogdareya
10 months ago
That's not how routing works now and, while possible, is incompatible with the desire that transacting parties remain anonymous.
The way that routing works now is that nodes broadcast announcements of their channels and everyone builds their own map of the network. It's noisy and runs into scaling limitations because that map needs to be continuously updated as channel states and fees evolve.
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tyzbit
10 months ago
[Here's a video of roasbeef talking about the future routing in Lightning](https://youtu.be/b_szGaaPPFk?t=2405). The routing tables are built on the sending side, and the payments are onion-layered so each path in the route only knows on what channel the payment to forward was received and on which channel to forward it.
per [the RFCs](https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-rfc/blob/master/04-onion-routing.md#overview):
>The route is constructed by the origin node, which knows the public keys of each intermediate node and of the final node. Knowing each node's public key allows the origin node to create a shared secret (using ECDH) for each intermediate node and for the final node. The shared secret is then used to generate a pseudo-random stream of bytes (which is used to obfuscate the packet) and a number of keys (which are used to encrypt the payload and compute the HMACs). The HMACs are then in turn used to ensure the integrity of the packet at each hop.
Further there are multiple ways of deciding how to route packets which are compatible with the spec.
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tripledogdareya
10 months ago
Which is what I described. The origin node can construct a route because it maintains a graph of the network. It can build this map because everyone broadcasts their channel announcements.
The receiver _can_ provide the sender with a partial onion to get the transaction from a rendezvous node to its final destination, but that partial route can't include more than a single private hop - which must be the last hop - without introducing a trusted announcement mechanism.
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TheGreatMuffin
10 months ago
> I think the "room full of people" might be my analogy I posted the other day on the LND Slack so lets stretch it some!
Yes! I liked it very much and it sticked in my mind. Hope you don't mind :)
Neat explanation
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chrisrico
10 months ago
>Don't the LN nodes need to know about all other nodes in order to be able to find the best route through the network?
When you open a channel, it's either public or private. The default is private, and it's only public if both participants agree (and provide their signature proving the existence of the channel).
I think what's confusing you is that the current routing algorithm wants to know about *as many channels as it can* so that it can find the most optimal route to its destination. That doesn't mean it has to know about *all* of them in order to function.
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jaydoors
10 months ago
Well you only want one that's good enough. When things get going the fees are likely to be pretty constant across nodes (and very low of course), so all you'll likely need is to find one route with capacity I'd imagine.
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TheGreatMuffin
10 months ago
I'm not an expert myself, so take it all with a grain of salt :)
I understand it so that the knowledge of one single node about the whole network is just not perfect in reality, because there are nodes coming on- and going off-line frequently, channels being opened and closed, channels being re-balanced and so on. Information like that has to spread over the network and if some things happen "on the other side" of the network, to which this particular node has no direct connection, it might be that the node is not entirely up-to-date. The information has yet to reach the node.
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NaabKing
11 months ago
anyone else has a link for Lightning nodes statistics? i had one page bookmarked (http://lnstat.ideoflux.com:3000/dashboard/db/lightning-network?refresh=5m&orgId=1), but it went down =/
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awpuppy
11 months ago
Newb question: If one of those nodes fails that is connected to so many from afar, the network simply finds the next closest connection and continues as if nothing happened?
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Bitcoin-FTW
11 months ago
This is the coolest motherfucking thing I've ever seen. Is this motherfucking lightning network on motherfucking Bitcoin?!?! And we got a motherfucking 3d graphical view of it with motherfucking usernames of motherfucking people voluntarily taking part in a motherfucking second layer decentralized financial network on top of THE motherfucking decentralized financial network? Dooooooods.....
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bobandalice
11 months ago
All the unconnected nodes must not have passed the aml/kyc reauirements /s
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tomtomtom7
11 months ago
The main idea behind Bitcoin Cash on-chain/SPV style scaling model is that end users don't need to run nodes. [As Satoshi wrote](https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=532.msg6269#msg6269):
> The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale. That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server. The design supports letting users just be users. The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be. Those few nodes will be big server farms. The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate.
This is different from LN where you actually need a node in order to transact.
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pilotavery
11 months ago
And unlike a hard fork, Ln doesn't matter. Anyone who can run nodes will, anyone who can't won't, and will simply use the blockchain. Since people will be using it off chain, it will also be less congested. So what if it only works in 50% of use cases? Then 50% can be off chsin, and 50% is on chain solutions like you said! And, it didn't require a fork or making new currencies.
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pilotavery
11 months ago
This is much different, since these "Nodes" are not using any resources at idle. It's not a node any more than Bitcoin client is. It does not transmit any data or use any computational power at idle. You could argue that most Bitcoin clients are nodes, since they transmit and receive data. Of course it's a different kind of node, but still is nonetheless. While if you go offline with your Bitcoin wallet, it's fine. Same with LN.
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kingvest
redditor for 3 months 11 months ago
> It does not transmit any data or use any computational power at idle
Wrong. If you observe the lnd log output, you will see lots of channel updates and other announcements.
As the project scales so will the quantity of these announcements. A centralized routing service may prevent that, otherwise it's more likely that the system will DDoS itself.
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pilotavery
11 months ago
Yes, on that implementation, it is helping to continuously update other nodes of which nodes it is connected to. It is also broadcasting information about itself to the network so that each knows receives information about every nodes that is online.
You don't have to broadcast though, the network is still fine without it. Kind of like how mining is essential for bitcoin, but mining isn't a requirement to run a node or to use it.
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thieflar
11 months ago
SPV, but without the fraud-proofs or any sort of network alerts/warnings. In other words, goodbye trustlessness, goodbye "peer-to-peer", goodbye anything even remotely resembling Satoshi's vision.
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tomtomtom7
11 months ago
Nonsense. Fraud proofs are a red herring.
No mining majority is going to waste $250,000/confirmation to defraud an SPV using invalid blocks, as a 51% attacker can steal much easier using valid blocks withholding/releasing *without* wasting $250,000/confirmation.
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thieflar
11 months ago
You can disagree with Satoshi all you want, but at least be honest about the fact that you are doing so. The whitepaper talks explicitly about using fraud proofs and alerts for SPV security, and then goes on to say, "Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to
run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification." Or is the BCH approach supposed to be "Don't worry, no businesses will ever receive frequent payments"?
Furthermore, it's hard to pretend that an attack vector requiring a single entity to control >50% hashrate is dismissable because *Bitmain already has this*.
For anyone actually interested in learning more about SPV and its limitations, see [Lopp's excellent write-up](https://www.coindesk.com/spv-support-billion-bitcoin-users-sizing-scaling-claim/). The user I'm replying to is here to try to troll and subtly shill altcoins, so this link is intended for anyone else out there actually interested in learning more.
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tomtomtom7
11 months ago
> You can disagree with Satoshi all you want, but at least be honest about the fact that you are doing so. The whitepaper talks explicitly about using fraud proofs and alerts for SPV security, and then goes on to say, "Businesses that receive frequent payments will probably still want to run their own nodes for more independent security and quicker verification."
He indeed hints at alerts which some assume to mean "fraud proofs" for SPV but they aren't relevant anymore.
Of course businesses that receive frequent payments will run their own node. End users don't need to run full nodes.
> Furthermore, it's hard to pretend that an attack vector requiring a single entity to control >50% hashrate is dismissable because Bitmain already has this.
I don't dismiss it. But an attack with valid blocks only is cheaper, easier, more destructive and no million full nodes can protect against it.
Relying on the economics of >51% is the very nature of PoW security.
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thieflar
11 months ago
>He indeed hints at alerts which some assume to mean "fraud proofs" for SPV but they aren't relevant anymore.
"What Satoshi said isn't relevant", but only when it suits you, huh?
>Of course businesses that receive frequent payments will run their own node.
Only if they can afford to do so. BCH espouses the philosophy that they don't need to be able to, hence this discussion.
>I don't dismiss it.
You do.
You have repeatedly demonstrated your misunderstanding of Bitcoin's security model. You proclaiming what the basis thereof is or isn't doesn't really count for much.
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KevinKelbie
11 months ago
Can you please make a distinction between active nodes and nodes that are no longer signalling? It seems most explorers show every node that has ever been on the LN so the number of nodes can never decrease.
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altangent
redditor for 5 weeks 11 months ago
That's something we will definitely be adding in the future.
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WalterRyan
11 months ago
I think it belongs to someone who made an obviously popular tutorial how to set up a lightning node, which used his own as default node to make their first channel to.
At least that's what I've heard.
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RustyReddit
Lightning Network Expert 11 months ago
SLEEPYARK is the Blockstream store. But since names are self-chosen, anyone could also be SLEEPYARK.
I think it's interesting: lnd default names are just the key, older c-lightning nodes use NSA style names, modern ones append the version for dev builds (was sick of debugging without knowing that!) . But most people seem to customise their names anyway.
I like that they use the color (also customisable) but would prefer they use it for the names, though i know that's UX-hard.
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GreatSock
redditor for 3 months 11 months ago
So two nodes could have the same name?
Also, what is really the point of the names?
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monkyyy0
11 months ago
Extra space to add shit to
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsxRaFNropw
They went super future proof it so that sort of thing doesn't happen
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WalterRyan
11 months ago
Looks nice, but why does it show different stats than https://lnmainnet.gaben.win/ ?
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altangent
redditor for 5 weeks 11 months ago
My understanding is that the network graph is dependent on a node's view of the peer to peer network. It will be different depending on how long a node has been online, what peers it has connected to, and what channels/nodes it has seen in the past but are no longer active.
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kingvest
redditor for 3 months 11 months ago
Correct.
About 35% of the nodes on lnmainnet.gaben are offline nodes.
Just like the website itself ;)
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GreatSock
redditor for 3 months 11 months ago
I think it would be nice if the size of the circles depended on the number of connections a node has.
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HiIAMCaptainObvious
11 months ago
Here is the link to the original comment thread. Or you can comment here to start a discussion. Author: altangent
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