Quote from: realr0ach on December 24, 2017, 02:36:46 AM

Okay, that was pretty much a non-answer and you shoulda just said, "fuck if I know". What about the reasons below for why Lightning Network is never going to work except in completely centralized fashion:

Quote from: realr0ach on December 24, 2017, 01:01:21 AM

LN is an unworkable train wreck without putting all channel closings in the same common permissioned queue (meaning completely centralized). The fact these systems are built around a finite block size means humans can easily attack that bottleneck by flooding it with channel closings. Since it can be flooded, you're required to buffer them and either discard low payers or put them at the back of the line just like regular bitcoin mempool.

From that point, you either have to design as a hub and spoke model just like what Mike Hearn claimed, where the Lightning node is a bitcoin bank and everyone who uses it is their peon slaves to extract usury upon, or every lightning node broadcasts a shared queue with each other. But due to the fact that people can try to flood the queue as mentioned earlier, each lightning node will have their own criteria for what is or isn't spam that they will broadcast to other nodes (meaningly INSANELY PERMISSIONED, cartel coordinated, and usury based). The nodes might also be incentivized NOT to broadcast and force a hub and spoke model for their own gain.

If a Lightning node constantly broadcasts flood bullshit to everyone, they will likely be blacklisted by other Lightning nodes (lightning banks, whatever you want to call them), so the entire system is based around things like trusted and untrusted members, subjective anti-spam filters, etc. In other words, for Lightning to work at all, it would probably be the most permissioned centralized piece of garbage ever to exist. No real difference from having an account at Bank of America, and ironcially, the govt will likely legislate who is and isn't allowed to run these Lightning nodes, meaning Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will run them.

At least this is my understanding of the problems one has to overcome to create such system. The fact bitcoin is not decentralized and it's impossible to create a decentralized digital currency in the first place, also means anyone claiming Lightning is going to be "decentralized" is a complete idiot when it's built on top of bitcoin.

It may bottleneck but there are ways to make it work. You keep getting hung up on the transacting processor part where btc is a settlement layer. Exters pyramid will have alts right above btc at the bottom. I have for example a way to make LN work in a more scalable way horizontal to userbase. Schnorr also helps with multisig and p2sh transactions. You seem to not have your engineering hat on again.