Quote from: sAt0sHiFanClub on January 30, 2016, 01:17:31 AM

Quote from: Lauda on January 30, 2016, 12:43:17 AM

Quote from: sgbett on January 30, 2016, 12:28:21 AM

I absolutely second that. What fundamental flaws?

Apparently he meant this article:

Quote from: sAt0sHiFanClub on January 29, 2016, 10:37:21 PM

try this

I'm too tired to analyze all parts of the article. Let me just point 1 thing out:

Quote

What Im not for, however, is prematurely deprecating critical parts of bitcoin (zeroconf transactions and low transaction fees)

The author works under the premise that these transaction are fundamental parts of Bitcoin. The right description would be: "these are dangerous, and you shouldn't use them, because you will lose money, and people who know better will laugh at you".

I will get back to this, but even if these points are true they sure aren't 'fundamental flaws'.

His views on 0-conf and fees are orthogonal to a discussion on LN.

Address the issues around:

How it will avoid centralization when the only likely working model will be hub and spoke.?
Why transact on main chain at all if payment channels can be settled (effectively) channel to channel?
How are routes going to be found in real time unless they are for common/recurrent payments?
How are routes going to persist? Or should they?
How long will funds need to be tied up on main chain to support single/multiple channels?

I don't see they are fundamental flaws. They all end with a question mark for one thing which implies uncertainty.

This is my understanding about some of those questions.

LN is open source and there are financial motives to run a node. Bigger nodes might be better connected (=more profitable). There will be a degree of centralisation (like mining) I don't see LN being billed as a fix to centralisation?

You transact (multiple times) off chain, net balances are settled on chain.

Routing is explained in the paper and analogous to network routing, if routes don't exist then I expect missing hops will be set up on the fly.

I *think* channels can be torn down instantly at which point funds are settled.

I think a bigger concern is transacting off chain appears to be opaque until a transaction occurs on chain that nets out the respective balances. That is to say only the nodes that constitute a payment channel know about the transaction. Whereas with on chain then that transaction is immediately publicised and propagated to all nodes in public.

The other thing I'm thinking about is that although individual LN transactions are trustless when conducted directly between Alice and Bob, as soon as Carl, Dave and Eddie get involved things change. Whilst the middle men here are financially motivated to do the right thing (and they can't steal - so perhaps trust is not the right word), you have to *rely* on these third parties, instead of a homogenous network of HA nodes.

LN is definitely not inherently bad, provided people realise its a payment channel for bitcoin and not bitcoin itself. (Much like bank transfers vs cash). Which seems right to me...

I'd use certainly use LN for buying coffee.